The Review of Contemporary Fiction

VAS: An Opera in Flatland, by Steve Tomasula
reviewed by Adam Jones

Untitled document

Steve Tomasula. VAS: An Opera in Flatland. Art and design Stephen Farrell. Barrytown/Station Hill, 2003. 367 pp. $34.00.

Square is looking for an end to the story he is writing. His mother-in-law wants Square and his wife, Circle, to have a second child and go to the opera (but in reverse order). Circle, who besides a daughter has had a miscarriage and an abortion, wants Square to have a vasectomy. Square’s indecision regarding all of this forms the plot of VAS, a beautifully vibrant collaboration between writer Steve Tomasula and artist Stephen Farrell. The story is told in fits and starts, separated by and interwoven with meditations on 100+ years of eugenics, pieces of dismembered comic books, and medical illustrations both antiquated and cutting-edge. The prose, which balances terrifying facts and a desperate humor with an ease worthy of David Markson, worries over what we are making of ourselves and our fictions about ourselves. These concerns, as implied by Square’s name, are borne from wanting to not be hip to the times, a desire voiced by the novel’s Johann Wolfgang von Goethe epigraph: “Men are to be viewed as the organs of their century, which operate mainly unconsciously.” In these days of hyper-Cartesian obsession with accessorizing and rewriting bodies, how can anyone regard a vasectomy—with its ancestry of forced sterilization programs (of the Nazis and the U.S. and nearly every other industrialized nation)—as an innocent procedure? In the desire to have bodies and not be bodies, how ideologically resonant is Square (and the reader) to—picking one example from the novel’s many—the U.S. Public Health Service’s Tuskegee untreated-syphilis experiment? If that sounds preposterous, then it is to Tomasula’s credit that the novel makes it seem much less so. Reading VAS, I felt pushed a bit higher above our own cultural Flatland, an experience both disturbing and enlightening, and one for which I am grateful.


Interview with Founder Board of Directors Funders Submission Guidelines Dalkey Archive Full Catalog Current and Forthcoming Titles Recent Titles Review of Contemporary Fiction Special Library Offer Special Backlist Sale Stores & Wholesalers Academics Libraries Reviewers Context Casebooks Author Interviews Links Dalkey Archive News Events Newsletter

The Review of Contemporary Fiction VAS: An Opera in Flatland, by Steve Tomasula reviewed by Adam Jones Untitled document Steve Tomasula. VAS: An Opera in Flatland. Art and design Stephen Farrell. Barrytown/Station Hill, 2003. 367 pp. $34.00. Square is looking for an end to the story he is writing. His mother-in-law wants Square and his wife, Circle, to have a second child and go to the opera (but in reverse order). Circle, who besides a daughter has had a miscarriage and an abortion, wants Square to have a vasectomy. Square’s indecision regarding all of this forms the plot of VAS, a beautifully vibrant collaboration between writer Steve Tomasula and artist Stephen Farrell. The story is told in fits and starts, separated by and interwoven with meditations on 100+ years of eugenics, pieces of dismembered comic books, and medical illustrations both antiquated and cutting-edge. The prose, which balances terrifying facts and a desperate humor with an ease worthy of David Markson, worries over what we are making of ourselves and our fictions about ourselves. These concerns, as implied by Square’s name, are borne from wanting to not be hip to the times, a desire voiced by the novel’s Johann Wolfgang von Goethe epigraph: “Men are to be viewed as the organs of their century, which operate mainly unconsciously.” In these days of hyper-Cartesian obsession with accessorizing and rewriting bodies, how can anyone regard a vasectomy—with its ancestry of forced sterilization programs (of the Nazis and the U.S. and nearly every other industrialized nation)—as an innocent procedure? In the desire to have bodies and not be bodies, how ideologically resonant is Square (and the reader) to—picking one example from the novel’s many—the U.S. Public Health Service’s Tuskegee untreated-syphilis experiment? If that sounds preposterous, then it is to Tomasula’s credit that the novel makes it seem much less so. Reading VAS, I felt pushed a bit higher above our own cultural Flatland, an experience both disturbing and enlightening, and one for which I am grateful.

Search the full text of our books: