Idiophone

May 1, 2018
A recursive prose-poem contemplating addiction, dance, and the need for pathbreaking art.In her latest, Fusselman (Savage Park: A Meditation on Play, Space, and Risk for Americans Who Are Nervous, Distracted, and Afraid to Die, 2015, etc.) focuses on breaking with artistic tradition, and structurally, she tries to practice what she preaches. Though she doesn't play with line breaks, she often deploys a one-sentence-per-paragraph method that gives a poetic aura to her observations--e.g., "Now my mother is frail. Now my mother is getting smaller. Now my mother's bed is moving and she cannot sleep." The author uses the object of the title--an instrument that sounds when struck--as a slippery metaphor for her art and being, encompassing her risk-taking as a drinker to Tchaikovsky's open-minded approach to composing The Nutcracker. The work is interspersed with imagery of mice, cockroaches, bunnies, and tiny vehicles, serving as an allegories of drinking, the author's tense relationship with her mother, and Tchaikovsky, too. Well, maybe; if it all doesn't entirely make sense, that serves her purpose just fine: "Why can't more authors just abandon their lumbering storylines halfway through and move on to something more interesting, like dancing candy?" It's not a hollow provocation: The best pieces of the work explore how The Nutcracker, now a drowsy Yuletide warhorse, was a radical creative act, inviting a rare dreamlike perspective to the stage, envisioning a blend of word and movement that, one interviewee tells Fusselman, died at the hands of the modernists. The author's layering of her thematic ideas gives the book the feel of a mood piece--like a Steve Reich composition where riffs phase in and out--which makes it a pleasure on a sensual level. However, because she never lingers long on any one idea, readers may feel that there is much more to be said about motherhood, alcoholism, art, and physicality than is being delivered.A curious and lyrical study that touches on many important ideas, but often only glancingly.

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Starred review from June 18, 2018
“How bold is a work of art that doesn’t tie it all up neatly at the end—that does something, abandons it, and moves on to something better?” asks Fusselman (Savage Park) of Tchaikovsky’s ballet The Nutcracker at the beginning of this energetic and poem-like essay. Exploring different aspects of the classic holiday ballet, Fusselman bounds with great dexterity from theme to theme—covering topics including addiction, motherhood, gender, and art—until she has transformed the traditional essay into something far wilder and more alive. “It is so unbelievably easy for one world to turn into another,” Fusselman observes while on a backstage tour of The Nutcracker at Lincoln Center as she watches the stagehands take down the set. “I am in this world, but sometimes I feel other ones pulling at me.” Throughout the essay she moves among worlds—the fictional setting of the ballet, her past, and Tchaikovsky’s era, among others—but she never fully situates the reader in any one setting, instead preferring the simultaneity of confusion and exploration: “I want to open the door and get out of the world./ I want to open the door and let more worlds in./ I want to be in two worlds at once.” And yet, despite the chaos this method and these desires engender, the author keeps herself, and her reader, grounded in reality: “The Nutcracker has bodies in it, and bodies always state the truth.” Like the ballet itself, the most profound resonances of this work are in its celebration of human capability and complication.