The Review of Contemporary Fiction
The Complexities of Intimacy by Mary CaponegroElisabeth Sheffield
Mary Caponegro. The Complexities of Intimacy. Coffee House, 2001. 220 pp. Paper: $14.95.
The Complexities of Intimacy, which includes four darkly humorous, richly imagined stories and a novella, examines the nuclear family in all its crippling yet structurally crucial intimacies and disjunctions. Due to the nature of this subject, as well as Caponegro’s use of images with strong psychoanalytic and feminist currency (such as the father’s house, the daughter’s phallic tail, and the mother’s milk which "transubstantiates" into ink), the stories lend themselves to readings à la Jacques Lacan and Luce Irigaray. However, while the stories invite such readings, they also wriggle out of them via the polyvalent capacity of Caponegro’s prose. Language in this collection is a wondrous beast, both precise and mutable. This paradoxical quality perhaps figures most prominently in the opening story, "The Daughter’s Lamentation," where the journey from the beginning of a paragraph to the end, or the transition from one sentence to the next, often seems to be as much effected by a felicitous turn of word or phrase as it is by the reins of thought. The author gracefully guides language in the direction of the fictions she is exploring-both the stories themselves and the family under patriarchy-and at the same time seems to follow its lead, pursuing its possibilities for play and ambiguity. Caponegro’s ability to exploit so deftly the resources of language is what makes the moments when the stories take a decidedly surrealistic turn (when, for instance, the mother and daughter in "A Father’s Blessing" crawl together inside the daughter’s womb for a little respite from motherhood) work so well: it seems perfectly natural, given the supple and miraculous nature of her prose, that the world it originates should be equally so. [Elisabeth Sheffield]