The Review of Contemporary Fiction

DunceCap by Alison Bundy
Brian Lennon

Alison Bundy. DunceCap. Burning Deck, 1998. 126 pp. Paper: $10.00.

A truly epigrammatic prose can be difficult to pull off in English—not least because it’s a French specialty, to which anglophone writers have to find their way indirectly. The thirty-one fictions contained in DunceCap average between one and five pages in length (and they’re small pages, in Burning Deck’s pocket-sized edition); their economy is at once playful and finely controlled, reticent and suggestive. Bundy’s miniatures include terse monologues (“Meanwhile—I stand,—or think I stand—in the middle of the road,—eagerly,—oh tenderly . . .”), cameos, prose poems, and parables with wry, Stevens-esque titles (“Restrained Theory on the Disappearance of Women,” “Primary Rule for Writing Popular Romance,” “Unsolicited Commentary”). Bundy is at her best in these last, tracing the persistence of desire with a mournful wit reminiscent of the best work of Lydia Davis: “I stood still on the path for a minute, thinking I heard a creature moving behind us, or alongside us, and my heart beat rapidly, as if I were in a movie. I looked up through the branches to the sky.” A mysterious infant interrupts a narrator’s morning walk; a mock-essayist objects to the pampering of chihuahuas; a group of diners interrogate a steak—these configurations verge on allegory even as they deflect it with ironical apostrophe and mock high diction: “He stood by the fence and sucked on a stone and called it companion, and was notorious.” The real virtues of DunceCap, though, are formal. It reads like the contents of a costume jewelry box—each item oddly wrought in a new way, with a philosophic modesty that’s rare in self-conscious “play.” [Brian Lennon]