Noy Holland's Bird

Already a sui generis master of the sentence-driven short story, Noy Holland's first (and currently only) novel extends her reach into the disorienting depths of feral domesticity

This post originally appeared on my website in Jan 2020.

Noy Holland has an uncanny ability to write about almost anything and make it seem elemental. Like many from the Lish school (and this novel is dedicated “For Gordon”), her sentences generate their weight often from the incidental, the fragmentary aspects of existence, to the point that telling a story is less a plot and more a way of speaking, of connecting language in surprising manners to dig in far beyond the surface of the event.

As someone who has read a lot of Lish-influenced work over the years, I’ll admit to having finally acquired a fatigue for his approach. Sure, sentences are great, and can do anything at any given time, but sometimes the musicality and whimsicalness of the stance—seen sometimes nowhere better as capable of flimsiness in Lish’s own writing—feel as if you wish it’d shut up with babbling off of combined vowel sounds and slippery verbiage and just actually say something sometime, or even just let the “magic of the sentence” thing take a pill and move to the sidelines as we allow some other aspects of narration to have effect. We get it, your sentences are beautiful, but sometimes they feel like being strung up to dry like laundry in fat sunlight. Fine, it flows, it’s uncanny, it bristles and pops a bit, ok.

Holland, though, isn’t one of those who has a problem with ending up with work that falls short of its own grandiosity of diction. She is an incredible stylist, for sure, and one that fearlessly enables her texts to sting not only from the sound of them, but from what rises up beneath; like a platform we are being lured to cross, and nevermind the cracking, the the fire in our hearts about to really burn us, the ambient light that makes it hard to look quite straight ahead, to see.