SEA, POISON

A struggling writer in Philadelphia tries to regain her creative footing after a botched surgery.

Sent to an eye clinic while dealing with her autoimmune disease, writer Cumin Baleen is told to get immediate surgery or risk going suddenly blind. But the procedure she undergoes “singe[s]” her brain, and she loses the ability to write anything but short, plain sentences. At the high-end grocery store where she works, called Sea & Poison, Cumin reads Shusaku Endo’s novel of the same name and meditates on human vivisection, “this need to experiment on the human, to puncture the human lung and see what happens.” After her "Unitarian Waldorfian" boyfriend announces he’s in love with their landlady, a professor of Oulipian literature, Cumin rents a closet in the bedroom of a polyamorous “theatre professional.” Dark, digressive, manic, and self-referential, the novel eschews traditional narrative structures: “I am organizing a novel now best I can, amidst the rivers and the piles of everyone, and walking only a broken, only an overgrown and burnt road in my mind.” When Cumin gets trapped at a reading, the first-person narrative switches to the story being read out loud. While some readers may lose patience, those who persevere will find seemingly unconnected strands converging around a conspiracy that involves human experimentation, writing constraints, capitalism, and our beleaguered protagonist. Beilin can be very funny, as when Cumin mistakes a Glade PlugIn (shell design) for a madeleine-shaped butt plug. But the real subject here is human suffering—and in particular the medical mistreatment of women—and the question at the heart of the book is: How do we bear witness to abuse?

A madcap, raunchy, unconventional text about medical abuses and literary art, infused with both humor and rage.