The Review of Contemporary Fiction
Yellow Jack by Josh RussellBrian Evenson
Josh Russell. Yellow Jack. Norton, 1999. 250 pp. $23.95.
Josh Russell’s first novel, Yellow Jack, chronicles the life of Claude Marchand, a daguerreotypist living in 1840s New Orleans, slowly going mad from inhalation of mercury fumes. Russell’s strength is most obvious in his ability to render Marchand’s voice and his obsessions (which range from the art of the daguerreotypes to the attentions of a young girl) with vividness and great care. The novel is at least as much about a place and time, however, and its depictions of the slosh and corruptive flux of a New Orleans caught in a time of plague are magnificent at their best.
Yellow Jack is composed of one dominant narrative parsed by two supplemental ones. The dominant one is written in Claude’s voice as he records his impressions of himself and his life, sometimes with questionable accuracy. His narrative is refracted by an unnamed late-twentieth-century narrator’s descriptions of some of his daguerreotypes and by diary entries from his octoroon mistress, a practitioner of voodoo.
In many ways Yellow Jack’s mixture of the grotesque with some measure of unapologetic ribaldry recalls Canadian writer Eric McCormack’s The First Blast of the Trumpet against the Monstrous Regiment of Women, though Russell’s language and phrasing have more control, his narrative less obsessive strangeness. If there is a flaw to the book, it comes in the limits to the way the mistress’s voice is incorporated: her moments of speech sometimes seem included primarily, perhaps artificially, to explain a point left unresolved in Claude’s narrative. Yet the expansiveness and control of the narrative as a whole renders this a minor point. Indeed, Yellow Jack shows Russell avoiding many of the mistakes of first-time novelists and serves as an intriguing beginning to what promises to be a strong career. [Brian Evenson]