Nothing Lasts Forever

December 2, 2013
Steiner (Matinee) challenges with three dark novellas. The first, “Into the Green Ocean Deep,” portrays, in intimate and obsessive detail, an unnamed woman dying of cancer and the lover caring for her. Told in long, sparsely punctuated sentences, the woman is “afflicted with existence and the dread of nonexistence.” In “Inviolate,” a man, also unnamed, is comatose and thus “could not embrace the opportunities dying created.” His wife whispers to his insensate body: “Anguish… proves there’s life.” Steiner’s primary theme seems to be that pain is as profound a symbol of life as joy or happiness or desire (indeed, perverse aura of desire wafts throughout this difficult collection). In “Negative Space” a man observes his unfaithful wife in the predawn hours and muses, darkly and elliptically, that “the voice of infidelity is the most erotic they will hear.” In Steiner’s universe, death, decay, and debasement are constants; his work exudes an existential angst reminiscent of Samuel Beckett, but without the wit or the humanity. This is a very grim enterprise.

January 15, 2014
A trio of stubbornly relentless fictions on sex and death and infidelity and sex and death and infidelity. Also: sex, death and infidelity. Experimentalist Steiner (Negative Space, 2010, etc.) clearly intends this book to function as a triptych on romantic abandonment. The opener, Into the Green Ocean Deep, tracks a woman at death's door who's pursuing one last gasp of sexual abandon with her lover. The prose is marked by its gynecological and scatological candor and a repetitive style that might tire Gertrude Stein. ("[S]he isn't only dying, she's at the end of dying, and then she's dead and there isn't any more dying to do..."--and so on.) Inviolate follows the musings of a woman whose husband lies comatose after a fall from a balcony; what she mainly ponders is the nature of consciousness and her affairs but more repetitively than with depth. The closing Negative Space is a man's account of his wife's confession of an affair after 20 years of marriage. This last story benefits from the intimacy of a first-person narrator and a sense of detail (a beloved coat, cigarettes, Parisian streets) that makes its pseudo-philosophical intonations feel less wooly. Steiner knows what he's doing, and he's in firm command of his style, but his assurance doesn't make these stories any less tedious and distancing; the namelessness of the couples don't signify universality so much as a faraway ghostliness. The book is orthographically punishing as well: Paragraph breaks are rare, making every page feel like a gray-prose tombstone. If Steiner means to explore the fragile nature of our lives, let alone the flickers of love we get to enjoy within them, he's done it with a dispiriting lack of humor and empathy. Pretentious, cold and exhausting.

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June 1, 2014

The vibrancy of love, the beauties of the flesh, and the knife-edge thrill of adultery: they're not exactly Steiner's subject in this collection. His three autumnal novellas portray, for instance, a man tending his dying mistress and a woman contemplating her comatose husband. Heartbreak happens, and thanatos comes for us all. VERDICT Cool, dark stories for the brave from an author taking risks.

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