Families are Formed Through Copulation – Jacob Wren (Book Review)
Note to self: being cynical and depressed about things has never made them better.
Jacob Wren’s “Familes are Formed Through Copulation” (Pedlar Press, 2007) is a collection of “political parables and they seem like someone’s legitimate plea for something other than inaction” (Dan Bejar, Destroyer). Wary as I am of musician endorsements on books, I was a bit tentative about this one. But I loved the title, the fact that it was a stage production (“La famille se creé en copulant / Families Are Formed Through Copulation by PME in Montreal in co-diffusion with Usine C (Montréal) and in co-production with the Forum Freies Theatre (Düsseldorf), and that it’s beautiful (like a lot of Pedlar Press books — maybe all? — the typography is amazing and the paper is high quality. Congrats to Zab Design & Typography, Winnipeg.); so I picked it up.
I’m glad I did, because Dan Bejar couldn’t be more right. His back cover review continues:
But amidst the sound of all this rational discourse, it really just feels like the noise of someone completely losing it! The paranoia is infectious [...] I felt better after reading this book! Which is only a little weird, because I think like any good book, it demands to be read incorrectly…
A big part of reading the book is making sense out of what you’re reading. There are enough character similarities between the stories to make you think it’s some post-post-modern version of a novel, but there’s a nagging insistence (the paranoia maybe?) constantly screaming “no ,this is not a novel! The characters’ similarities don’t matter! Stop trying so hard and just read!”
The second story, A short parable concerning the state of Israel, prepares the reader:
Daughter breaks curfew again and is grounded. The television is on in the other room. We have seen this all before. It’s familiar. One night father steps into his daughter’s room while she is sleeping and quietly rapes her. She screams and mother pretends not to hear. We have all seen this before. It is extremely unpleasant but sadly it is not shocking. Like goes on. The paper comes in the morning. Coffee is made. One weekend, when father is away on business, his daughter quietly slips in the master bedroom and brutally rapes her own mother. Once again mother remains silent. Pretends not to hear. Pretends.
From this point on, there are honest descriptions of family life, world politics, protest, and even indie rock. Wren manages to approach all these subjects, from the serious to the silly, with a level of familiarity and understanding you don’t see very often in fiction(?). Instead of story-telling, you really get a sense of the writer-as-character slipping into paranoia as he starts realizing that all these mundane events stack up into something real. Something substantial and potentially terrifying.
All told, this is a cry at humanity to start looking at themselves and their surroundings. It’s the kind of book that makes the perpetual thinker feel like maybe their paranoia is warranted. Maybe if enough of the paranoid get together, they can formulate a plan, and all the woes they see in the world will disappear. Highly recommended to anyone who considers themself a thinker.
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