Book Review: ‘Prairie, Dresses, Art, Other,’ by Danielle Dutton

PRAIRIE, DRESSES, ART, OTHER, by Danielle Dutton

Aspiring writers now get M.F.A.s in creative writing, instead of studying literature, and novelists end up teaching these people rather than attending to their own work. Almost any other day job would be preferable, since editing students’ literary efforts not only pays badly, it sucks exactly the same imaginative energy out of you that you need to write your own stuff. Once neutralized in this way, some writer-teachers compound the misstep by mining academe for material. Big mistake.

Danielle Dutton is a co-founder of the feminist press Dorothy and the author of two novels, including “Margaret the First.” But alas, she teaches, and it shows. “Prairie, Dresses, Art, Other” is a medley of tangled nonfiction and some very intriguing fiction, linked by mentions of prairies. Dutton has spoken of her interest in pockets of wilderness and admirably pledges to send half this book’s profits to the Missouri Prairie Foundation.

A bolder project would have had more Prairie, less Other. Rather than engage with prairies here, Dutton writes quite a lot about swimming. In “Somehow,” a mother and child meet one of the woman’s male students when swimming in a local canal. The woman worries about how she looks to him in her bathing suit. That she’s also menstruating adds to her discomfiture, and these qualms give depth to the sexual encounter she and the student have later that day. The distance between people seems unreliable and ever-changing.

Awash with references to personages like Kant, Cate Blanchett, Mina Loy, Joseph Cornell and Agnès Varda, Dutton’s take on human existence is consistently surreal, her work a collage of dreamlike juxtapositions. In “Nocturne,” a mother and child on a road trip enact the age-old gender dissonance: her sensuality and warmth versus her son’s colder, more scientific outlook. They’re both obsessed with apocalypse, she fearing it, he almost courting it. The kid announces that rotting veal can sometimes glow and black holes make you explode, while the mother decides the car is “upside down on the bottom of the planet.” With threat lurking round every corner, things seem only temporarily held together, mostly through the efforts of maternal love.