Aimee Bender’s Latest Is a Proustian Reverie

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/28/books/review/aimee-bender-the-butterfly-lampshade.html

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THE BUTTERFLY LAMPSHADE By Aimee Bender

If it is defensible to divide works of fiction into those that prize stillness and those that prize motion, then “The Butterfly Lampshade,” Aimee Bender’s compact surrealist memory box of a novel, sets its store firmly by stillness. Her earlier books were dedicated, as this one is, to transfiguring the American domestic landscape by way of magic, fantasy, bewitchment, peculiarization. But where those books were also propelled by motion, to change, “The Butterfly Lampshade” by contrast stakes its ground early, and remains there. It resists becoming something other than what its opening pages suggest it’s going to be. Yet its particular quality of stillness hums with so much mystery and intensity that the book never feels static. It is a measure of the book’s success that as I reached the conclusion, I felt considerably more altered by the experience than I often am by novels that travel much further from their beginnings.

The music critic Walter Holland recently proposed that “active musical listening is part patient attention to the moment and part predictive attention to the possible futures that that moment suggests.” If the same holds true for reading — and I think it does — then Bender’s success here might be explained by the ease and simplicity with which she commingles these two forms of attention. After all, how often does a novel that seems poised to reward your immersive attention diminish in its power, conspicuously and all at once, as soon as it tries to engage your predictive attention? Everything begins so promisingly, but then the plot takes hold and the book becomes smaller, more desiccated, as you realize the predictive attention the writer is applying to the material is so much more meager than it could have been, or than your own was. “The Butterfly Lampshade” never makes that swerve. Instead it retraces the path it has already established, gradually filling in its textures, looking both back and deeper. In this way, it evades the stiffness of those stories that are able to move forward only by hardening into their possibilities.

Early in the novel, before her obsessions saturate her life, the narrator, Francie, holds a managerial position at a framing store. It is a telling job for someone so aware of the need to maintain the borders between things. “My great love then — and still — is delineation,” she says, recollecting a few formative days when, at the age of 8, she lost her mother to psychosis and “the scrim of meaning had floated off of everything.”

After a premonitory glimpse of the book’s cast, we learn that three times during Francie’s childhood she witnessed a sort of mystic reification, when a picture to which she’d given her attention opened out from its surface, discharging itself into object being: a butterfly from a lampshade, a beetle from a worksheet, and a rose from a window curtain.

She spends the rest of the novel trying to comprehend these visitations. The memory of them remains vivid in her mind, coloring even her most mundane moments: “I ate my bag of potato chips and sat next to the small succulent plant in its terra-cotta pot left behind by a previous tenant, and for a moment felt myself living inside both times at once.” This double attention, which lies at the center of her experiences, turns the novel into a kind of small-scale, supernatural Proustian reverie: Proust if what Proust had been trying to recover was not luminous, ordinary reality, but a rupture in luminous ordinary reality; Proust if his childhood had been broken open by Arthur Machen or Lord Dunsany.

Bender’s concern with evoking the inwardness of objects, however, is less common to fiction than to poetry. I think of Francis Ponge, Gertrude Stein, Martha Ronk — the great thing-masons of literature, describing pebbles, bowls and buttons with rigor and exultation. In some respects, Bender’s ongoing fascination with the border separating objects from people makes “The Butterfly Lampshade” a mirror image of her 2010 novel, “The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake”: In that earlier novel, the narrator’s brother was a living being who took on the quiddity of an object; in this one, objects take on the quiddities of living beings.

But such an occurrence, though “fun to imagine in a story,” Francie insists, “is terrifying in real life.” An object can be magical without becoming an amulet or a charm. The butterfly “had to gain internal functions and an external structure, had to come out of an entirely different plane of existence to make itself, but somehow it did,” she thinks. “It was an active psychosis.”

Increasingly, Francie feels “as if everything — hamburger, cartoon dog, letters — might be on the verge of popping into the world.” And indeed, late in the book, she witnesses one last puncture in reality: two humans, or human-shapes, who request “tickets” from her, “a paper,” as if “speaking in another language that was still pretending to be our language.” Reading these final pages, it is hard not to feel as Francie does: that anything and anyone might be a two-way street, capable of passing from our side into theirs by means of illustration — or from their side into ours by means of emanation.

One finishes the novel with the eerie sense that we too are objects who have slipped accidentally into being and that, like the butterfly, the beetle and the dried rose, we really ought not to be here.