Book Review: Slab By Selah Saterstrom

Slab
A Novel by Selah Saterstrom
Coffee House Press, August 2015
ISBN-13: 978-1566893954
$16.95; 224 pp.
Reviewed by Pedro Ponce

Some novels are built; others are excavated. In her latest novel, Slab, Selah Saterstrom confirms her status as one of America’s premier narrative archaeologists. This title—which, to this reviewer’s knowledge comes with no prize money or federal imprimatur (yet)—is as much formal as it is thematic. In lieu of scenes, Saterstrom gives us moments recovered from the detritus of memory and master narratives, sifted and examined until they reveal their ambivalent history. Slab, which takes the overarching form of a play script, begins with self-styled performance artist Tiger reflecting on her life and career to a fictionalized Barbara Walters. In the course of their interview, Tiger reveals that she grew up on the former plantation estate of Little Harpe, one of the first documented serial killers in U.S. territory: “Bolted into the tree where my grandfather installed a tire swing for children, a historical plaque: LITTLE HARPE HANGED HERE. After a posse hung him in 1804, they chopped off his head and stuck it on a pole as a warning in what we considered the front yard […].”  In the stratified time of Saterstrom’s fictions, the past is always present.

The future isn’t far behind. Any fiction that attempts to keep pace with the American homeland of today will inevitably read like a dystopia. Tiger works as an exotic dancer and has the chance to entertain troops “[f]ighting Leader’s war.” Potable water, in Tiger’s world, is a precious commodity: “Here is a bucket. There: a gunking hunk, frayed at the edges like torn meat. Many flat screens, floating. There are so many things in the water.” She recalls her stint as Miss Mississippi, when she worked to promote gun safety “by visiting with schoolchildren across the state and showing them a darling animation featuring Tommy the Gun, who explains to children what to do if they see a gun, which includes not touching it and telling an adult.”  Tiger’s America feels at once timeless and ripped from the headlines.

The novel’s second act introduces Preacher, who learns the secrets of scripture after an accident leaves him incapacitated. Preacher believes that scriptural text is itself a code that must be deciphered in order to understand its actual message. He explains his exegetical theory to Mother Harriet, who oversees his recovery after he leaves the hospital: “he saw the way words worked, how each word had a multi-blooming gut that revealed itself as a mass of tendrils reaching down, very deep, as if through the ocean itself, layer by dark layer, until these tendrils exploded into a root ball of ultimate convergence, a holy notion.” The convergence of Tiger’s story with Preacher’s (prefigured in the novel’s subtitle, “On That Hallelujah Day When Tiger & Preacher Meet) is only one of Slab’s many revelations. Not the least of these is the power of storytelling to reveal and recover lost histories, as long as we’re willing to dig.

 
Pedro Ponce is the author of the novel Dreamland, forthcoming from Satellite Press.