SPRAWL

SPRAWL

“SPRAWL in fact does not sprawl at all; rather, it radiates with control and fresh, strange reflection.” ― Bookforum “Reads as if Gertrude Stein channeled Alice B. Toklas writing an Arcades Project set in contemporary suburbia.” ― The Believer When Danielle Dutton’s SPRAWL first broke upon the world in 2010, critics likened it to collage, a poetics of the suburbs, a literal unpacking of et cetera. This updated edition, with a new afterword by Renee Gladman, reopens the space of SPRAWL’s “fierce, careful composition”―as Bookforum wrote―“which changes the ordinary into the wonderful and odd.” Today I fell asleep in the tall grass near the old train station. It was a complete picture. A fashionable park. Yet the picture had its sordid and selfish aspect. I can’t seem to say what I mean, Mrs. Barbauld, but with some urgency I mean to inform you what a triumph the big city has become. I am a secular individual but even I can feel the shift in the horizon utterly alien to the constitution of things, the habitual. Sincerely, etc. I move in shade on the edge of a parking lot under walnut trees in the early morning around the edge of a curve in an accidental manner. I walk the sidewalk and ripple the surface of it. From this condition I have a view of the world. Danielle Dutton is the author of Margaret the First, SPRAWL , and Attempts at a Life . Her writing has also appeared or is forthcoming in The Paris Review, Harper’s, The White Review, Fence, BOMB , and others. She is on the faculty of the writing program at Washington University in St. Louis and is co-founder and editor of the feminist press Dorothy, a publishing project. "This experimental novel is best read in a single sitting and, like the photographs that inspired it, can be viewed in any number of ways, with a different effect each time." — Publishers Weekly " SPRAWL feels like walking around the neighborhood at night, spying through lit living room windows . . . Dutton makes the domestic feel forbidden with how lusciously she renders each scene." — Nathan Scott McNamara, Lithub "Dutton is not the first writer to explore the paradoxical nature of contemporary suburbia . . . yet Dutton has found her own perspective on the subject, and a formal balance between experiment and simplicity, critique and appreciation. Yes, SPRAWL heaps volumes of satire on suburbia. Here, however, suburbia is in on the joke, and returns our gaze." — Erin Becker, Make Magazine "At the heart of Danielle Dutton's SPRAWL is a lavish, endless list of domestic objects: water pitchers, sweaters, cakes on cake stands, petunias in a terra-cotta pot. Borrowing techniques from both fiction, poetry, and visual art (particularly photography), the book not only infuses each object, be it a juice glass or a paper napkin, with a Vermeeresque glow but arranges it into part of a verbal still life. The result? A fresh take on suburbia, one of reverence and skepticism." — Leigh Newman, Bookforum "Danielle Dutton's unnamed narrator stalks through yards, streets, and her own house with such sharp perception that everything she encounters—cake trays, the doorbell'ring, a dead body—becomes an object in her vast and impeccable still-life. Dutton's sentences are as taut and controlled as her narrator's mind, and a hint at what compels both ('I locate my body by grounding it against the bodies of others') betrays a fierce and feral searching. SPRAWL makes suburban landscapes thrilling again." — The Believer Book Award, Editors' Shortlist "Dutton's unnamed housewife roams sidewalks and manicured lawns like one of Benjamin's flaneurs, reminiscent of the contemporary urban walkers of Renee Gladman's stories or Gail Scott's My Paris . But this novel is like other works, and it is not—it is both unabashedly voracious in terms of literary sources and an extraordinarily original text." — Believer Magazine "In this reissue by Wave Books, poet and fiction writer Danielle Dutton observes the suburban. She walks along sprawling suburbs and considers the eeriness of its normalcy, the stillness of its imagination, with wry graceful attention." — Largehearted Boy "Imagine literally unpacking et cetera. This is what Dutton's experimental novel, SPRAWL , aspires to do. SPRAWL is a double entendre—written in single sentences with no paragraph breaks whatsoever, its prose affects a sprawling internal monologue of a female protagonist; the title also locates the novel in the suburbs, which, like et cetera, could go on forever. . . . It is an original approach to a conventional subject, a challenge to the basic ingredients of novels (setting, character development, point of view), and a reinvestigation of Victorian fascination with the inner lives of distraught, socially confined women. Dutton's rendition, because of its strict commitment to continuous run-on feels strange and new, even while echoing Molly Bloom's exasperated soliloquy at the end of Joyce's Ulysses .” — Cora