Book Review: Silence & Song by Melanie Rae Thon

Silence & Song
Stories by Melanie Rae Thon
Fiction Collective 2, September 2015
ISBN-13: 978-1573660532
$16.95; 160pp.
Reviewed by Phillip Garland

In Silence & Song, Melanie Rae Thon offers an expertly crafted meditation on the utility of language in an era marked by an unremitting stream of tragedies. Her timely book moves nimbly between dying immigrants lost in the desert, the poaching of mature saguaros, a senseless murder, the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone, a wild, wandering bear, and other characters. With an expansive scope, Thon negates distinctions between public and private trauma. Instead, she places her disparate subjects within a cosmos irreparably damaged through human violence.

Throughout this lyric essay, presented as a diptych with a brief interlude, Thon demonstrates the difficulty of establishing perspective among disorder. Thon weaves in language from an AP wire story to describe the senseless murder of a good samaritan attempting to help a troubled boy. In a neat narrative trick, a character rewinds and fast-forwards through a surveillance tape that documents a convenience store murder committed by her brother. Still, such appeals to narrative objectivity only serve to further conceal, obstruct, and confound our understanding of tragedy.

Silence & Song wrestles with the failure of language. Repeatedly, we find ourselves in a position where, as Thon simply puts, “words don’t work.” Following his son’s crime, a grief-stricken father wanders aimlessly through a neighborhood, only to be collected by a wife and daughter quickly sliding from his memory. He sits quietly in the car. He “can’t find the words, can’t find the order.” Our senses are equally deadened to the approaching destruction. Thon writes, “Imagine a song too sweet, vibrations of a black hole whirling in space, shredding stars that come too close, humming through time (swallowing light, swallowing color), tuned to B flat, fifty-seven octaves too low for any human being to hear it.”

Despite these barriers, Thon offers up the possibility of true understanding through an intense scrutiny of human violence. Whereas language may mystify, our bodies reveal the truth. Thon crafts mesmerizing, unforgettable images of this truth-telling violence. A girl watches her brother remove a rib from his chest after a car accident. A dying man vomits blood; his cousin drinks it to survive. It is through these images, though, that Thon offers a way out of unknowing, to exigence and, one hopes, action.

In “Vanishings,” the graphic imagery overwhelms and eventually obscures the tragedy of dying migrants. The latter section, “requiem: home: and the rain, after,” offers a more complex, emotionally rich narrative involving the dissolution of a family in the aftermath of a Seattle murder set against the cleanup of radioactive material in Chernobyl. The contact point between these narrative strands creates a charged, compelling argument against deterioration.

In the ever-present void and lack of cosmic center in Silence & Song, Thon navigates through time and space as if they were just words. Past and present are joined through grief. Continuously, there remains an opportunity to explain, communicate, and share meaning. One character, with a father long dead, is still driven by this desire: “Still I ran home to tell, to bring him back, to show him.” Silence & Song thus provides both a startling inquiry into and assault on the inexpressible.

Phillip Garland’s fiction has appeared in Parcel, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, and redlightbulbs, among others. He hails from Tennessee and lives in Chicago.