Gayl Jones's The Birdcatcher—her seventh novel, published in 2022—begins where other books would climax. On the first page, we hear that character Catherine tries repeatedly to kill her husband. No, he never leaves her. This is all clear from the get-go. It's an upheaval of traditional suspense tactics that left me all the hungrier to read more. After all, the armature of that relationship is just the beginning; it's the fleshier shape of it that compels.
"Maybe it's just that folks are always looking for one big truth, and maybe there are just a lot of little truths," writes Jones. Little truths beckon from every veiled, unsettling dialogue in this novel. It's like watching a stage play subject to aftershocks. "A strange conversation we had, the sort of conversation that one finds in dreams, and that would speak for madness in the real world."
It's a mad scenario carried on in fictional exile. In the latest in a series of expat landings, our American characters alight here on sunburned Ibiza. They're a fascinating trio, platonic more than romantic and partaking in the hate of love. Travel writer and narrator Amanda Wordlaw; our unhinged sculptor, Catherine; and Catherine's ever-enduring husband, Ernest, speak to each other in words like the just-cooling surface of a lava flow. What heat beneath. There are full chapters intercut with brief, paragraph-long nuggets, shards with suggestive edges.
Amanda is a distraction for the cataclysmic couple and a fixer, the one who sweeps up the broken glass. But as a character, she is accessory to the action. We learn she is Ernest's foil, ever running from love where Ernest absorbs Catherine's violence. Amanda is accessory to her own action. Even her last name, Wordlaw, which fits her vocation to a tee, was her ex-husband's name first.
There is a dramatic perspective shift at the end that serves as acceleration. The title begins to make more sense: Here's a book ostensibly about the “catcher” but just as much about the “not caught”: our narrator, Amanda. The uncaught bird becomes the operative, a woman who only lands briefly, who’s only ever one sentence from escape, a novelist living for the single scene.
Ultimately, for me, the novel is about the casualties of art. Jones probes the bounds of what is acceptable in the pursuit of creativity. Husband Ernest enables his bloodthirsty wife for the sake of her work as a sculptor; Amanda Wordlaw lives by that law and that law only, abandoning relationships like failed drafts.
Curious for more Gayl Jones, I picked up Palmares, Jones's sixth novel, published in 2021. It's a massive tale of 1600s Brazil. Here Jones writes of the distant past while keeping the characters completely recognizable. They're human, not just hangers for stilted language and bygone custom. "I've stood in the face of the monster of time," says the grandmother character, a slave and purported witch. "I have held laughter and fear in the same fist." In Palmares even more than in The Birdcatcher, devastating truths are revealed in oblique dialogue. It's hallucinatory and all too real, by turns. Jones waits for us to take the leap.
Kate Oden is a freelance writer, editor, and translator living in Hanover. She publishes more brief book reviews on Substack.
