The Review of Contemporary Fiction

Defiance by Carole Maso
Alan Tinkler

Carole Maso. Defiance. Dutton, 1998. 272 pp. $23.95.

Carole Maso has suggested “there might be ways in language to express the things that exist at the extreme peripheries of speech.” Though she made this comment in an essay on her last novel, Aureole, it is equally applicable to Defiance, a novel in four acts that follows a brilliant physicist, Bernadette, through her last months on death row for killing two of her Harvard students. For Bernadette, the narrator, language and life collapse into the beauty of a “mute player on a deaf piano” as she creates her “death book,” not as an explanation for her actions but rather for Elizabeth, her friend who is working on a book titled Against a Feminine Masochism.
Maso creates a defiant female community that responds to the masochism that patriarchal society forces upon women, as in Bernadette’s mother’s workplace, where her mother was made to sing “I’m a Little Teapot” as her boss masturbated into a handkerchief. Maso’s metanarrative critique of society raises stunning questions about war, fathers, media (televised execution?), and children’s songs to name a few.
Defiance, however, is not a rant but rather a wonderfully orchestrated novel that employs language—and silence—to explore individual identity within various constructed worlds, not the least of which are sexual relationships. Bernadette, an underage whore during her undergraduate days, bides time as a young professor waiting for her perfect victim, Alexander Ashmeade. By her own admission, her second victim, Payson Wynn, was sloppy passion.
Readers familiar with Maso’s work recognize the beauty and irony of her continued quest to write books that explore inadequacies of language while realizing the inseparability of language and society. Defiance is a strong and very satisfying addition to her work. [Alan Tinkler]