SPEAK SOFTLY AMONG ICEBERGS

A grieving Atlanta man seeks relief in travel, dissociation, and the contents of a relative’s old trunk in Singletary’s experimental novel.

A man facing divorce in the American South suffers a tragedy when his son dies by suicide. Rocked by the death and the dissolution of his marriage, he decides to travel to exotic locales around the globe. It’s unclear what his name is, but some details suggest his character, especially memories of an old friend named Berry. The story grows weirder (possibly involving shape-shifters) as the protagonist travels further, both inwardly and outwardly. The man has a relative’s trunk containing a journal or some sort of travel writing describing the relative’s time in Istanbul (when it was still called Constantinople); in this relative’s story, the narrator finds some kind of solace. (A sample of the syntax: “When I begin to decipher what I found in the relation’s trunk, what slowly began to replace the child.”) It’s clear the man likes being a southerner (“What Southerner won’t dream of warm sun in December?”), and the text does include some brief moments of lucidity, but the overwhelming majority of the writing is inscrutable: “We no longer wore masks and our visitation relaxed, I glad the company, the weather making ME think of global ice-cream visita a porch what was a porch I knew she wanted to ask vista visits mister?” There may be something of a story somewhere in the book, but Singletary has cloaked it in so much incoherent blather that it is impossible to find. There’s certainly a great deal of energy in the writing, the frenzied and experimental formatting is unique, and there’s definitely no other book around quite like this one. Even so, reading this requires too much effort and offers little reward, and it is unkind to ask readers to attempt it.

A chaotic, manic novel about grief.