Book Review: Bird by Noy Holland

Bird
Fiction by Noy Holland
Counterpoint, November 2015
ISBN-13: 978-1619025646
$24.00, 176 pp.
Reviewed by Siel Ju

How long is a day, an hour, a moment? In Noy Holland’s first novel, Bird, time warps and stretches to contain a life – or really, two lives, one of a distant and reckless youth, the other of a quiet, suburban motherhood – within a single day.

The day looks unremarkable from the outside. Bird, a married, stay-at-home mother of two, takes care of her kids and household chores, occasionally stopping to chat on the phone with her friend, Suzie. But Bird’s day of the mind is a long torment of memories. Mostly, Bird obsesses about her first love, Mickey, and the exhilarating perils they shared, from their violent lovemaking and lawless, drug-fueled thrills at the beginning, to the terrifying self-mutilation and psychosis at the end.

Now married 12 years, Bird’s life has little resemblance to her past wildness. She is safe, clean, well-fed. Her life predictable. Yet the desires of Bird’s youth live on, and her ruminations continue. Bird’s memories seem to have an addictive push-pull effect on her, reflected in Bird’s conversations with Suzie. The two women call each other constantly, even as they irritate, even taunt, each other. In fact, we discover Suzie has betrayed Bird terribly in the past. Despite all that, Suzie is Bird’s link to her old memories, to Mickey, and Bird can’t let go. Bird doesn’t want to stop asking what if: “She misses lives she has never lived – days issued out of the future, hours that will never be.”

As in Holland’s short stories, Bird’s tone is poetic and finely wrought. Even in Bird’s present time, the story has a hallucinatory, almost apocalyptic feel, as if some sharp, secret danger lurks in suburbia’s shadows. That danger, for Bird, is the perilous journey through her own recollections, which by the end of the novel, literally fell her: “She is ash and dazzled, rapt – gone to her knees in pieces in the wind of a passing world.” Through its many layered stories, Bird reveals the rich multitude of lives a mind can contain.

Siel Ju’s stories and poems have appeared in Denver Quarterly, The Missouri Review (Poem of the Week), ZYZZYVA, The Los Angeles Review, LIT, and other places. She is the author of two poetry chapbooks: Feelings Are Chemicals in Transit from Dancing Girl Press and Might Club from Horse Less Press. She edits the literary zine Flash Flash Click. More of her work can be found at sielju.com.