Noy Holland's Bird

Noy Holland’s first novel, Bird, follows the eponymous character through a labyrinth of haunted memories and conflicting desires as she navigates a single day in a now quasi-claustrophobic domesticity that revolves around a husband, a school-age boy, an infant daughter, and the family dog. Much of that day is spent vacillating between thoughts of Mickey, a man she once loved (and can’t quite let go of, more than a decade after the fact), and the immediacy of the moment in all of its corporeal obtrusiveness (her restless boy—who pees in his sleep and needs to be fed and readied for school; her daughter, whose first tooth—newly arrived—digs into the woman’s nipple as the infant breastfeeds in a bloated diaper; Bird’s husband, who conveniently sleeps through the mess of her morning ritual until it’s time for his pre-work routine to take center stage; a long time friend—the embodiment of all that Bird once was and can no longer be, for better and worse, envied and pitied, both—who phones repeatedly). The past and present mingle together like guests at a cocktail party as she moves seamlessly between the two, although on this particular day, her history with Mickey, recounted in fits and starts, is the more assertive presence. But it isn’t nostalgia as a refuge against the shell of what she imagined her life would be. It’s far more complicated than that, and the existential tension of this tangle of competing impulses is what drives the story. There’s a real stream-of-consciousness feel to the narrative (sans the literary affectations of a historically circumscribed Stream of Consciousness style). It doesn’t follow a linear path. Its trajectory is more akin to that of a spiral—around and about and back and forth; shirking a simple ‘here, then there.’ It reflects the way people think when they’re engaged with the world in a way that is more complex and demanding than, say, what one would experience while lying in bed, late at night, waiting to fall asleep. But Holland’s verisimilitude isn’t one of mimesis. It’s an exercise in evocation; slouching toward the felt-but-not-seen texture of thought—its scent, its temperature, its cacophony—without attempting a strictly literal rendering or slavishly adhering to the kind of linear contrivance (for the sake of narrative clarity) that most readers and writers are more comfortable with. Having said that, it’s not hard to follow. Holland confines her ambition (considerable in scope) to an interior landscape, without the ubiquitous accoutrements of the extraordinary that serve as low-hanging fruit in the quest for the most facile kind of dramatic tension; no guns or assaults or wars; no pandemics or natural disasters or post-apocalyptic rubble, just a woman in her suburban home, (mostly) alone with her thoughts, over the course of an otherwise nondescript day. And she imbues it with drama, and the drama is real, and imminently recognizable. And haunting. Her prose is exquisite (an understatement) and her 'voice' is truly distinctive. She has a poet’s sense of rhythm, and a poet’s eye for the hidden potency in the most pedestrian and obtuse of things. A book full of surprises, even at the granular level—the paragraph, the sentence, the phrase, the word—like a Russian nesting doll. I keep rereading it. It doesn’t get old. And Kiki Smith on the cover to boot.