Another Governess / The Least Blacksmith: A Diptych

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What marks this severe book is an astounding level of discipline in the prose. Joanna Ruocco, a writer of stark effects, seems to have squeezed her sentences so tightly they are sheer muscle. Just read a few. They are simple, strict, rarely veering from the basic structure you might encounter in a children's book. I thought of the Dick and Jane books, the sing-song cadence of simple factual lines. But this is no children's book. What starts out innocently almost always veers into strangeness or violence. Ruocco does something wonderful here. She builds writing sentence by sentence until, by force of logic, she achieves a genuine discomfort. This is a literary discomfort, borne of that same discipline in the prose. One senses that perhaps Ruocco worked from a deliberately limited vocabulary. Certain words appear with regularity: cakes, glass, fluid, lump, glue, blood, dogs, moat, nits, butcher. She shuffles these words while remaining obedient to her narrative — and there is a beguiling, grisly, poignant narrative here (actually, there are many) — and somehow, through this deliberate practice, meaning grows, a world blooms, a story emerges. It's part fairy tale, part gothic, part domestic, and wholly its own odd species of writing. Listen:

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