THE WALL WITHIN THE BODY

A woman seeks freedom from an oppressive system in Steinberg’s novel.

From a young age, Arianna observes the world around her in Texas, trying to make sense of the stories her sister, Lori, tells; her father’s and grandfather’s drinking; and the condescending way that her teachers talk to her. She knows that their family is poor but that “their poverty was special. Them being poor was in the moonlight with her mother singing and her grandfather playing the violin.” Young Arianna also observes other power dynamics around her, particularly between men and women (rendered as mxnand womxn). When she reaches adulthood, she manages to escape to college, but she still deals with the complexities of sex, gender, money, and religion. As she moves on to grad school and eventually marriage and children of her own, can Arianna find freedom of expression, or will she be anchored forever to the same dynamics that informed her early years? Steinberg’s prose is effectively layered and fluid, shifting between Arianna’s stream-of-consciousness thoughts and the editorializing voice of a third-person narrator. In both registers, however, the dense text is often unclear in its meaning. At one point, for example, Arianna (or the narrator) discusses an English paper on sex and religion: “It was the kind of topic that everyone wished they had and no one wanted to talk about; like the way a naked womxn felt in a movie walking towards a bed, knowing everyone in the world was going to have their own opinion of exactly what she was doing there.” Why exactly is the topic so desired yet forbidden, and how is it related to the imagined thoughts of a nude actor? Such unexplained assertions are a recurring feature of the text. The book sets itself up as a tale of critique and rebellion, but with its nebulous narrative and a cipher for a protagonist, it befuddles much more than it enlightens.

A pointed but hazy bildungsroman with little in the way of plot.