Still, she tries to contain it. The first third of the book conveys her fitful and fragmented attempts to describe and redescribe the facts of what happened. She heard one of the intruders laughing uproariously at “Mrs. Doubtfire,” the feel-good comedy her family had been watching when the men broke in. Later she heard the choral music of “Agnus Dei,” one of her family’s CDs, playing on repeat. But she knows that these particulars are “the weird, almost comical, parodic ones, not the life-threatening, not the deep marrow fear ones.”
So she tries out other forms. These include poetry (“Someone smashes a glass./Someone smash smash./Someone smash”) and a script that verges on farce (“Father jokes says he is fine but rules out watching hostage movies ever again, ha ha, a joke”). Another effort has her resorting to placeholders for most of the words: “For seven hours they XXXX and she XXXX XX XXXXXX until XX.”
LaBarge wants to put boundaries around something that is boundless and undefinable. In the weeks and months after the event, what comes closest to capturing her “deep marrow fear” is a dream she has of being in a dirty, cell-like room while people bang on the door and press their faces to the window. “I lie down on the ground with my back to the wall, so the faces cannot see me, make myself small and start counting,” she writes. “Something hot and awful crawls into my mouth and I swallow.
At first, her images and impressions are necessarily cramped and claustrophobic. Trauma is isolating; it cuts her off from others and turns her in on herself, spiraling around the same preoccupations. But soon the book begins to venture outward. “I read and read and read myself stories in order to live,” LaBarge writes, amending Joan Didion’s line about storytelling.
Reading writers like Joy Williams and Lorrie Moore, who play with ambivalence and absurdity, allows her to feel communion and connection. Her existence no longer seems so confined; it resonates with “other strands and lives and narratives unfathomable, real and not.” And it isn’t just these writers’ characters or their plots; it’s the thrum of their language, the surprising rhythms of a voice, the sly sense of humor. Their stories create “possibilities that don’t yet exist.”
“Dog Days” pursues this expansive approach, braiding memoir with criticism, psychoanalysis with poetry, fiction and even quantum physics. It’s a testament to LaBarge’s gifts as a writer that she can make even the most complex and cerebral ideas feel urgent and alive. Her interests and tastes are invitingly omnivorous: Whether considering a Joan Mitchell painting, the Christmas movie “It’s a Wonderful Life” or the phantasmagoria of David Lynch’s “Mulholland Drive,” she writes with attentiveness, curiosity and rigor.
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