Book Review: Cream of Kohlrabi (Floyd Skloot)Reviewed by Michael NorthenMost people know Floyd Skloot for In the Shadow of Memory, the brilliant memoir in which he describes, speculates and reflects upon how a virus changed his brain almost over night leaving him with permanent physical, language and memory disabilities. Others may know him for his essays or his collections of poetry, most recently, Selected Poems: 1970-2005. His latest foray, however, is in none of these areas. Cream of Kohlrabi (Tupelo Press, 2011) is a collection of short fiction. And the genre of disability fiction can certainly use his help. Life writing about disability is no longer the wide open field it was in 2003 when In the Shadow of Memory was published. An interested reader has many excellent books to choose from. Disability fiction, especially short fiction, is another story, however. There are still, of course, Anne Finger's ground-breaking Basic Skills and Noria Jablonski's idiosyncratic Human Oddities, but aside from those one has to seek out this work in periodicals or anthologies, such as Kenny Fries Disability Studies Reader Unlike disability poetry, disability fiction is struggling. One unimpeachable quality that Skloot is able to offer his fiction is verisimilitude. In creating characters with disabilities, the author of the stories in Cream of Kohlrabi has his own experiences to draw from as a result of a virus that caused him brain damage. Just the first few pages of In the Shadow of Memory reveal some of the material he has to work with. Here Skloot describes that he stops in mid-sentence unable to find the words he needs, he struggles with being able to calculate how many pages he has left to read in a book, he puts a freshly washed pan in the refrigerator or tries to put a stack of newspaper to be recycled into his mail-box. In Skloot's own words: I put fresh grounds into the empty carafe instead of the filter basket on my coffee maker, put eye drops in my nose or spray the cleaning mist onto my face instead of the shower walls…at the dinner table I might say "Pass the sawdust" instead of "Pass the rice," knowing even as it happens that I am saying something inappropriate. As he says, "These 'deficits' have been incorporated into my very being, my consciousness. They are part of my repertoire. Deficits imply loss; I have to know how to see them as gains." One of the ways that Skloot – and his readers – can see them as gains is in the creation of the characters that inhabit his short stories. Cream of Kohlrabi is divided into three parts and, though each section has its strengths, it is the first section of the book and the characters found there that has the most to offer to disability fiction. In this first group of Skloot has taken his own experiences with an uncooperative memory and difficulty in everyday skills to create portraits of elderly Americans, most of whom live in nursing or retirement homes. Their names alone – Norma, Hershel, Esther, Dorothy, Norman – speak of a time gone by. Aside from age and a body that no longer functions as it once did, the common denominator for almost all of the seniors in the stories is their slippery hold on memory. In "Let Us Rejoice!" Norma Corman, a nursing home resident who appears to have Parkinson's, reflects on her current situation All these humiliations Norma could do without. Along with the half-hour it took to button a blouse or the endless waiting for her legs to listen to her brain and get moving. Terrible, the way her mind would race ahead and her body dawdle behind. Time was all messed up now. For most of the inhabitants of Skloot's initial stories, time is all messed up. Like the narrator of Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five, Skloot's characters are frequently spastic in time. The wandering in time in Cream of Kohlrabi is mental rather than physical, but the characters, especially those with Alzheimer's, do literally wander as well. Perhaps Skloot is admonishing the reader through one the story's social workers when he writes, "Jennifer knew that wandering was often an Alzheimer's symptom. Best not to make too much metaphoric meaning out of what was essentially organic behavior." It's true, characters that populate Skloot's stories are individuals and not symbols. Even so, one might say that these stories are a study in memory. As a storyteller, Skloot takes a number of approaches to letting us into the minds of his characters as they deal with this shifting of memory and time. Sometimes, he will lead off the story with the protagonist (and reader) trying to locate herself as he does in "The Tour." Esther Myerson sat in a wheelchair trying to figure out where she was. Straight ahead she saw the ocean, but the air was too cold and the water wasn't green enough for this to be Florida. Looking closer, she saw that the beach was all wrong too It was short and gray, like a cracked slate patio, with ling fingers of rock jutting out into the breakers. Beach! She was in Long Beach, even though the beach was short. She was in the state of New York, county of something. . . At times, the characters almost seem able to allow themselves to drift into an earlier year. In "Plans", Benjamin Dodge, who has terminal cancer, is listening to his doctor's advice: It was best to enroll in the hospice program, let the nurses and the social worker ease his way,
and that's where Dodge stopped listening and happily went back to 1969. At other times, the past's impingement upon the present is more frustrating. As "Alzheimer's Noir" opens, Charles Wade says: It was about ten at night when I saw her walk out the door. Now they're telling me that's now what happened, she wasn't even here. I don't buy it. The room was dark, the night was darker, but Dorothy was there. We were in bed and her curved back was against my chest…. They tell me I'm confused. What else is new? I'm also tired…And don't sleep worth a damn, which is why I saw what I saw in the night. Confused, maybe, but the fact is that Dorothy is gone. Though he is actually referring to his wife Dorothy, Dodge later says, "Alzheimer's people wander. They are trying to get out of the prison they are in and who can blame them. I feel the same way myself." In some stories, such as "Alzheimer's Noir" and "The Wanderer" this attempt to breakout is literal, but more often what they are trying to break away is some aspect of their