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Review by Ursula Carroll.

Coming. Apart. by Edy Poppy,
Trans. by May-Brit Akerholt. 

Dalkey Archive

85/100

Those familiar with Edy Poppy’s previous work might dip into Coming. Apart. looking for a collection of short stories that expand on the sensual, starkly personal, and direct storytelling found in Anatomy, Monotony. Coming. Apart., retains the narrative clarity and emotional honesty that set Poppy apart, but presents a marked shift in content. The shorts are visceral, intense, even disturbing at times. Poppy maintains her ability to push boundaries with ease, drawing us into seven stories about love, separation, morbid sexuality, and emotional turmoil.

Poppy returns to some familiar figures, Vår and Lou in The Last Short Story, Cyril and Ragnhild in Rain Border. By no means is this a sequel to Anatomy, Monotony; it felt more like a final ending to Anatomy, Monotony. The other five offerings in the book feature a cast that range from pathetic to fascinating to detestable. There is a unifying darkness threaded throughout the book., they are all about people – mostly men – suffering. Most of the stories deal with some kind of parting, this book is truly about her divorce. 

Like her other work, Poppy does not hesitate to be sexual, to push boundaries, or to flaunt a taboo. Coming. Apart. features sexuality as a tool to push the characters to engage in depraved behavior. It leads to alienation, isolation, and incarceration and it is much less romantic than anyone would like. I read Coming. Apart. in one sitting and could not put it down. I was drawn into the little worlds of characters, many of whom I would not wish to meet.

Dungeness is the star of the show. A forgettable man falls in love with a woman who “moves from one relationship to another and stays with whoever desires her the most”. She moves him to a boathouse in Dungeness, and things slowly unravel. A grey, unforgiving landscape sets the stage for these two unnamed characters to get closer and come apart at the seams. The woman loses interest, just like she said she would. The man grows pathetic, losing grip on his sexuality, masculinity, and himself. It is a unique read on unrequited love, this man almost changing shape throughout the course of the relationship. He is at times aggressive, sympathetic, unremarkable, horny, repellant, pitiful. He is like the tide that ebbs and flows over the course of the story. The setting undergirds this with melancholy as the English seaside in the off season offers very little reprieve for the characters and readers alike.

Poppy has mentioned in interviews that she feels that male pain is underrepresented in literature, and wanted to have room to explore it. There is plenty of room in literature for women to suffer, to be sad, to be betrayed. Thousands and thousands of pages have been dedicated to exploring our feelings when we experience hardship. Men must grin and bear it and remain stoic in the face of hardship. It is not manly to cry, it is not manly to panic, it is not manly to be anxious. Anger is acceptable. Anything else must be quashed, shoved down, and left to fester. Writing men who experience a full range of emotions is feminist writing.

Men are conditioned from a very young age to repress their emotions, surely a product of the patriarchy. If men are unemotional and ‘level headed’, then we emotive women must be histrionic and unreliable. If men are required to remain unemotional to succeed, they have no choice but to disengage with their feelings. No expression can be permitted. This is by design; women are to handle the care needs of a household while men see to the practical, physical needs. No time for them to be faffing about with frivolous emotions. One google search for ‘male emotional repression’ yields hundreds of results for papers about toxic masculinity, for barriers to mental health care, and the dangers of suppression. If you’re feeling alone and dangerously suppressed please call the suicide hotline at 988.

It does not have to be like this. Writers like Poppy give a wide berth for fictional — and sometimes nonfictional — men to feel. These men are not relegated to just getting angry. At times they feel helpless, at times they feel ennui, at times hopeless, uncomfortable, lost, sad. By giving these men room to feel deeply, Poppy once again is shirking traditional patriarchal standards. These characters have the nuance that is within us all but only some of us are permitted to express. While the shorts in Coming. Apart. are about love gone south, the emotional reality in the stories are something deeper. They are an exploration into a slightly different world, one where men can express themselves freely.

FFO: A Good Man Is Hard To Find, The Smiths, The Magnetic Fields, Notes From The Underground

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