The Review of Contemporary Fiction

Out of the Loud by Karen Elizabeth Gordon
Brian Evenson

Karen Elizabeth Gordon. Out of the Loud Hound of Darkness: A Dictionarrative. Pantheon, 1998. 210 pp. $23.00.

For fifteen years now, Karen Elizabeth Gordon has been publishing grammar and usage handbooks with a difference. Instead of old tired phrases from equally old and tired grammarians, she offers what she calls a “Balkanalian tour of Babel” (xiii), complete with (1) a cast of reappearing and quite strange characters (carefully described in the Dramatis Personae section at the book’s beginning), (2) recurring narrative threads (used to piece together a series of stories), (3) a plethora of strange and mildly bizarre images, and (4) sentences that have the mood of a Mervyn Peake novel.
Take, for instance, one of the sentences used to illustrate the difference between eremetic and hermetic: “King Alabastro kept Dariushka’s eyeballs and heart in a hermetically sealed bivalve coffer, her garter belt entwined with his suspenders, her finger cymbals with his cuff links, and her sling-back satin slippers at the foot of their conjugal bed.” Or this sentence, which distinguishes between fray and affray: “The affray at Blotto Junction could have followed a much bloodier scenario had Ziggie Spurthrast not appeared in her leopard-skin getup and shot down a row of whiskey bottles . . . .” Not exactly the world of Dick and Jane.
There are one or two slips (for instance, The Drunken Boat is attributed to Baudelaire rather than Rimbaud—though perhaps this is the fault of Drat Siltlow, the character who tells us this, rather than of Gordon), but the usage rules are all carefully and effectively drawn. Gordon manages to transform a dry art into a rollicking one, creating a fragmented dark universe at the same time. There’s no more delightful way to approach usage and grammar than through the work of Karen Elizabeth Gordon. [Brian Evenson]