Cartwheeling Truth

A young woman sits on a bus. Her name is Vera Cartwheel—the cartwheeling truth—but we won’t know that until page five of the novel we’re reading, Marguerite Young’s Miss MacIntosh, My Darling. Soon after, we will forget it. We will lose and find our narrator’s name repeatedly, along with many other names, in this great storm of words—about twelve hundred pages’ worth, in the forthcoming reissue by Dalkey Archive Press—that follow, a torrent of affirmations and denials that can posit the same character as at once dead and alive, imaginary and real, commonsensical and delusional. Names aren’t really the point of this book, anyway. Things have a tendency to crawl away from them.