I would prefer to exclude, as well, the foyer window, from which I once saw my wife embrace a rival of mine. I would prefer to exclude the two in the front room, however, as they are pine-framed, unlike the others, with drapery in an unpleasant shade of blue. In our house: there are ten windows on the ground floor. These moments keep the reader going, and lead us to think we’re wandering toward epiphany (we probably aren’t): Through the abstract beauty, blood and rot of this book, the first person surfaces from the heaps of inanimate objects, reminding us that, despite Schwartz’s anonymizing lists of “household accidents,” beds through the ages, and colonial Pennsylvanian architecture, there’s one specific man with one specific (murdered) family at the heart of this book. The rattlebox contains a hook and a blade, and is buried in the margin of the yard. (The treetops seem to shriek.) A rag doll gives way to a stump doll-the face stained red, for the frightened child, or blue, for the dying child-which gives way, in turn, to a toy horse, describing a faltering voice. (Bloodbirds, so-called, are said to produce a rueful sound.) A bloody bone is thunder, in one version, and timber and chimney smoke, in another-or a pile of sticks near a river, just before the war. The orphan swallows a small bird, a finch or a sparrow, even a parakeet, wings clipped, eyes excised-at least as the narrative survives in the upland boroughs and in several Eastern towns. Then these images, themselves, are hijacked by other images before they can ever become complete: In John, images ceaselessly interrupt the rare fragments of narrative. Just as every description reads as an erroneous passage in a madman’s encyclopedia, the differentiation between chapters reads as another decoy from a deeply hidden story, another false and distorted factoid. Despite the titular specificity of the sections, the division of the book into its three parts seems a mere formality - the voice and rhythm are adamantly static, providing little in the way of revelation from chapter to chapter. If this is a tale of anything, it’s one of cuckoldry ( John the Posthumous’s three sections are “Hornbook,” “Housepost, Male Figure” and “Adulterium”), and ensuing matricide/infanticide - every so often, the narrator will speak in the first person, and through these rare moments, we can infer, with the help of a not-too-generous back-cover description, that he has been cheated on, then, it seems, killed his wife and children, and afterwards, perhaps, become an unreliable historian and written this. But if you’re at all like me, you will finish John and appreciate its power and boldness - its refusal to settle on being merely haunting - its insistence on seeming, itself, a haunted object. Just 30 pages in, you might find yourself thinking, or asking a significant other, “Will one more distressed fetus hide actually make the pages pop? Does this patinated bedpost clash with these pickled chicken’s throats?” The author certainly won’t answer these questions for you - he’ll only address them by continuing his inundation of gore and household objects - charred adulteresses juxtaposed against 1800’s mantelpieces, and the like. Rather, this prose-poetry-ish collage of antediluvian gruesomeness and domesticity creates a feeling akin to diving into a Joseph Cornell assemblage - or perhaps a mismanaged Restoration Hardware. Schwartz’s second book (the first being A German Picturesque, a collection of short stories) is not at all an experimental rehashing of the reign of this king, nor does its buried narrative have much to do directly with most of the hideous acts of violence - or birds, or bed types, or biblical references, or houses in Colonial Pennsylvania - that the book rattles off in lieu of story. But this paltry elaboration on the book’s title will not demystify its content, for, like many of the half-explained half-histories Schwartz half-takes on as subjects, John I is pure MacGuffin. The title of Jason Schwartz’s John the Posthumous refers to the shortest ever reign of a French monarch - John I - a child who lived a mere five days, possibly poisoned by his usurping uncle.
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