“I am very much a person who likes to get high,” I read. “I have always been a person who likes to get high.” I try to feel the words, not just recite them, try to convincingly perform this rueful confession of the author, documenting her struggles with addiction and her mixed feelings about intoxication. The book is fragmented, potty-mouthed, decidedly inconclusive, laced with literary references and sociological research and vomiting scenes. It’s kind of hard to read.
Also, it’s mine. It’s my book. I wrote this thing. It’s me.
The absence of quotation marks helps the text lean, uninterrupted, into the jagged stream of consciousness of a disaffected teenager trying to maintain an ironic distance even from her most difficult emotions. It’s a successful union of form and content, where everything is given the same undifferentiated weight because everything feels equally heavy.
The choice can be somewhat disorienting, and it can take readers a little longer to get into the book’s flow. But it’s a choice that’s increasingly common in modern fiction. Some of the best and buzziest contemporary writers—Sally Rooney, Ian Williams, Bryan Washington, Celeste Ng, Ling Ma—render their dialogue free of quotation marks. The reasons vary, but more writers are dropping speech marks to explore distances between readers and narrators and even to eliminate hierarchies.
For those of us not personally affected by a violent crime, the why can become the stuff of legend, as intriguing as the how. We want to know the motive, to judge for ourselves whether or not the reason is good enough. We want to weigh in, to somehow make the event about ourselves. But Penance underscores what seems most important to those who are irrevocably connected to both victims and perpetrators: it happened, and there is no taking it back. After everything, far from granting relief, unrelenting attempts by spectators to answer the question why are likely to inflame.
That's the thing about Davis' work: Even when life isn't so fascinating, she finds its very lack of excitement fascinating.
A ruddy blush of modesty colors “Making It So,” Patrick Stewart’s engaging self-portrait of life on the British stage and the starship U.S.S. Enterprise. Humility is not, of course, the trait that first comes to mind with big-name actors, for whom a strapping ego would seem to be a job requirement.
And with his booming voice and clenched-fist persona, Stewart has usually registered as a take-charge, cross-me-at-your-peril kind of guy. He became internationally famous portraying the autocratic space captain Jean-Luc Picard on the long-running sci-fi series “Star Trek: The Next Generation,” a man given to terse dictums like the one from which this book takes its title: “Make it so.”