So Much Is Yet to Be Written—

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Carole Maso’s Ava delivers through a nonlinear succession of sparse details, the bodily experience of losing the ability to make retrospective sense of one’s life.

First page:

“Each holiday celebrated with real extravagance. Birthdays. Independence days. Saints’ days. Even when we were poor. With verve.

Come sit in the morning garden for awhile.

Olives hang like earrings in late August.

A perpetual pageant.

A throbbing.

Come quickly.

The light in your eyes”

Through three chapters spanning the last morning, afternoon, and night of her life, a hospital-bedridden Ava Klein recalls in fugal recurrence the mundane, erotic, and historic moments her body has weathered, including first learning to write her name, three promiscuous marriages, relatives who died in the Holocaust and those who survived it, a rainy-day Fellini movie-binge, a miscarriage, teaching comparative literature at Hunter College, the televised First Gulf War, once eating pears poached in red wine, losing her friend Aldo to AIDS, and flying to Boston’s Dana-Farber Cancer Institute with her final lover, Danilo—a Czech novelist who holds for her survival all the hope of the Velvet Revolution—to get a sixth opinion on her blood cancer. 

The thirty-nine-year-old is sometimes interrupted by nurses who prod her and draw her blood.

She always refers to herself and is referred to by present nurses and remembered lovers in the legal full, as “Ava Klein,” sometimes with an added middle name or two, depending on whichever husband she’s remembering. 

Her rare disease, the reason for the dissolution of all she’s seen and done, is rarely addressed outright; its progression is dramatized as her memories condense and distort in recurrence. 

She says in the afternoon she wants 

“To speak in a language that heals as much as it separates.

I need days, not hours, like this with you.”

That night, nearly dead:

“The ideal, or the dream, would be to arrive at a language that heals as much as it separates. Could one imagine a language sufficiently transparent, sufficiently supple, intense, faithful so that there would be reparation and not only separation?

Thank you.

Now, pains in joints, weakness. Pain. Some pain.”

And later still, she hopes

“To create a language that heals as much as it separates.

—as we form our first words after making love.

I need days in bed with you like this”

•

Since Ava was first published in 1993, there have been floods of grief books, but none with the narrator enacting on her very body, in such an anticonfessional first-person mode, this live drain of logic-making that death brings.

The book’s far closer to and constantly compared with David Markson’s elegiac postmodern assemblages than, say, Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking, or whatever else is easily evoked by “grief memoir.”

But while Maso here formally works like Markson—usually a sentence or fragment or two per line in big white space—the content couldn’t be less clinical, though charged with such a setting.

I’ll commit a Markson-Masoism and quote myself; I’ve said about Ava’s unmoralizing lushness that it’s as if David Markson “both personally knew what enjoyable sex is & existentially regretted this.”

While Markson’s books are mostly past-tense accounts of mundane facts about the dead—Tolstoy’s wife copied War and Peace in longhand seven times, Rembrandt spoke only Dutch, and so on—Ava, for all its nostalgia about what the subject has seen and done, is extremely anti-elegiac, even as she’s dying.

In denying the pastness of her experiences, Ava Klein denies their resolution. While she’s a grammatical subject, she’s no protagonist. As her account of all she’s lived disintegrates, each repetition of “I” dismantles what it would affirm.

“I got to dance. I got to sing. I got to kiss you on the cheek.

I got to… careful of the intercom.”

Rather than the organizing principle that builds meaning out of what’s been lived—e.g. “I was born here, I met my husbands there, there, and there, I loved each this way”—Ava Klein, in accumulating memories, loses her capacity to make sense of them.

“Substituting” is a word more apt than “accumulating”; each word for each recollection displaces the next before it can amass her life. 

Maso makes it formally impossible for Ava Klein even to metabolize her grief about losing this.

As with Markson, there’s no plot; but Maso has managed to pattern from this void a lyric narrative, to order an unsynthesized sequence of chosen trivials into a fragment-narrative with boundless and uncertain space to repeat—

“Olives hang like earrings in late August.

Green, how much I want you green.

Gray-green, blue-green, emerald.”

with indefinite chances to wonder at “All that was fluid, beautiful—”

The “I” is shifting referent. As it dies, each past replaces the other without accumulating into the Past.

Maso has written a grief book with—unlike Markson’s—no survivor’s vantage, no retrospective, no live speaker speaking from a position of having outlived anything. 

As Ava Klein speaks, she forecloses all possible worlds, each “way of thought, a form of imagination and hope,” as she here refers to what each AIDS death carried away during the crisis.

•

That healing-not-separating-language phrase, Maso borrows from Hélène Cixous. 

Its earliest occurence:

“I miss you.

The ideal or the dream would be to arrive at a language that heals as much as it separates.

It was Christmas Eve Day. I wore bells.

How does this strike you as a beginning?”

A weaving association of human desires, the reading of which moves the mind as living does. 

Ava Klein is always just on the verge of beginning to account for these desires, and so to understand and cast them off, but the multiplying entropy of these beginnings grows until she dies that night.

