Escape from the present
In the world of Ascher/Straus, film, TV, dreams, and brief conversations form a hyperreal landscape

By Stephen Beachy

ABOUT 30 YEARS ago stories and poetry began to appear from a composite entity, a "collective" formed by Sheila Ascher and Dennis Straus and publishing as Ascher/Straus. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, they began creating "space novels," reminiscent of the happenings of the 1960s and 1970s. These were interactive performance novels structured by the spaces in which they occurred, galleries or air fields, and designed to disappear once they were over, an attempt to release the book from its binding.

Ascher/Straus have since embraced the binding and published four books and a pamphlet, a fascinating and complicated body of work that has remained largely unknown. Their first enigmatic pamphlet, Letter to an Unknown Woman, bears an oblique relationship to the Max Ophüls film of the same name and announces what will be a continuing interest in the intersections of identity and film. Themis, for example, whom we know only from other characters' conversations and letters to him, starts out as "a beautiful boy who looked a bit old for his age, like Victor Mature in Samson and Delilah." But after he's picked up by a sugar mommy and moved from Greece to Florida, "he's living ok, but still it doesn't quite remind him of the movie he saw with Dean Martin or Alain Delon." Then his wife spots a new kid on the tennis court who looks exactly like Farley Granger in Strangers on a Train. The other characters are equally slippery to others and themselves, haunted by the sense that something sinister is happening on the edges of their perception, or while they're asleep, something frighteningly similar to the things that happen in movies about tough guys, cops, and hardened dames. The story is haunted by hovering helicopters that make the conversations barely intelligible even to the characters actually having them. Throughout Ascher/Straus's work it sometimes feels like you are walking in and out of theaters at a multiplex where each is showing fragments of the same dream, yours or somebody else's.

Of the published books, The Menaced Assassin is their most obviously experimental work, and its characters – Celeste, the Dane or the Swede, the taxi driver, one or several men named Antonio – are the shadiest. Freed from the pretense of plot, they are troubled by similar questions as the other, more plotted characters who will follow. They are obsessed with the future and with the unlimited sense of possibility that only gets horribly reduced anytime a decision is made, meaning created. It strikes Celeste as cruel that things lag so far behind the readiness of the personality for change. Or is it the other way around? In a letter from Finland, the Dane or the Swede writes that he no longer feels Scandinavian, so maybe not modern. These characters exist in precarious worlds, at the edge of 20th-century catastrophe. The clouds might turn oddly yellow, "a kind of phosphorescence that makes one wonder if a chemical factory hasn't been dynamited somewhere on the outskirts of the city." One day or the next, during one poorly remembered conversation or maybe one just imagined, these constructs say things like "Everything you don't want will be readily available. They'll wheel it in like a roomful of prizes on a game show. But everything you need is no longer being manufactured." When we can't even count on the reality of Celeste, her hair color or her continuity within the space or time of the novel, the repetition of certain stories creates a substitute for plot, the sort of mythic space of a Kathy Acker novel. We hear several times the story of a wife who allows herself to be seduced by her husband's boss for the sake of his promotion. It proceeds and ends or doesn't end in a variety of ways, merges with Celeste's own story of herself. Within the mayhem, the reader is constantly assaulted by ideas. Celeste is "probably" one of those who "knows that movies constitute our only authentic body of myth, who're interested, for example, in the political mythology of movies like Each Dawn I Die, a second rate prison film you can't watch without coming to the conclusion that every moral person is bound to find herself/himself outside the existing power structure, if only one chooses to exercise one's freedom, and that in the end, if one wants to lead one's own life, one must either band together against this structure or escape from it altogether. Or, in Flamingo Road it's clear that the only effective solution to political evil is murder ... "

Ascher/Straus constantly force their readers to abandon expectations. In their later work, those expectations are foiled more subtly, and within structures that resemble more traditional plots, but whose ambiguities and multiple possibilities are all the more striking for that reason. In The Other Planet, Valeria is haunted by the sense that there's a completely different way to live, akin to living on another planet, a future that one can enter now, through sheer force of will. The Other Planet examines the ways the myth of the future creates a profound disillusionment and a yearning for the impossible. It critiques that myth while harboring no nostalgia for the forms that trap characters in the present, the habits of family and full-time employment. Valeria finds herself in a traditional romantic plot, receiving attentions from two radically different suitors. There's a nice, inarticulate working-class guy who's desperately in love with her versus a creepy evil genius-entrepreneur-rapist, Humberto Vilanescu, who offers her a part in the vague and improbable "future" as an escape from the relentlessly barren present.

"We long for life to be like a waking dream, an adventure whose coherence, whose 'plot' provides something akin to meaning," Humberto tells her. It's exhausting, their need to resist a monotonous present rooted in an overly familiar past, and offering only the clichéd scripts of family, job, romance. "Mass agreement = History," Valeria's dying mother scrawls on a pad, unable to speak. "It happens. Again and again. There's no resisting it, though it takes you by surprise every time. Now everyone is talking about marriage again...." Valeria's not having it either. The nice guy gets left behind without a trace of sentimentality for the contrived and narcissistic "love" he offers as some emblem of what it is to be human. Human, as currently configured, is not OK. She journeys instead through Ascher/Straus-world, a world where film, TV, dreams, and brief conversations collide to create a hyperreal and moody landscape.

