The Review of Contemporary Fiction

My Symptoms by John Yau
Dennis Barone

John Yau. My Symptoms. Black Sparrow, 1998. 203 pp. $27.50; paper: $15.00.

Throughout My Symptoms male and female narrators surprise us with unusual, shifting colloquialisms, with playfully enlivened cliches, pleasing turns of phrase such as this one for shouting, staring, mocking kids on a school bus: “a bus load full of parrots beating the windows with their beaks and laughing.” Yau’s narrators speak into voids and though we hear them, we are not the addressee and cannot act or answer their plea. Communication is off the hook; life, off-line and going nowhere. Yau’s characters, his poetic paragraphs, talk of guilty pleasures and masks of innocence, of various freedoms and a multitude of constraints. One man has an ambivalent relationship with his post-office box, he both depends on it and denies his dependence. That man is an emblem of the reader; the post box, the book: these are stories that recount the symptoms of many, if not most.
The book has six sections. Part one has seventeen stories ranging in length from two to six pages; the shorter pieces are more poetic and less plot or character oriented than the longer ones. Parts two and three, entitled “Lives of the Artists I” and “Lives of the Artists II,” are sequences of non-narrative prose sketches. The next two sections, “Snow” and “Lives of the Poets,” are also sequences, but return the book to the narrative impulse of its first section and to the subject matter of contemporary relationships askew, sexuality, and the stimulation and denial of desire. The final section contains thirteen stories ranging in length from a single page to six pages. These narratives bring the book full circle, but here the failings of memory and the passage of time are emphasized more than the failure and passing of desire.
A student instructed me to look at the first word and the last word of any book and in that combination, she guaranteed, a key to the text could be found. For Yau’s book you get “my” / “room,” which does seem central to the work if not fully explanatory. A room that belongs to someone as the space in which stories exist, the mind as room, or the room as a space which the reader enters. [Dennis Barone]


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The Review of Contemporary Fiction My Symptoms by John Yau Dennis Barone John Yau. My Symptoms. Black Sparrow, 1998. 203 pp. $27.50; paper: $15.00. Throughout My Symptoms male and female narrators surprise us with unusual, shifting colloquialisms, with playfully enlivened cliches, pleasing turns of phrase such as this one for shouting, staring, mocking kids on a school bus: “a bus load full of parrots beating the windows with their beaks and laughing.” Yau’s narrators speak into voids and though we hear them, we are not the addressee and cannot act or answer their plea. Communication is off the hook; life, off-line and going nowhere. Yau’s characters, his poetic paragraphs, talk of guilty pleasures and masks of innocence, of various freedoms and a multitude of constraints. One man has an ambivalent relationship with his post-office box, he both depends on it and denies his dependence. That man is an emblem of the reader; the post box, the book: these are stories that recount the symptoms of many, if not most. The book has six sections. Part one has seventeen stories ranging in length from two to six pages; the shorter pieces are more poetic and less plot or character oriented than the longer ones. Parts two and three, entitled “Lives of the Artists I” and “Lives of the Artists II,” are sequences of non-narrative prose sketches. The next two sections, “Snow” and “Lives of the Poets,” are also sequences, but return the book to the narrative impulse of its first section and to the subject matter of contemporary relationships askew, sexuality, and the stimulation and denial of desire. The final section contains thirteen stories ranging in length from a single page to six pages. These narratives bring the book full circle, but here the failings of memory and the passage of time are emphasized more than the failure and passing of desire. A student instructed me to look at the first word and the last word of any book and in that combination, she guaranteed, a key to the text could be found. For Yau’s book you get “my” / “room,” which does seem central to the work if not fully explanatory. A room that belongs to someone as the space in which stories exist, the mind as room, or the room as a space which the reader enters. [Dennis Barone]

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