Two Unplain Janes: Jane Unrue's Life of a Star

arrived the other day courtesy of Waldrop generosity.

I started it tonight and read to page 62, just over half the little novel.

It's quite good.

I was already a fan of Jane Unrue.

Googling her just now, she seems to be a well-kept secret.

For now.

But that situation cannot last when one writes as well as she does.

Jane Unrue reminds me in an odd way of Jane Mendelsohn (I Was Amelia Earhart).

They both write subtle novels composed of almost ectoplasmic prose.

In a weird way, it's like an inheritance of the Jamesian thing (the supernatural James anyway).

But both Janes wisely take a pass on Henry's Byzantine grammar and tool sentences and paragraphs of a much more palatable length.

Both authors understand the mystery inherent in grammar itself, and how this can become an important part of narrative.

I suppose Mendelsohn's vampire novel is a bit slight, but I liked it. She was sort of the literary belwether on that, as vampire erotic lit broke shortly after her first novel along those lines.

But her Amelia Earhart novel, written in the first person posthumous, was wonderful.

I listed Unrue's book House on my shortlist of "The Twelve Books by Burning Deck Press You Should Own" sometime back.

This novel is about the almost mythological power that hides itself in the erotic.

Also, it is about the torturously well-fitting clothes of jealousy.

Jealousy's ridiculous sartorial splendor.

And the wreckage that follows.

As usual, Unrue shows us that a straight line or direct stare is always the longest distance between two points we are trying to use to reperer in any real investigation of the world.

(Sorry, Leslie Kaplan's novel uses the French verb on every other page and now it's stuck in my head!)

Unrue's prose is deliciously Lobachevskian like that.

The irreal is found, as ever, to be more convincing. At least when it comes to that strange creature we call narrative.

She writes very well. Did I already say that? It's worth repeating.

I see I have missed a novel, Atlassed, which came out in 2005, which I will need to hunt down.

And I see she published a novella in the swan song of 3rd Bed, Vincent Standley's wonderful magazine (of which I was happy to be a part on more than one occasion).

I probably actually have that somewhere in this house or the old one.

I'll try to review this when I finish it.

I can already recommend it.

Stylistically, it's that delightful mix of novelistic innovation and unapologetic anachronism--that thing so many contemporary French novelists (yes, P.O.L!) do so well.

P.S. Love Keith Waldrop's cover art for this!

P.P.S. You can find some links to works online by Unrue at her rather exiguous Wiki entry here: Skewing Light