Lauren Fairbanks

Sister Carrie is a first novel by a woman writer possessing such an original voice and slashing, surrealistic wit that she is sure to take her place at the forefront of cutting-edge fiction writers. Carrie Meeber leaves her stifling Florida home for Chicago, where she enters the related fields of advertising and prostitution. As an unflappable narrator makes inquiries into her bizarre life, a cartoonish, hyperkinetic, blaring street world envelops the reader. Depraved characters parade themselves and their crass literary leanings; many keep journals, out of which Carrie is revealed with stylistic pyrotechnics. Fairbanks's scrappy, fantastic, debauched characters reveal themselves as well in hot rapid monologue and dialogue. There is something of Kathy Acker in Sister Carrie, something of Ronald Firbank, William Burroughs, Mark Leyner perhaps, even the Joyce of Finnegans Wake. (And Theodore Dreiser's Sister Carrie? revamped, accessorized, given riot grrrl attitude). But it is finally a tour de force from a young woman writer with a voice all her own and a sardonic world-view perfect for the irony-clad nineties.

Nothing is pure or sacred in "Muzzle Thyself." If it hasn't rubbed up against something or isn't sweating, it's of little concern to Lauren Fairbanks. Literary fragments, "found materials," are organized in such a way as to appear unliterary. The narrative line breaks with authorial intrusion and other modes of interruption. Most poems end with a "slammed door" or a punchline. "Muzzle Thyself" is not lofty or nice, but it has juice. It's a created world, a world reflecting one mind. The creation is complexly unrealistic, filled with humor, rubbish, and ambiguous information.