Carla Bradsher-Fredrick’s novel Hands and Straight Lines creates a calm yet unsettling zone of ambivalence that reconfigures the traditional bildungsroman into a mysterious meditation on adulthood and the good life.
LitStack is excited to bring you Lewis Buzbee’s review of Hands and Straight Lines, a debut novel written by Carla Bradsher-Fredrick.
In This LitStack Review of Hands and Straight Lines
Sensual Details Envelop Your Attention in
Hands and Straight Lines
Belt Buckles and the Hagia Sophia
The critic George Garrett, writing of Faulkner’s Snopes trilogy, makes this important claim: “Faulkner is not, not even at his most complex, ‘Hard’ to read, but he insistently invited the reader to a deeper engagement in the experience of the story.” And this is true of the great Modernists, Proust and Woolf (and others). They write not to impress or confound but to draw the reader to new perceptions. Proust will take seven pages to stand in the foyer before a ballroom, detailing each and every connection in what Marcel sees there. Woolf will detail the lines and curves of a flower and show that flower over time. These are not “slow” moments; in fact, the writers fill each moment to the brim.
Carla Bradsher-Fredrick works the same vein in her impressive first novel, Hands and Straight Lines. On every page, Bradsher-Fredrick slows us down to fill up our senses, to see the world in stunning new appreciation. She will spend a long paragraph detailing the design and edges of the narrator’s, Edward’s, aunt’s cut-glass vase, or on the exact construction of a fast-food ashtray. Or the intricacies of a belt buckle, or the interior dome of the Hagia Sofia. For Bradsher-Fredrick, everything is sacred and worthy of our attention.
Connecting to the World
But what’s striking in this attention to detail is that it is not, in any way, the writer showing off, or some other variety of literary indulgence. The attention is rooted clearly in Edward’s innate sensibility. A sensitive child, with an early compulsion to draw, he is, at the age of four, already breaking down the world into shapes. In trying to draw hands, he discovers curves, their fluidity; he also discovers a dislike for straight lines, as they work against the curvilinear shapes that comfort him. Bradsher-Fredrick’s deeply plumbed details always portray the emotions of the character in that moment: not just the world, but the character connected to the world.
Here, Edward is taking a textbook out of his high school locker:
I lost resolve to study, not because the book reminded me of its difficult subject, but because the hardback book’s stubbed corners touched something in me. The book’s corners looked soft. The book’s broken corners spread, showing the hard binding’s cardboard as an inner softness.
Here, his lover’s bathrobe:
The plaid’s pattern, then, caught my attention. The robe looked lax, softly overlapped, softly tied around his body. His underlying clothing and his slippers also, like his robe, looked loosely uninsistent, utter lacking in stringency.
These are brief examples. The bathrobe dissection goes on for two pages, but never without insight or wonder. Bradsher-Fredrick’s clear and rhythmic prose is an incantation, drawing the reader deeper into the world, and we happily fall under her spell, eagerly awaiting each new moment of intense focus.
A Happy Ending
But of course, there is a story, and while a common one, it is not inconsequential: a coming-of-age tale, a bildungsroman. We follow Edward from his childhood to his early 20s. Growing up in a small college town, in a conservative, though kindly, family, Edward makes his way to the college’s MFA program, where he meets an older professor twenty years his senior, and they instantly become lovers.
Such a story as Hands and Straight Lines could have been mired down in cliché. The parents could have been brutal or otherwise horrible; here they are merely a bit stiff and aloof at times. The older professor, Lawrence, well, there’s a trope that invites many bad takes, but Edward and Lawrence are genuinely, and sweetly, in love with each other (without the relationship becoming sentimentally portrayed). The book’s climax is the wedding of these two, and a happy one it is. While not avoiding the true dramas of? Edward’s life, Bradsher-Fredrick gives us a portrait of a life that feels completely authentic. A happy ending! Imagine that.
A Coming of Age
As they prepare to marry, Edward gives Lawrence the gift of a Japanese folding fan. The tension between lines and curves that infiltrates the novel is, in this fan, reconciled. Edward has come of age.
…I stared at the fan’s painted presentation. I appreciated the visual balance of the composition, the round shape of the flower dense with small petals—a China aster, I learned later—and the straight shape of the knife. The painting looked airy and open around those elements placed around a vacant center. The rounded, illusorily almost spherical flower with its many sinking shades of pink…the flower and the comparatively muddily-painted knife with its slightly curved, almost-rectangular blade…
Hands and Straight Lines weaves these two threads seamlessly—the details and the life—and creates a compelling, joyous, and deeply moving novel. Bradsher-Fredrick may have borrowed—stolen?—from the great Modernist novels of the early 20th century, but she has created a wholly original vision.
~ Lewis Buzbee
About Carla Bradsher-Fredrick, Author of Hands and Straight Lines
Carla Bradsher-Fredrick grew up in Oklahoma, where she was devoted to the equestrian sport of show jumping. After having lived in France and Turkey, she graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Grinnell College and earned an MA in art history from the University of Michigan. There, she also fulfilled the requirements for a PhD in art history except for the writing of a dissertation. She and her husband lived for many years in Saudi Arabia and in Arlington, Virginia, before moving to the Portland, Oregon area. Hands and Straight Lines is her first book.
You can find Carla Bradsher-Fredrick on Facebook, and on Poets & Writers.
Source: Publisher Tailwinds Press
Publisher: Tailwinds Press Enterprises LLC
ISBN: 9798988690351
Pub date: 12/15/2023
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About Lewis Buzbee, the Reviewer of Hands and Straight Lines
Lewis Buzbee is the author of The Yellow-Lighted Bookshop, 3 award-winning novels for younger readers, and several others. His newest novel, Diver, is available wherever books are sold.
Other LitStack Resources
Be sure and look at our other LitStack Reviews for our recommendations on books you should read, including reviews by Lewis Buzbee, Lauren Alwan, Allie Coker, Rylie Fong, and Sharon Browning.
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