The Mere Weight of Words is Not Quite Enough

(Today’s review comes from Anna Roorda, a young writer living and working in Illinois, and who’s reviewed for Corduroy before)

            I can see that Carissa Halston, the author of The Mere Weight of Words, had good intentions with this novella. The story basis is there, though it’s not anything especially flashy or irregular. It’s essentially about a girl named Meredith who is often at odds with both of her parents but especially her father. She’s also struggling to maintain vulnerability and peace with her boyfriend. As a result of these, at times, sinking relationships, we see the ways that silences can lengthen and wedges can form between people, and how everything will be destroyed unless bridges can be built. These framed relationships give the illusion that we as readers will be kept close to the nature of the story and its words. The story is built on the remaining threads between people, and these very threads make up our existence as humans. We recognize failing and successful relationships because they are familiar to each of us—we work with people, live with them, sleep with them, fight with and/or love them, clean their diapers or clothes or make their lunches.

            However, optimism isn’t always enough, and it may be too optimistic and perhaps naïve to assume Halston’s good intentions with this novella and judge it solely upon those hopeful, fluttery feelings that I originally had in those first few pages. Because the feeling that came as I finished this book, if I get to the bottom of the matter, was irony. The irony lies in the fact that the title begged me into thinking that the novella would use language and characters to create a kind of meaning and intimacy with the reader. Halston splashes across the cover of the book that words mean a whole lot of something and they carry a weight that actions or thoughts cannot.

            My impressions of the book were very different from these early presumptions. Black and white. I was expecting to see language precise and exact and dangerous, like tongues of fire ripping along a floor beneath my feet, cutting where it may. The truth is, I felt the furthest from Halston and the story she sought to tell through these characters. And all because the language simply wasn’t precise and it, frankly, wasn’t enough. Words often seemed to drag or hang there on the page like damp bathrobes on hooks, empty but still asking me to consider them or to take them for whatever they were worth. I wasn’t always sure what that was, because the words were too weak, too far away, too much of something that I wasn’t a part of as a reader. That was equally troubling and annoying.

            Does Carissa Halston want my sympathy for Meredith and her inability to communicate openly with her lover?  Does she expect a kind of sadness to bounce from to the page to my heart when I read of Meredith’s accident that leaves her face in a state of paralysis? What about when I read the word regret in regards to her father and all that has passed, or not passed, between them—what should I have felt then?  The thing was, I wanted to shake my fist in rage, or shed soppy tears, or flip through the pages with a kind of urgency that would surprise every speed-reader I know, but this novella wouldn’t allow me those small joys. I wanted to believe in words again, I wanted to be coerced that their existence is crucial and central, but I really wasn’t unable to because of the sheer force of inadequate language hitting me in the face. Or, rather, nodding at me but not hitting me or touching me at all. I wanted it to flick my wrist, or graze my hair, so badly.

            I remain hopeful for Halston and whatever novel she’s working on, as the book jacket told me. I am not sure if it was optimism that brought me through this book, or if it was the thought that maybe the grand moment that I was waiting for–when language, emotion, and character collaborate together on the page–would at last arrive on page 21, 37, or 49. That moment never did come, and I was given instead a vagueness that warranted, demanded, explanation. That left me feeling both robbed and sad. Maybe with future endeavors, Halston will deliver to her readers the strength of the words that she promises them.