Yet to Come by Cris Mazza
Decades before #metoo, Cal chose his punishment for going too far with a girl he was crazy about: a life-sentence with a woman he could not love, whose frequent rages, untapped spending and ruthless children were his means to distract himself from longing and regret. The girl from his past also condemned him to periodic postcards bearing no return address. Rather than increasing his despair, the postcards helped stoke the imaginary life he maintained with her, including dialogue about his plight, images of her showing up while he plays his sax in a nightclub, and even sex, the very realm that had initiated her retreat from him.
Decades before #metoo, Cal chose his punishment for going too far with a girl he was crazy about: a life-sentence with a woman he could not love, whose frequent rages, untapped spending and ruthless children were his means to distract himself from longing and regret. The girl from his past also condemned him to periodic postcards bearing no return address. Rather than increasing his despair, the postcards helped stoke the imaginary life he maintained with her, including dialogue about his plight, images of her showing up while he plays his sax in a nightclub, and even sex, the very realm that had initiated her retreat from him.
Decades before #metoo, Cal chose his punishment for going too far with a girl he was crazy about: a life-sentence with a woman he could not love, whose frequent rages, untapped spending and ruthless children were his means to distract himself from longing and regret. The girl from his past also condemned him to periodic postcards bearing no return address. Rather than increasing his despair, the postcards helped stoke the imaginary life he maintained with her, including dialogue about his plight, images of her showing up while he plays his sax in a nightclub, and even sex, the very realm that had initiated her retreat from him.
Decades before #metoo, Cal chose his punishment for going too far with a girl he was crazy about: a life-sentence with a woman he could not love, whose frequent rages, untapped spending and ruthless children were his means to distract himself from longing and regret. The girl from his past also condemned him to periodic postcards bearing no return address. Rather than increasing his despair, the postcards helped stoke the imaginary life he maintained with her, including dialogue about his plight, images of her showing up while he plays his sax in a nightclub, and even sex, the very realm that had initiated her retreat from him.
The layers of complexity in Cris Mazza’s work never cease to amaze. Yet to Come is a drama of yearning and dissatisfaction, obsession and dysfunction, love and hunger and music and the kinds of lies we tell ourselves and others, all the way down. A love story, a family saga, a narrative of “parallel perditions,” as one of the characters says, Yet to Come is a quintessentially American story, a history of the decades told in stinging dialogue and rich internal narrative, in postcards and journals and multiple layers of how we communicate, and how we can’t. The scenes from an unhappy marriage are some of the most compelling, hurtful, and true I’ve ever read. Dip in, you’ll be pulled along in a narrative that reveals itself in layers, unfolds itself subtly, lingers in the mind long after the book is closed.
—Rilla Askew, author of Fire in Beulah and Kind of Kin
The formal experimentation of the book’s various textual attacks, its graphicness, its collaged nature, and its over-the-topness. make it a kind of opera, staking a claim for a kind of super- or neo-realism, overly rich as if it were a map more detailed than the thing it represents.
—Michael Martone, author of The Moon over Wapakoneta: Fictions and Science Fictions from Indiana and Beyond, and Memoranda
Cris Mazza is a master at depicting the ways the past haunts us. In YET TO COME, Cal’s half-life of regret poignantly and at times painfully reminds us of the agency in our own lives, even in the face of closed doors. Never one to reduce complex human beings to stereotypes, Mazza also reveals here the way intimacy complicates gender dynamics beyond the easy ways we so often see portrayed in the media.
—Rob Roberge, author of More Than They Could Chew, and Drive
Yet to Come is another fine example of Cris Mazza's skill, craft, and complex take on a world that is only now catching up to her. Like watching a fireball explode over and over again on auto-repeat, reading Mazza's prose offers the experience of feeling luminous heat while looking for protective eyewear that never quite does the job. There's no protection, but there is always the hope that protection is always to be found deep inside her immensely powerful language.
—Davis Schneiderman, author of DIS, and The Exquisite Corpse: Chance and Collaboration in Surrealism’s Parlor Game
Cris Mazza has seventeen other titles of fiction and literary nonfiction including her last book, Charlatan: New and Selected Stories, covering her 20 years of authoring short fiction. Other notable titles include Something Wrong With Her, a real-time memoir; her first novel How to Leave a Country, which won the PEN/Nelson Algren Award for book-length fiction; and the critically acclaimed Is It Sexual Harassment Yet? She is a native of Southern California and director of the Program for Writers at the University of Illinois at Chicago.
Book Information:
· Paperback: 328 pages
· Binding: Perfect-Bound
· Publisher: BlazeVOX [books]
· ISBN: 978-1-60964-349-2