The dreams and films reach their sinister and comic peak in Red Moon/Red Lake. This collection of stories follows a constellation of characters whose sense of coherence and plot is tied to monster movies, movies in which alien pods blow their seeds across suburban lawns, movies in which dark figures who hunger for living flesh haunt the dark spaces in between the shoddy houses of suburbs that seem to have been designed for nightmares to take place in. It's a feeling that pervades everyone and everything, so that in midsummer heat, under a blinding sun, Nora meets an old woman who speaks of how the cicadas are louder than ever before and the heat somehow darker, in a relentless monologue of horror. Nora thinks the old woman has lived too long: "Or had neither died nor survived the winter. A sort of corpse within which a tiny vocal kernel had sprouted, its roots on the other side." The old woman's daughter laughs and translates. "What Ma means is that the air is dead and the trees are dead, and the sweat that pours off us gets filthier and fouler every year. Yet we stand out here and we keep talking and talking. We can't shut up...." Ascher/Straus-world is haunted by the belief that one's own story is composed of all the stories others tell us, even or especially those we'd rather avoid. As the most sinister possibilities eclipse the willful banality of these lives, Red Moon/Red Lake crests in the strange and complicated title story, as emotionally satisfying and dreadful as anything in contemporary fiction.

The only comparable work I know of in tone to The Other Planet and Red Moon/Red Lake is that of Joy Williams, which has a similar dark sense of humor and the same sort of dialogue, dialogue at once so real and so unreal that it seems like the way people might talk in dreams. The way people would talk if they were possessed by a rare intelligence – if the most ignorant and thick-headed among us became articulate in the expression of our ignorance. If our ignorance could speak. While Williams was interspersing her oddly structured and quietly surreal novels with the sort of tight, minimal, epiphany-rich stories that landed her in Best American Short Stories year after year, Ascher/Straus's oddly structured and quietly surreal novels have been interspersed with even more oddly structured and loudly experimental novels or novel-like things. It isn't surprising, the degree to which they remain unknown. They've resisted the primary mechanisms of corporate publishing, which are not so different from those of most indie publishing: the creation of a recognizable stylistic and marketing niche. Instead of capitulating to the cult of personality that drives literary production in America, their experimentalism has been playful and evolving, depending on the shifts in their own interests more than on the requirement to be consistently "experimental enough."

Their most recent book is ABC Street, which was released by Green Integer, placing Ascher/Straus where they belong, in a line publishing "Essays, Manifestos, Statements, Speeches, Maxims, Epistles, Diaristic Notes, Narratives, Natural Histories, Poems, Plays, Performances, Ramblings, Revelations and all such ephemera as may appear necessary to bring society into a slight tremolo of confusion and fright at least," and placing them alongside Stein, Wilde, Poe, Celine, and Michaux. ABC Street combines the journal with the novel, a chronicle that isn't about the self that produces it but about the context that surrounds that self and about the act of chronicling itself. Its author, "Monica," is re-creating conversations that happen among constellations of characters who surround her, strictly realistic New Yorkers who seem only slightly less surreal than the characters of the previous books. Their dark sense of humor is familiar. Yvonne, herself the mother of a baby who's sucking up her life energy, confronts her destiny with words that say life stinks, a voice that says it doesn't matter: "Yvonne wants to know if Monica can figure Janey Hedges out. Janey's little one Jo Andy's not even a year old but she's got another one due in June! Janey's not stupid so why'd she need two nooses to kill herself?" Simultaneously, ABC Street sends out ripples that change our reading of the other Ascher/Straus books, blurring lines of memory and realism and imagination, while it forces us to confront the way writing itself, and the sorts of perception that drive writing, is a medium conducive only to very particular ways of understanding. Monica discovers that "what interests her as a chronicler has as little to do with what's ordinarily meant by realism as it does with what's called imagination." Chronicling is a form of editing, creating order and meaning out of disorderly experience. "But another path eludes both reader and editor, arriving in every text as if of its own free will." The chronicler's intentions go awry. Thinking and intending to write about one family, she ends up starting a book about people she hadn't thought about at all – a collection of stories titled Red Moon/Red Lake.

Ascher/Straus have chosen their own canon and manifested that subjective history as a unique constellation. Ascher/Straus are a crossroads where Doctor X, Shadow of a Doubt, The Damned Don't Cry, and Lola Montes come together with the sort of "European" fiction that involves an intellectual engagement with the world. Despite all the thinking that goes on in these books, they are never pretentious, boring, or incomprehensible and are consistently funny. Volume two of ABC Street will be forthcoming from Green Integer, and a list of early works published here and there, including traces left by the space novels, can be found at www.ascher-straus.com.

Letter to an Unknown Woman

By Ascher/Straus. Treacle Press, $12.50.

The Menaced Assassin

By Ascher/Straus. McPherson and Co., 128 pages, $9 (paper).

The Other Planet

By Ascher/Straus. McPherson and Co., 256 pages, $15.95.

Red Moon/Red Lake

By Ascher/Straus. McPherson and Co., 128 pages, $16.

ABC Street

By Ascher/Straus. Green Integer, 120 pages, $10.95 (paper).

Stephen Beachy is a novelist and critic who lives in San Francisco.