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On Being seen

Asked why she used the grotesque so prominently in her fiction, Flannery O’Connor famously replied, “you have to make your vision apparent by shock—to the hard of hearing you shout, and for the almost-blind you draw large and startling figures.” In his often-stunning debut story collection The Girl with Two Left Breasts, D. V. Glenn seems driven by the same incentive to shock and startle, thus waking the deficient of hearing and sight, in this case regarding race and identity. Yet linking O’Connor to Glenn is perhaps misleading. O’Connor’s concern was race only some of the time, her deeper fixation individual misfires at redemption via gothic allegories played through the lives of poor white Southern Christians. Glenn’s narrative fixation is nearly always race—or he finds a way to nearly always include it—in lyrical remembrances and grotesquely comic allegories played through the lives of African Americans (and occasional white ones) in our ostensibly post-racial culture. But Glenn has a deeper concern as well. Embedded beneath all the shouting and startling is a lyrically ambitious and versatile voice examining how we perceive ourselves and others—not only via race, but also via (in no particular order or rank) class, gender, sexual desire, addiction, and family (or the family’s absence). Much like O’Connor’s, Glenn’s stories are frequently drawn forward by the tantalizing lure of violence. The more predictable analogue to Glenn’s work might be Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952). Indeed, Glenn makes the connection for us in “The Relationship Handbook,” wherein Keith, a white college friend of the black protagonist, Dick, wonders how it feels “to be judged a priori, to be foremost seen and so held in thrall by the most superficial of the senses...seen, and not invisible as Ralph Ellison declared...but seen and seen and seen.” Glenn notes through his ironically instructional narrator that Keith’s viewpoint is skewed—whites too can be seen and judged by the other—but the reversal Fleisher continued from previous page