Djuna Barnes has largely been forgotten, those who do know of her will have run up against the enigmatic Nightwood, a book I had to immediately reread to get some small sense of comprehension. It has since worked it’s magic on me, probably my third favorite novel of all-time, but rather than a third read within a few months, I grabbed Ryder, her first novel, off the shelf. It turned out to be a bit more approachable but that is hardly to say that it can be read with ease. Yet, Ryder is an absolute delight as a reading experience.

It’s rather beyond my abilities to put it into words but thankfully the Afterword entitled “The Havoc of this Nicety” Paul West shows that he does.

“Instead of plot, in whose absence she works like someone bereaved, nonetheless trying to distract herself and come up with ventriloquial recoveries of the beloved voice gone, she achieves something that few novelists writing in English have ever made much effort at. She does get her characters talking (Peacockian-Huxleian as they are), but more often she sublimes them into something else that hovers between Sarraute’s sub-conversation and Becket’s inane oratorio. She divines from the very air, the white paper, around her speakers the things they never say, the things being said “off,” the things said before, the things to be said in the future, and what counts for her is not so much the word as the tone, the tuning-in of an art of talk that reaches its consummation in the unquenchable Doctor of Nightwood.”

"Early, she discovered the principle of additiveness, meaning that she could always add something to something else, not because the first something was inadequate but because the observing or defining mind required such elbowroom.

Her writing delineates, often with mordant accuracy, but she bloats it too, just to tell us she is there, serving the cause of plenty. She is among those rare souls, the phrase-makers, to whom a phrase no one else could have dreamed up is more precious than whole sequences of action or talk. Her work is there to evince her own mind, and to overface ours.

Sometimes you have to read her with tweezers, other times with a trowel and a scoop, especially when she has let someone loose in a soliloquy. I think she sometimes thought of the novel as the supremest form of soliloquy, which is to say the novel at its closest to poetry.”

While reading Ryder I was getting the vibes of Omensetter’s Luck by William Gass, the artistry (if not the polished prose) of Nabokov, the need for very close reading like a Pynchon novel demands, and the further I went the more Rabelaisian I realized the work was, which would have clicked sooner if I had read my copy of Gargantua and Pantagruel).

Dina Barnes may very well be mv favorite author. Nightwood took some time to sink in but it’s an undoubted masterpiece. Ryder clicked immediately, partially because I knew what to expect l, but also because it’s akin to Crime and Punishment compared to Nightwood’s Karamazov.

In Ryder we get Djuna in her early raw form and it is an absolute delight.