'Vertigo' by Joanna Walsh

I first read Joanna Walsh in Hotel, in which she recounts her experiences as a hotel reviewer at a time when her marriage was falling apart. The movement in that book is from the particular to the personal to the theoretical, and Walsh succeeded in picking large enough holes in what at first seems like continuous thought to fall through, and to leave us on the brink with a feeling of vertigo. In Vertigo, a collection of short short stories, vignettes almost, Walsh reverses the current. Here the theoretical forces itself through the grille of the personal to induce the particular. The resulting text is perhaps flatter, less nuanced, than Hotel, but the stories are immediate, often pointed, and filled with sharply selected details which puncture, and thus reveal the emptiness of, the characters and situations her protagonist(s) encounters. When all that is left are the ordinary particulars of everyday life, and these particulars shrug off any ‘meaning’ draped over them, what is there to suppress the panic that arises when we question our relationship to those particulars?

May 2016