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The Only Good Heart by Beth Goobie
The dancing, fluttering deaf girl on the cover of Beth Goobie's short-story collection, The Only-Good Heart, is photographed by her mother, who is not deaf. April Hickox's lovely, textured photos capture the blurry borderland between people -boundaries insurmountable, some experience ineffable. A perfect choice of cover art by Beth Follett, publisher of Toronto's fledgling Pedlar Press, for a densely layered, challenging book that at times leaves the reader red and raw, clamouring for connection, yet ultimately rewards through the weaving beauty of its language.
The Only-Good Heart is ostensibly a collection of linked short stories with one protagonist, Dorene Grace Hall, but the beautifully designed dust jacket calls it a "tale," and the book does hold together loosely as a novel. In structure, I'm reminded of b.p. Nichol's poetry collection, Selected Organs: Parts of an Autobiography, which waxes eloquent on the psychological, spiritual, symbolic significance of different parts of his body, beginning with the vagina: "I never had one." So too does The Only-Good Heart divide Dorene Grace Hall into her multiplex selves. Goobie's stories peppered with firstperson points of view from several separate personalities, taken together, form a fictional biography of the "whole" Dorene Grace Hall.
Dorene's self fractures partly through cult mind control, and partly as a survival response to that control. Born into an interfamilial cult and criminal organization known as the Kin, from infancy Dorene is programmed, by means of electric shock, medical abuse and ritualized assault, to participate in utterly degrading forms of child prostitution and pornography, yet retain no memory of her experience. The Kin's "doctors," through a complex set of coded triggers, split three-year-old Dorene away from herself, creating other little girls who like to fuck their Daddy, or any daddy, or a dog, or cattle prod.
But at the same time, Dorene brings out her own little three-year-old girls who can hold in their bodies, contain each uncontainable, ineffable part of the pain and horror. I'm drawn to make the connection with Goobie's two books which precede this one: Could I Have My Body Back Now, Please?, subtitled "Body-Fictions," a sardonic,...