- Rick Harsch, Voices After Evelyn, Maintenance Ends Press, 2018, 264 pgs, $19.95
The 1950s were a curious time in American history. Some people see it as the country’s greatest period thanks to an economic boom benefitting its citizens after decades of depression and war. This is the era politicians refer to when citing slogans such as “Make America Great Again.” It was a time of prosperity. The social mores were more stolid, too. Women were expected to stay at home as mothers and wives. Men were supposed to be strong and silent. People of color knew their place. Sex was something best discussed behind closed doors and out of public view.
The fifties were a time of repression. Politically, this was the McCarthy Era when a senator from Wisconsin became popular ranting about hidden conspiracies and deviants infecting America. And while the economic conditions enabled many white males to earn enough money to support a family, women were underpaid and exploited while people of color were excluded from many jobs simply because of their color. This was the beginning of the nuclear age when both the United States and its enemy, the Soviet Union both had an arsenal of weapons of destruction with the potential of eliminating all human life on the planet. It was a scary time of duck and cover drills and conforming to the crowd.
Rick Harsch set his latest novel, Voices After Evelyn, in 1953. He investigates the still unsolved disappearance, and presumably murder, of a 15-year-old babysitter named Evelyn from the conventional Midwestern city of La Crosse, Wisconsin. On the surface, La Crosse is a swell place full of good citizens who live a dull, drab, and dreary existence. Harsch digs underneath the crust and finds the lurid elements below. Harsch’s La Crosse is a place whose denizens’ hidden desires and illicit behaviors reveal a more sordid existence. The author serves as a ringmaster of the circus. He tells his story through the voices of various people who lived there, knew Evelyn, and have theories about her disappearance.
Harsch has written about La Crosse before, most notably in his Driftless Trilogy (The Driftless Zone, Billy Verite, Sleep of the Aborigines) in a similar narrative style using a central character’s distinctive voice to convey the story. The last volume of the set came out more than 15 years ago. The Iowa Writers’ Workshop graduate’s new release Voices After Evelyn is more ambitious because of the number and variety of characters within and its implicit theme that connects the particular crime to the city’s stagnation. Harsch uses multiple voices to tell the tale.
Just as Evelyn’s disappearance has never been solved, La Crosse itself became stuck in time after she went missing as if in punishment for the misdeed. Despite the prominence of the title character, La Crosse itself is the story’s focal point, the epicenter of all that happens. La Crosse is the real victim of the transgression, as well as its main suspect and perpetrator.
This is noir fiction. The voices tell the story in gumshoe slang and hard-boiled language, including the Greek chorus that Harsch imaginatively uses to highlight what has happened across the novel. The La Crosse natives sound like they were pulled right out of fifties’ pulp paperbacks. They refer to femme fatales and speak in snappy sentences or dreamy stream of consciousness monologues with lines such as “We looked at each other between the timid suicides of our eyeballs,” “Oh grand deception! His mind must have been chaos…oatmeal” and “I wouldn’t beg a whore like you to kiss my ass” peppering the novel. There’s lots of drinking and smoking that suggests the hazy and hallucinatory consciousness of whoever is telling the story. People hang out at places like the Coo Coo Club and listen to acts like Louis Prima. The author lurches back and forth in time looking at events before the murder or with the perspective of what happened forty years after the event. This strategy keeps the narrative moving, even though the answer to who committed the dastardly deed remains unanswered.
Harsch’s linguistic acrobatics keep one’s attention as he tells these stories in colorful jargon that demands concentration even when what is happening seems irrelevant to the larger tale. He’s not offering red herrings. These tangents color in the missing details in an entertaining sideshow where the freaks are just regular people with, um, weird sexual appetites and a fondness for violence. Evelyn is not the only victim here of the macho culture, but there are other women here who are beaten without provocation. Consider the case of Peter Kurten, who offhandedly confesses to knocking out a woman he just met, raping her, then repeatedly bashing her head in with a hammer. Or a woman such as Maggie Hopkins, who brags that she carries a knife and is just itching to cut the balls off any man who would mess with her. These are peripheral characters whose stories create a setting. Evelyn’s disappearance is just one more mystery that reveals the dark side of the times and the town.
Voices After Evelyn is comprised of a number of small tales that add up to be much bigger than its individual parts. The novel succeeds at showing the sleepy Midwest to be as gritty as Philip Marlowe’s Los Angeles or Sam Spade’s San Francisco. The implicit message is that the mean streets of America are everywhere. Harsch does this with a sense of humor and an ear for the weird. We may live in a sick society where nothing is as simple or as guileless as it seems. But the key is that we are alive. His novel may be set in the past but reeks of the present. The parallels between then and now reveal that corruption and depravity are nothing new.
Voices After Evelyn is the first book presented by Maintenance Ends, an imprint of the regional publisher Ice Cube Press. Maintenance Ends founder, Todd Kimm, has said that the imprint is devoted to emerging the overlooked Midwest works with an eye towards the wild and transgressive. Harsch’s novel amply satisfies these criteria.
In addition, Maintenance Ends also commissioned Iowa artist and poet Julie Russell-Steurt (Caveworks Press) to take a 53-line excerpt from the novel and explore the mystery of Evelyn’s disappearance through a unique “tritetraflexagon” structure, also known as “Jacob’s Ladder.” Russell-Steuart used hand-drawn pictures, photographic images of rock and fossil formations from Iowa’s Coralville Dam, and sophisticated folding techniques to offer insights into the mystery via the recombination of its constituent parts. She utilized the laser engraver at Cedar Valley Makerspace to create the relief plates and a large cylinder letterpress to print five colors on both sides. 53 Lines comes in a hand-numbered edition of 75 and sells for $40.
Dr. Steven Horowitz is an adjunct assistant professor of American Studies at the University of Iowa where he teaches courses on American culture. His dissertation was on the topic of twentieth century American literature. He is a Staff Writer for popmatters.com and the Iowa Source, and he has published in numerous academic and popular periodicals including American Poetry, Icon, and the Village Voice.
Illustration by: Daniel Zender.