The Good Brings the Bad in “Still Life” https://ift.tt/5CFM6Lg
A debut novel by Katherine Packert Burke, Still Life follows Edith, a trans woman who, for the first time since her transition, returns to Boston, where she attended college — a trip that forces her to reckon with what happened then and what could have been, as well as what has actually happened in the time since she left.
At times funny and familiar, and at others raw and complicated, the novel straddles past and present to illuminate queer friendships and the challenges and reliefs that come with grappling with gender identity. The narrative spends almost equal time in the past as in the present, as through continual flashbacks Edith recalls and continues to process past events, attempting to weave them into her present existence. But while Edith’s grip on the past persists, as evidenced in the vividness of her remembering, her current existence is less clear, and less certain and embodied.
What technically brings Edith back to her alma mater is an invitation to read from a book she has published, but the real pull seems to be seeing Tessa, one of the two friends in her core group from college, who she briefly had a failed relationship with before moving to the South to pursue her MFA. The other member of the trio, Val, has recently died, and since then, Edith has not been in touch with Tessa, nor addressed the fact that for a while before Val’s death, they were lovers. Amidst all of this, Edith struggles with writing her next book, the prejudice and erosion of rights she faces as a trans woman in her current home state of Texas, and her broader struggle to determine a path forward in her life as she now navigates her newfound womanhood without the mentorship she had previously found in Val, who was also trans.
But despite these myriad conflicts that Edith faces, her station in life, as suggested by the book’s title suggests, remains inert. Rather than moving forward in any of these predicaments she faces, Edith spends most of the book spinning in circles, treading water and avoiding confronting much of anything head on.
Much of the book is interspersed with cultural references, and one of the most recurring and resonant is to Merrily We Roll Along, the Stephen Sondheim musical based on a play of the same name written by George S. Kaufman, which many of the themes of Still Life loosely map. Similarly to Still Life, Merrily We Roll Along follows three friends whose bond from when they were young disintegrates over the years. At one point in the novel, Edith muses about the “cyclical, discursive” nature of this “shift,” and how often “[t]he present is a consequence of all the moments that came before. No single choice, no single failure.”
This, too, seems to be the challenge Edith faces, though she continues to struggle to pinpoint some sort of reason or explanation for why things have unfolded the way they have. She struggles as she observes how her friends from college seem to have fully moved on from the past: Tessa, once firmly a lesbian now engaged to a cis man; Charlie living with his wife in an apartment with “cloud-colored curtains, snake plants in the window”; Adam is situated as a college professor; even the woman at the rock climbing gym, who Edith briefly interacts with on a dating app, but only under a false identity, has found a new relationship.
Meanwhile, Edith cannot seem to stop attempting to rewrite her past, which is effectively blocking anything in her present from fully coming to fruition.
That moment of true realization and change that seems poised to happen throughout the novel’s pages never occurs, the potential tensions woven throughout the story never winding up towards a moment of explosion and as a result, actual change. Instead, Still Life ends up facing much the same fate as Edith’s latest stuck attempt at a novel draft. She describes it in a correspondence with her editor: “It’s a matter of being stuck, she wrote, of needing your story to move on so that your life can improve, but the wave eventually crests. The good is undone by the bad. In fact, the good brings the bad.”
FICTION Still Life
By Katherine Packert Burke
W.W. Norton and Company
Published September 10, 2024
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