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Attempts at a Life by Danielle Dutton

With a dizzying turn of sentences, Danielle Dutton uses Gertrude Stein’s technique of “insistence” (also known as repetition) to create a palpable intensity, and the playful, yet precise simplicity of the word choice in her debut collection, Attempts at a Life, marks Dutton as the descendent of the modernist portraits by—and of—both Stein and Pablo Picasso, as handed down through Language poetry, prose poetry and experimental fiction lineages.

Dutton’s piece, The Portrait of a Lady, begins with the following paragraph: “I was a tomboy and fought on open fields. The days passed unmarked and I called them: Mrs. Days. ‘She is a different child!’ I heard the women say even as they were forgetting me. And while my sisters practiced their stitches in the parlor from the light of a beaded lamp, I stood on the battlefield with what I thought was a gun in my hand, but it turned out to be a bright green bird. Thankfully, an opportunity arose to chart well-charted republics. I sailed east in front of viewers. With body erect I sniffed the air, tilted generously with numerous impressions. Someone said: ‘If there is a wound then bacteria or peroxide will take care of it one way or another.’ I heard someone say: ‘Bring your body closer. Bring up your five parts.’ But I was the dancing girl for my own army after all, and a vixen.”

By contrasting the “Lady” of the title with the first-person revelation that the portrait’s subject was a “tomboy,” Dutton echoes Stein’s wonderfully gossipy sense of humor. Because we encounter this work as fiction (as it is labeled) we must ask ourselves whether we are dealing with an unreliable narrator or merely charming candor. However, Dutton’s choice of the preposition “on” rather than the expected “in” shows an author willing to manipulate word choice with a poet’s sensibility in order to create her desired effect. In this case, the preposition “on” creates a physical surface that simultaneously illustrates the condensed passage of time that we are about to experience, as well as the girl’s inability to assimilate properly, as a “lady” would, to her surroundings. The rest of the paragraph reaffirms that we are dealing with a narrator who is—if anything—reliable to a fault. Her outsider status, that of a “different child” and a “tomboy” in a household populated by sisters who “practiced their stitches in the parlor from the light of a beaded lamp,” hint to us that this narrator uses the label “lady” as both an ironic term and a title she has appropriated for herself. She is a self-described “dancing girl” and “vixen” who has traveled the world in order to “chart well-charted republics” and she has returned to bring this knowledge to her well-heeled but dull kin: A lady is a lady who says she is a lady. Additionally, Dutton’s subtle repetition of “chart” and “charted” and “bring” and “bring” in this short passage, utilize Stein’s “insistence” technique to reinforce the narrator’s progression through years and landscapes.

In section after section in Attempts at a Life, Danielle Dutton executes expert, miniscule language slips that make us slide down the surface of her narratives like raindrops streaking the windows of the last un-gentrified house in an old Victorian neighborhood. While Attempts at a Life may not present us with a fully formed artist in the mold of Stein and Picasso, it most certainly introduces an important new literary voice.