is/was, Jenny Sampirisi

Jenny Sampirisi’s is/was is disorienting and disquieting from the opening lines: “It’s the confusion of the body that makes this unbearable.  It’s that each seemingly separate pain is a component of the same pain.”  Compiled into numbered fragments and files, Sampirisi’s first novel presents the reader with incidents of pain and loss: a lost little girl, a hysterectomy, a cut palm, troubled marriages.

The lives and losses of the characters in is/was are tangled around the disappearance of eight-year-old Abigail Wren.  Sampirisi does not unravel this mystery—rather, she concentrates on one complicated family.  Something has indeed gone missing from the Fitch family— Sampirisi depicts Fitch family interactions as painful and strained.  Eva, recovering from a surgery and obsessed with the case of Abigail Wren, finds living in her own body and the tasks of motherhood increasingly challenging.  Sampirisi piercingly describes, “Eva imagines her body as vegetative, woody, and damp, or as menacing and unformed.” Roland (Eva’s husband) often forgets words, can’t concentrate on conversations with his family, and confesses to feeling “robotic.”  The Fitch children seem equally confused–<m>Andrew, an awkwardly hormonal teen is described as “fully absent,” and Isabel, their precocious daughter mimics her mother’s physical pain left over from the surgery.

Sampirisi is also a poet, and her power over the short line is evident in her narration. Her lines are terse, choppy, and often chilling, especially when recounting news about Abigail.  Between scenes of action, Sampirisi splices words that seem borrowed from headlines or police reports.  One reads, “female. sum of constituent elements or parts. is on her back,” while another lists, “beige turtleneck sweater/…blouse with buttons missing.”  The alienated characters of is/was initially prevented me from being swept up in the story, but the novel truly gains momentum after the first few sections.  Invasive, arresting, and alarming, Sampirisi’s novel documents individuals linked by loss.