THE MEAT AND SPIRIT PLAN

A fragmented novel that lurches through the life of the unnamed narrator from girlhood through adolescence to rocky young adulthood.

Early on we sense the narrator’s desperation to construct a meaningful life, but contemporary culture—especially in the Southern backwater of Beau Repose—gives her almost nothing to work with. She grows up (if that’s the term) in a world with no periphery, where amidst the questionable “pleasures” of drugs and adolescent sex (the mysterious “world of doing it”), she drifts from one empty experience to another. She ends up in reform school, which enforces mandatory activities like basket weaving and square dancing. Eventually, her sharp mind enables her to go to college, and she makes high scores on a placement test for British universities, which leads her to study in Glasgow, city of rain and fog (and more drugs and sex). Her course of study is “The Postmodern Seminar for the Study of Interpretative Uses,” in which students create “postmodern happenings in honor of Jacques Derrida,” but this intellectualism also understandably fails to nourish the narrator, who becomes ill in both body and mind, the “meat and spirit plan” showing definite deficiencies. At the end of the novel, she insightfully realizes that there’s a third choice beyond light and darkness, one that “includes light and dark but is not limited to either.” The novel is divided into paragraphs, though Saterstrom orders these paragraphs into a loose narrative framework organized by fragments from heavy-metal bands like Metallica, Anthrax and Judas Priest (“Rock Hard, Ride Free”). Perhaps an even more basic unit of structural organization found here is the image, for image patterns (of Ginger Rogers, of butchering, of The Seventh Seal, of The Blue Lagoon) weave through both the reality and the dreams of the narrator.

The narrator observes that one of the characters “uses language like an exacto blade”—the same can be said of Saterstrom (The Pink Institution, 2004).