Ire Land (a Faery Tale) by Elisabeth Sheffield (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Ire Land (a Faery Tale) by Elisabeth Sheffield Jane Rosenberg LaForge (bio) IRE LAND (A FAERY TALE) Elisabeth Sheffield Spuyten Duyvil https://www.spuytenduyvil.net/ire-land.html 188 pages; Print, $18.00 Call it dumbing down, appealing to the lowest common denominator, or Disneyfication. For generations of American children, the land of enchantment has long since been drained of its subtleties, as the traditions of the Brothers Grimm and Charles Perrault, among others, have been sanitized for a querulous mass market. In technicolor, these tales of transformation—from rags to riches, from man to mammal and back again, from fish woman to silenced female—become mere recollections of a moral education. The protagonist must learn a lesson of humility or selflessness to earn the psychic or fiscal reward that is their due. The narrator of Elisabeth Sheffield's new novel, Ire Land (a Faery Tale), confronts this lack of nuance head-on during a ménage à trois in an Upstate New York hotel room. Having adjourned to the "woodland paradise" suite after a conference, the women's studies professor Sandra Dorn and her sex partners of the moment find themselves haunted by this essentially American reinvention: "Maybe there was something provoking about that wallpaper with its Disneyfied forest scene, as if there cartoon critters peering through the trees," she says while divining what inspired the "antic play of moist cavities and thrusting appendages" that lasted for three days, until the waterbed broke. [End Page 72] Despite the fervency of her efforts, Dorn fails on this occasion, and others, to restore what has been lost by the homogenization of earthy folklore into an industry exercising a fraught cultural dominance. Whether she ever gets beyond the forces arrayed against her, or if the price she pays trying is too steep, will likely make for a diverting discussion on how any human being, particularly a woman of a certain age, can make meaning out of their life in the postmodern era. In the meantime, Sheffield delivers a frequently hilarious and finally heartbreaking dive into contested spaces in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Much of this romp, which begins in western Colorado, jumps to New York City and parts north, and crosses back and forth into the (now) far reaches of the British Empire, centers on the female body—how it looks, or should look; who controls it, and for what purpose—but to reduce Ire Land to a story about gender is to ignore its fundamental criticism of the so-called binary world and the vicious divisions we struggle through in its wake. Though Dorn is ostensibly the novel's narrator and protagonist, Ire Land is an epistolary novel, the leavings of a daughter of Irish immigrants who has become unhoused, and possibly unhinged, as she records her final metamorphosis. She recalls beginning her adult life as a "big ripe pimple of potential" and is alternately referred to as a "hag," a "cutting edge bitch," and a "crone" by herself and others. Her tale of woe elicits spare replies from her correspondent, Madmaeve17@gmail.com, the keeper of a blog and member of a British online support group for victims of domestic violence. The commentary on these emails, presumably the work of one of Dorn's colleagues at her last teaching position, is not the standard caution against the unreliable narration that lies ahead, but it is frequently witty and imbued with the same sardonic tone that Dorn applies to everyone, including herself: "We have left out the quotations in the dialogue," one such note explains, because the edit "seem[s] to 'speak' to Sandra's inability to recognize any external reality outside herself. Does/did anyone else ever exist for her, beyond being a means to fulfilling her own needs and desires?" The audience for these papers is Dorn's estranged daughter, McKewan Kambi, or Kew, for short. Here rests the reason for the book's puzzle of a structure, which undergirds its moral—if the messages at the novel's conclusion can be categorized as such. In recalling the conference that led to the hotel [End Page 73] bacchanal, Dorn says the meeting had something...