The Brooklyn Rail

Dog Days sits beyond the clarity of a good story, an easy plot that is rehearsed and narrated and constructed and demanded and peddled. This complicates the form of a review, with its insistence on summary: a couple of quick lines that place us, face down, on one side for seven hours, in the same hostage situation that this book is and isn’t about.

Writing around “the ordinary extraordinary event” her family survived nearly two decades ago, Emily LaBarge leads with the incoherence of traumatic recall. “I see a flash and movement in the corner of my vision and suddenly the men are there,” she starts. “I did not hear them coming. Maybe I heard them coming. I did. I did not.” She backs this fragmented narrative with a rich synthesis of theory, psychology, and literary analysis, along with a record of dreams. LaBarge’s research pursues lines of thinking that are surprising until they aren’t: A mesmerising section on our experience of time compares theories of presentism and eternalism, amplifying the way traumatic feedback loops strand us across different temporalities. “Trauma, along with its recovery,” she writes, “is the ultimate experience of both this will last forever and this will happen again anytime and anywhere.” In its capacity to hold these various, sometimes contradictory truths, Dog Days resists the sense of control implied by standard narratives—the polite fantasy of our own omniscience. Instead, LaBarge’s debut memoir turns to the potential of language as it fractures along an act of violence, reorienting us to ourselves and how that self might be more fully expressed.

An impression of “what happened” is ultimately achieved through revision, each turn snagging against some slight variation, redacted bits, a rhythm of X’s to stand in for the things beyond speech. Between the gaps, images clarify into a sudden presence: “I remember a hand pressing hard to the ground to see if it was real. I remember this hand being my hand and looking at it, watching to see what it would do.”

I cried the first time I read this, on a too early flight next to teenagers who cracked stale beers into the pressurised cabin. Beyond any climactic arc, there’s the quiet recognition, trailed by disbelief, of having arrived at your own epitaph. The sense of helplessness—that ultimate fear—is sharp in memory, despite the linguistic attempt at distance. The almost childlike wonder of the action and its narration stuns me. I’m reminded of the impossible questions carried by children in Gaza, recorded by the Palestine Trauma Centre UK, which I came to through Selma Dabbagh’s writing in the London Review of Books. They are marked by a similar anticipation: “After we die, will I hear your voice? When I die, will they put me in a grave with my mom and dad?” What happens to a life that has come this close, to a generation and the generations after?

“Trauma is a narrative problem” becomes a refrain throughout Dog Days, evidence of the way shock disrupts our sense of a unified self. In one riff on the expression, LaBarge describes trauma as “polyvocal”: “The narrative includes your response to the event and the response of others too. It includes similar events and similar experiences, more and less extreme, and dissimilar experiences, more and less extreme, shared across time and space.” I hear this in Robert Glück’s About Ed, which I read just after Dog Days, another record of the continuum of grief. When Glück’s lover learns he has HIV, the narration alternates between two perspectives: the disbelief and delirium of the newly sick, the refusal of the newfound caretaker. In the steady pan between both speakers, the interstitial space becomes the story, the movement a kind of lateral narrative. I have come to hear that interval as death itself, or the fact of death that is beyond our comprehension. The cross-talk magnifies its presence, picks up on either side of what LaBarge calls “the devouring black pauses” in language. In the process, death is made a communal act, involved as silent witness. Glück drafted these scenes by reshaping Ed’s own writing about the day of his diagnosis, a resurrection that reaches across the decades since his passing. The call and response sustains a momentum of hope, even as it predicts, then relives, the same loss. “The reader’s expectation may be the faith to restore, the anticipation you enter and become,” Glück writes. “To answer your question answers every question.”

Recovery is often the great hope of trauma narratives, an attempt to replicate something of our past selves—as if our proximity to death hasn’t changed us. LaBarge stakes a claim at the edges of a narrative constantly reconfigured by the original sin of knowledge. Maybe the most generous aim of Dog Days is its embrace of the impossibility of return. A former innocence eludes us, but Eden defined by its borders, we learn, is a paradise foreclosed. Still, the search for redemption has sent us striving.

In April of this year, NASA launched four astronauts into lunar flyby, the furthest our species has travelled from home. The historic journey, part of a gradual effort to settle and start anew, offered some of the first views of the far side of the moon. Among the discoveries was our earliest glimpse of the entire Orientale basin, one of the most dramatic lunar landscapes, formed eons ago by what is vaguely referred to as an “impactor,” or a “violent event.” Debris rebounded from the moon’s surface, leaving scars larger than the initial strike, a trace that defied scientific understanding until the last decade. At our greatest extreme, new horizons have shown us this: craters, signs of collision. More of the same.