The Shell Game by Kim Adrian (October 2019)
The Shell Game is a collection of essays… sort of. Let’s say 'essays' loosely as each one here is more an experiment with structure and form, the goal to explore a topic without having to resort to the standard essay construction. I found my way to this book after an initial interest in reading ‘The Body’, Jenny Boully's ‘essay’ written entirely as a series of footnotes referencing another essay (that may or may not actually exist). As it turned out, the excerpt from ‘The Body’ featured in this collection didn’t meet my high expectations, but I found plenty else about The Shell Game that captured my interest.
The four ‘essays’ I marked down for rereads were ‘Math 1619’, ‘#Miscarriage.exe’, ‘We Regret…’, and ‘The Spectrum’. Of the four, only the latter proved forgettable on the second attempt – the other three were each outstanding in their own way and get my highest recommendation. ‘Math 1619’ details a minority experience in the form of word problems commonly seen on high school math exams while ‘#Miscarriage.exe’ describes the aftermath of loss in a series of instructions written out using a generalized computer programming syntax. My favorite was ‘We Regret…’ an ‘essay’ by Brenda Miller that rewrites her life disappointments in the form of rejection letters.
There was a lot of writing in this book that I could have done without. I’m not trying to be dismissive; it’s more that I’ve done a lot of similar things already on TOA. Why watch the concert on TV if you can go play the songs yourself? This wasn’t an entirely wasted reading experience, however, as in a strange way seeing some of the work highlighted in The Shell Game bolstered my own resolve. It may never have been in doubt but I can assure you, dedicated reader, that I am recommitted to cooking up more of the eye-roll inducing nonsense that has littered TOA over its first four years (with notable examples from 2016, 2017, 2018, and 2019).
A collection dedicated to exploring form and structure unsurprisingly left me with a few notes to take down about the topic. Overall, The Shell Game considers the way traditionally organized writing can strangle the life out of unusual or difficult material and explores the various answers writers have come up with for this issue. A new form can also amplify what might get lost in the flow of a standard structure. The thought I will try to keep in mind whenever I explore a new method of expression is that just as a digression loses value whenever it becomes evasive, an innovative structure must clarify and inform the answer where a more generic form would fail. In other words, the purpose of invention in the structural sense is to expose rather than conceal the writer’s message.
