Danielle Dutton. Attempts at a Life. Tarpaulin Sky Press, 2007

Review by Adam Peterson

There are heroines in Danielle Dutton’s work, some of the novel’s biggest—Hester Prynne, Emma Bovary, and Jane Eyre among them—and Dutton’s retelling of their stories, though only a portion of the book, gives Attemps at a Life its center. These are characters known for their confinement by societal forces at least partially, and inseparably, due to their gender. Hester Prynne has her letter, Bovary her desires, and Eyre her orphaning. And so out of their stories Dutton crafts their alternative dialogue, thrusting them from prim realism and into a poetic consciousness, as if they’ve been given the benefit of having read their own novels. Prynne: “Who is afraid of me? Even light runs from me. I run after.” Emma Bovary, whose doesn’t get a monologue exactly but a neat summary of her story that Dutton cherry picks until it has a consciousness: “In the highway. In the garden. To poke stuck waste, wept nights, was pregnant.”

And then there is Jane Eyre’s, which begins the book, starting everything off on a note of powerless misfortune and savvy awareness: “It started out I was smaller than most. Not pretty, but passable. Rest easy, for this is not another story about a girl and her father; I never even knew mine.” Eyre’s story, condensed like astronaut ice cream to four pages, takes the familiar path here—Rochester is blinded and in the end they wed—but the narrator’s immediacy is intense and the prose is cutting:

It is love and it is (as he explained it) as though a string were tied from his lowest left rib to mine and would, upon separation of too many miles or months, bring forth wrenching internal bleeding, or death.

The image is found in the original, but much in the way a flag appears in a Jasper Johns painting or a hit from the 60s finds its way into a hip hop song, Dutton makes it her own not through mimicry but through omission. By straining out the Victorian niceties and putting the words, retold, into Eyre’s mouth makes the visceral body immediate, and love seems to have put the characters, if not their ribs, at risk for a pain different than that for which they are destined. When the separation comes sentences rather than chapters later, the effect is complete and devastating.

Dutton also takes up the pen of authors like Alice James and Virginia Woolf who, surprisingly naturally, fall into a similar intellectual space as the fictional characters. Like the characters, Woolf and James felt the restrictions of their sex in unjust societies (and homes), but here Dutton gives them unbound reign over the page. “Virginia Woolf’s Appendix” is a passage of images which, of course, offers no explanation. “Alice James” is the story of the diarist as a young girl who ends with a knowing joke that “patience…gets me novelists for brothers.” It’s a witty portrait, but the implication is that Alice herself is denied that outcome, and, like Woolf, her growing madness is eventually what confines her.

Dutton’s attraction to these characters and writers seems to be how stunted they are by the world around them, and Dutton crafts them—and her own characters—with tangible, earthy descriptions, firmly bounding the voices to a physical world. When not borrowing classic characters or authors, Dutton builds small stories out of lives similarly subject to the will external forces, and it is this struggle that Attempts at a Life seems to take its title. The titular stories, nine different lives spanning history, take on the ambiguities of the work around them, and one is immediately struck with a mystery of names. To read the pieces here is to take refuge in Dutton’s hard, ecological nouns at the expense of identity. Dutton’s characters, and they are vivid characters, all approach the world as if it were immovable in its construction and the ways it will hurt them. The narrator of “S&M” writes, “What is it to walk away? Love treats my tongue like an oak leaf” but doesn’t walk away. She, like Madame Bovary, like Alice James, is bound by others. Even Jane Eyre, precariously tied at the rib, becomes less the recipient of a happy ending than a life dangled out to the world, incomplete.