THE GREY PLANE

Reviewed by Christopher Patrick Steffen

It would be very surprising if Shelley Jackson had never read Katherine Dunn’s Geek Love. Both novels explore protagonists with deformities, both novels use split narratives, and both novels engage small town-settings. While Jackson’s novel brings Dunn’s novel to mind, these comparisons may be slightly reaching. Jackson explored the social effects and political aspects of her novel’s conceit (that two-headed [conjoined] twins are now commonplace in society, the effect of nuclear radiation), whereas Dunn focused more closely on the familial relationship of her protagonists and questions about societal exclusion.

Half Life follows parallel storylines concerning the conjoined twins Nora and Blanche. The chronologically earlier of the two storylines begins with the twins’ parents and conception. It explores the twins’ family through their childhood. The second storyline follows Nora (Blanche has been asleep for over a decade) through her adult life. She works in San Francisco as a phone sex operator and lives with two idiosyncratic roommates. When Nora learns that a doctor in London is performing “unity” operations (decapitating one twin’s head), she thinks she’s found a way to finally become singular.

Jackson is quite adept at exploring the complications of identity and responsibility in the hypothetical context of conjoined twins. Can you really be an individual when not even your body is yours? She also includes selections from “The Siamese Twin Reference Manual,” the scrap-book Nora constructs with everything that interests her concerning conjoined twins and her specific situation.

Although it can be difficult to follow, the novel is at its best when the two sisters wrestle for control of the narrative. Jackson’s decision to portray the twins struggling for control of the narration is well executed (hauntingly subtle, even), and I think the novel could have benefited from more of it. This being said the novel still runs a bit long and could have used some strategic editing. By the end of the work, the reader can’t help but smirk at the notion that a novel called Half Life runs probably twice as long as it should.