past, some guilt. Norma Corman is tortured by the guilt of her husband having died shortly after she publicly humiliated him. At the nursing home she meets Hershel Birnbaum and realizes "Hershel was tormented by having survived." He is surviving the painful illness and death of his son. As Norma eventually realizes, "If she and Hershcel were united in anything, it was in not being responsible for everything they'd always held themselves responsible for." This might be said of a number of characters in the book. Not surprisingly, many of the male characters in the book are World War II survivors. For these men, the indelible impact of the war is one that keeps resurfacing in their memories. This is particularly true of the Jewish men – and Jewish characters make up the majority of the male protagonists in Cream of Kohlrabi. In various ways, they are running from or tortured by these memories. Norman Hertz, "The Wanderer," escapes from his nursing home to the woods where he believes himself still to be back in the war running from Nazi's. Others like Ike Rubin are so bitter from their experiences that they frequently seem unable to see anything positive in life. At one point in the title story Rubin asks one of the nurses aides to describe the oceanfront scene in front of him; she does so, telling him about people on the board walk the waves, and swimmers. When she finishes, he comments, "You know what I see, Rosa? I see a haze, mostly. The color of bones, or maybe ashes... Everything's looked like that to me for the last sixty-some years. Ashes and bones." So have any of the elderly and disabled characters in this first group of stories been able to turn their losses into gains? Perhaps, Norma, who able to see how she and Hershel are victims of their own guilt is able to look at him with newer eyes and say, "There is was now, someone younger let loose from within the old Herschel. Handsome, yes, but there was more to it than that. He was full of life again, vital." Perhaps, ironically, Esther, for whom every trip is a place to something she sees as anew. For most, though, their experiences have not been transformative in any positive way. In addition to his familiarity with disability and memory loss, Skloot draws on his experiences growing up in Brooklyn. Here, too, verisimilitude is one of the stories' virtues. Indeed, some of the material Skloot uses in the last two sections of the book comes from is own family. In In the Shadow of Memory, he tells of his father and grandfather being sellers of live poultry in Brooklyn, how they were ultimately edged out by the Mafia coming in and taking over the territory. The details Skloot provides in his short story "The Royal Family" could only have come from someone who knew the life and work of a poultry salesman first hand and could get into the mind of a man like its main character Milton Webb, who couldn't see the future coming. More intriguing yet are these words from In the Shadow of Memory: The family story is that my father married on the rebound. He was disappointed in early love, turned his frustrated energies to work, and married at last out of desperation. I've never been told any details about this mystery woman, the love of his life, when he lost her or why . Such a family rumor is an open invitation to a fiction writer and it takes little imagination to draw the connection to "The fights" in the final section of Cream of Kohlrabi. One of the most poignant stories in the book, it tells of the relation between Murray perlman, a Jewish poulty butcher, and Sally O'Day, a politically savvy Irish Catholic who sits ringside at her brother's boxing matches. Aware that such a story might not ring true to contemporary readers without the setting, makes sure to zoom in on this story, opening it just after Roosevelt defeats Landon in a presidential election and pull out of it, just as the Hindenburg is bursting into flames. Skloot now lives in Portland, Oregon and while many of his stories are New York based and sport characters who could only be New Yorkers, he also takes advantage of the specific Northwest. Cream of Kohlrabi, begins and ends with bookend stories. Both of the stories take place in the Seattle/Portland area. Both stories feature a crusty older man with a medical condition resulting in cognitive issues who is a rabid Seattle Mariners fan. Both involve a journey – a quest, in a sense. Finally, both end with a dream fulfilled, though in very different ways. In the work of fiction writers like Anne Finger, Jillian Weise and Terry Tracy, characters with disabilities, who tend to be smart, savvy women, challenge the images that society has of them. They are outraged by their treatment and resist both the medical establishment's attempt to define them and societies refusal to accommodate them. Perhaps, some of this has to do with the fact that most fiction writers with disabilities are women and feminists, used to fighting paternalism and popular conceptions. None of that is happening in Cream of Kohlrabi. If Skloot agrees with the social construction theory of disability, he isn't letting on in this book. As mentioned before, Skloot's characters are not metaphors or caricatures, but individuals. This does not mean, however, that his work does not add to the discussion about disability in literature. The stories in Cream of Kohlrabi provide several opportunities for discussion.
While disability fiction needs writers who point out the ways that society itself rather than any one individual's impairment creates disability, it also needs realistic but unsentimental portraits of individuals that do not ride on any particular political agenda. It is the latter that Skloot's collection provides. Skloot's characters in Cream of Kohlrabi are varied and convincing. While the themes of his story are universal, the stories themselves are going to be more highly prized by readers who, like the characters themselves, have seen many years of life. Only a person who has lived a long life themself can truly appreciate the guilt of outliving one of their children. What anyone can take away from these stories, however, is a sense of how it must feel to have time and memory carry one into unknown territory. Every reader knows someone like one of Skloot's characters and if reading Cream of Kohlrabi can help in understanding that person better, then Cream of Kohlrabi has served an important purpose. |