What sort of a mind produces a whole book as though it might be an error, each sentence a fault line? The Canadian poet Anne Carson – here chiefly writing prose – explains Wrong Norma is thus named because she knows the pieces within the book do not add up. We are not to expect them to be on speaking terms with one another. I have interviewed Anne Carson, a classicist frequently tipped as a contender for the Nobel prize, for this newspaper – but interview is not the word for what took place between us by email. I sent her questions, she swatted the majority of them away like troublesome flies. Sphinx would be an understatement. Formidable, ditto. I was relieved to learn, later, that she is well known for resistance to talking about her work.
But reading her new book, I see something more revealing going on: the sense of how difficult it is for anyone to say precisely what they mean. Words, here, are not trusted collaborators. In Snow, she writes: “words can squirt sideways, mute and mad; you think they are tools, or toys, or tame, and all at once they burn all your clothes off and you’re standing there singed and ridiculous in the glare of the lightning.” Questions, in her essays, prove as volatile as answers. Some barely deserve to be questions: “Some questions don’t warrant a question mark,” she writes in an opening essay. But language has a recklessness that is an oppositional force causing constant friction against Carson’s default cautiousness.
Reading this astounding, virtuosic book is a sampling of interiority. It is extraordinary because the form partakes of the unjoined nature of human thought. But it needs adding, lest this should confound, that Carson’s trump card is that she is funny. She writes with sangfroid, self-consciousness (she is much preoccupied with selfishness) and self-ridicule.
She has illustrated this beautiful book herself, it is a facsimile edition of an original hand-designed book. The fox on the cover, although elegant, does not look in a good way: featureless and wearing what could, at a pinch, be seen as long black evening gloves. It has a lolling ribbon of a tongue and smudgy, rusty fur. Perhaps the fox is Norma – although as far as I can gather, she is intended to be Norma Desmond from Sunset Boulevard (the character played by Gloria Swanson – foxy herself, I suppose).
A wonderful, postcard-length vignette, Saturday Night As an Adult, describes something that most of us will recognise: a meeting with friends that is a colossal, necessarily unacknowledged, disappointment. She writes with a gleam in the eye, in a shorthand. The friends her narrator meets are: “narrow-boned people (art people), offhand, linens”. The restaurant is: “dark, cool, oaken”. It is unacceptably noisy: “Our hearts crumble. We order food by pointing and break into two yell factions, one each side of the table.” Who has not experienced what follows? “We eat intently as if eating were conversation.” This roaring flop of a get-together is concluded by the observation that, instead of being able to present themselves as the people they believe themselves to be, her narrators feel no more than “blurred friends in greatcoats”. With those decibel levels, conversation cannot prosper but Carson describes the restaurant debacle with unblurred panache.
She polices herself but her subject matter is itself uncordoned. Her terrain is varied – the real and fantastical combine. Her own list of subjects includes “Joseph Conrad, Guantánamo, Flaubert, snow, poverty, Roget’s Thesaurus, my Dad … Russian thugs”. There is also a prose poem in the voice of Socrates and a grimly playful illustrated account of the meeting between the poet Paul Celan and fascist philosopher Heidegger. And there is a stop-you-in-your-tracks piece, Thret (in three parts). The Anglo-Saxon spelling is a slight threat in itself, beginning to create an insecurity that is amplified as the segment’s violent world unfolds. It is a startling piece involving a shattered society, school assassins, drug barons: “But can someone tell me what is it about Louis Vuitton? Why do gangsters love this stuff? It’s just luggage, right?” In this brutal context, humour’s job is not to put us at our ease but further to destabilise. The central figure is a scientist who specialises in stains.
I particularly loved the untitled opening piece about the selfish exhilaration of swimming. Carson’s strangely perfectionist approach intrigues. She swims like the poet she is. The water has “rules”. She observes: “You have to keep finding it, keep having it find you. Your movement sinks into and out of it with each stroke. You can fail it with each stroke. What does that mean, fail it?” That might be the question but you will not find an answer to it in this nonstop triumph of a book.
Wrong Norma by Anne Carson is published by Jonathan Cape (£14.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