What’s worse, she’s losing only the faint possibility of understanding.

“I am always just on the verge of understanding, which is the true state of desire,” Maso has written about writing Ava in her essay “Precious, Disappearing Things.”

In another essay about the book, “Notes of a Lyric Artist Working in Prose,” she mentions the time-plagued impressionist Virginia Woolf, saying Woolf knew that “Like sex, one has to figure out how to go on after the intensity of the moment—how in effect to compose a life after that, how to conjure back a world worth living in, a world which might recall, embrace the momentary, glowing, obliterating, archetypal.” 

The attempt to reconjure a “glowing, obliterating, archetypal” moment never succeeds.

But as Ava Klein recalls intensities, a pulsing miracle occurs by each word in her dying hours. In the morning:

“The late verses of Neruda vary widely in tone and texture. Their fluctuating musical impulses require a looser structure woven together less by the uniformity of lines than by the dying poet’s sensibilities.

A stroll around the park. While the weather’s still fine. The ginkgo trees in fall.

•

Turn over on your side.”

And that night:

“It was early autumn. Unseasonably warm. All the joggers were out. People on benches. In the distance we could hear the sound of water rushing over rocks. Through the trees the yellow of taxi cabs. We brought a picnic. It felt like summer. The ginkgo trees.

Who was she? And what did she want?”

Reconjuring sex or a picnic stroll around the park, she returns to incomplete essentials—a sweet stale smell, the yellow of taxi cabs through ginkgo trees, a pulsing around the thigh, the sound of water rushing over rocks, “the hovering and beautiful alphabet as we form our first words after making love,” autumn warmth—one can’t assign a lived beginning or end to it that isn’t incidental—not because the memory didn’t have one but because it was lived. 

And so, that night, that “Hovering and beautiful alphabet—” reappears to follow Nabokov chasing butterflies on a steep slope over Telluride, “with hummingbirds and humming moths visiting the tall green gentians that grew among the clumps of a blue lupine.” 

Reordered, rechoreographed, these facts would relate another life, its possibilities dead to this and just as unable to be prolonged:

“He holds a butterfly net.

How could I have

Open your mouth. Swallow.”

Maso wrote in “Precious, Disappearing Things” that Ava would not have taken its final shape had she not written it while watching the First Gulf War for weeks on television. 

Her first war witnessed as an adult.

Watching the “efficient, precise elimination of people, places, things by my government” had her believe this was the extreme face of the daily, petty chaos that traditional fiction tries to ward off. The narrative devices that sanction mass death—its “complacent, unequivocal truths, its reductive assignment of meaning, its manipulations, its predictability and stasis”—are those that linear stories borrow. 

When it works, what’s happening has happened with no time to think otherwise.

Infancy and death are two states that these stories have no native devices for, even when their logic leads to these.

There’s a statement by Didion, “We tell ourselves stories in order to live,” which is quoted so incessantly it may as well function as one of these stories. Ava shows that, when we stop telling such stories, what’s left isn’t death or silence but another order of experience and speech, a fluid baby-narrative, a foggy geriatric-narrative, one in which our life is not the succession but the immediacy and pain or painlessness of what we’ve lived. 

As her day and disease advance, Ava Klein finally loses the possibility of warding off the doctors’ diagnostic logic. Her thoughts shift from

“Yes, but what are my chances?” 

to 

“An extremely rare blood cancer. Is Danilo then my final lover? Have I saved with some purpose his sad and hopeful country for last?” 

to 

“Rare blood disease. No known cure. Maybe only weeks.” 

to 

“I was on my way to Germany finally to 

When the result of the extremely rare 

Do not worry 

The considerable irony of this has not been lost 

Treblinka, a rather musical word.

Are you positive? Yes, I am extremely positive, Aldo said. In fact, I’ve got the first signs—forgetfulness, night sweats.” 

The same lived facts return fully altered in the returning. With Neruda in Ava Klein’s mouth, myself in mine, Didion in ours, Cixous and Woolf in Maso’s, even this review is borrowed language. 

A good review interestingly and honestly conveys what a book is trying to do and whether it does it. As that summing-up is what Ava tries to refuse, I’ve tried to demonstrate how the absence of this way of making sense of human particulars broadens in some ways and kills in others how they can be lived and written about.

Another way of thinking about that: When I die, those concerned will ask: “Who was she? And what did she want?” No answer to this that is final, written beyond that life, would be fully true or kind to it. 

When Ava Klein stirs from a night in France—

“Later in the circular room, we danced for hours to Prince. He pulled me toward him. He pushed me away. I have a woman and a child, he whispered over and over, in broken English.”

—to a white sleeve in her face, a nurse takes the thermometer from her mouth, she is repeating the particular instant, as if—This is what this was, no, it was like this, and this is what that was, no—until she’s just saying beautiful words that make it something else.

Fiction as only states of mind. The world seems inevitable this way, its shapes in concentration’s firing line and dwindling time to sustain it. This ending could’ve been otherwise.

Ava Klein says “So much is yet to be written—”