Barrelhouse Reviews: Ebb by Grant Maierhofer
Reviewed by Caitlin Palmer
Kernpunkt Press / April 2023 / 260 pp
I’d heard of the Oulipo group before, the writers and artists who worked with various forms and constraints. As a concept, it always sounded abstract, like an intellectual posturing. Reading the concept made flesh, however, the text becomes embodied, haunted with absence. In Grant Maierhofer’s Ebb, the absence is the letter a. This is clear from the asterisks used on the front and back covers (to let the unsuspecting reader get a taste of what they are in for, I suppose). Inside, however, there are no asterisks used, because there is no letter a. . .anywhere. Maierhofer chooses exclusively words and language that do not use this vowel, and the absence sits, always, at the back of the reader’s mind. This is likely the most obvious thing to say about this work, but the effect is strangely propulsive. With this constraint, the content seems to condense, to heighten, with what is not — what cannot — be said.
The story follows Ben in Illinois, where he works and studies with other friends for whom it’s “enough this little communion with themselves their communion of the work.” It’s a life that’s at times mundane, including malaise or excess, and occasionally disturbing with various grotesqueries. Yet the acknowledgement of these disturbances is just below the surface, as if Ben has accepted these conditions (constraints) and they could be no other way. To live in reality, there are some things you can’t look at too closely. The narration describes a party Ben goes to, not really wanting to but out of isolation: “the second time Ben went to the house the one holding evil he witnessed stuff he swore not to bring up ever. These people were murderous. He knew it but seeing it unfold right in front of him felt impossible. . .” The practice of Maierhofer’s constraint, then, sans the letter a, mimics Ben’s inability to express what causes too much pain or disruption. The language that ebbs and flows, “the flow being the mellow time the ebb being the rougher time the even violent time,” takes the narrator to basements and kitchens and co-ops. The sensory effect is at once drably monochromatic, yet often highly saturated, like a film by David Lynch. Even the banal can be dangerous, disruptive.
More is revealed with the murderous house, Ben’s involvement with and against it, and the narrator’s relationship to Ben — with whom or what is “looking out on the world now [with] the feeling of discomfort. . .there. The feeling of envy is there. The feeling of regret is there.” All of it sticky and sliding, firstly present with the ever-missing a, the trick that language plays on the reader, holding itself up like a signal. Like a card turned over at the beginning of a deal, it makes me think I know what I’m in for. How quickly I find that I don’t. Neither, perhaps, does Maierhofer: “Where does the person put the world? How to get up? How to move?. . .hobbled by debt. . .hobbled by hope.”
All of it combines — maybe it was never separated — the language the character the narration, me, the reader, the world in which we read this. Ebb is like the glowing red hot knives put down by some drug users in the book, left behind to remind of their terrible capability. The novel asks the reader to “stop yourself within this to see where you exist. . .to try to figure out while you’re in this position if you might do something. . .better. . .possibly you should.”
Prepare to be hypnotized, and deeply affected. Prepare, perhaps, to see your own mind’s constraints, held up in a mirror.
Caitlin Palmer is a writer interested in the cycles of growth and decay. She has work published at DIAGRAM, EssayDaily, Ghost Proposal, and in the anthology New Lore of the American West. She held the Hemingway Fellowship at the University of Idaho the year after Maierhoefer, and has received support from Tin House Writers Workshop. She teaches writing at the University of Missouri, and is represented by Janklow & Nesbit for a novel about ecological issues in the Midwest. She can be found on Twitter @Cait_the_Lin.