REVIEW: On Susan Steinberg's Machine

by Franny Marzuki

Machine by Susan Steinberg (via Graywolf Press)

Obsession is at the core of Susan Steinberg’s first novel Machine. The obsession with a drowned girl; with violence; with power; with bodies; with souls; with shadows; obsession with the day the sun will explode. All of these obsessions are channeled through the nameless main character following the events of one summer where her entire world is changed. Throughout the novel, our main character tries to reconcile the drowning of a local girl, her brother’s possible involvement, his fall into addiction, her father’s affair, her mother’s weakness, and the deterioration of her family. This is a story about trauma and the ways we process it, how power dynamics can mold our identity and our relationship with others, and how growing up is about discovering the falsehoods our parents fed us in youth. 

The author Susan Steinberg was the Nonfiction Writing Program’s Bedell Distinguished Visiting Professor of 2018-2019. She spent last spring semester leading a seminar for the NWP graduate students about literary excess. Anyone who has read Machine would immediately see the irony in this concept. Steinberg herself writes with deliberate economy, breaking down language to its most pure. Words will repeat frequently but leave different impressions on the page every time they return. Take for example the sequence of “the weight of the body; the weight on the body; the weight of the water pressing down” (78) and how the word “weight” moves from the mundane, to the sexual, to the violent. Steinberg’s brevity is also in the fact that the characters aren’t given names, referred to only by their relation to the narrator—mother, father, brother, “the girl who drowned” (110). Not even the location is specified, only given shape by the experiences the narrator has while there. Steinberg would argue she does this lack of naming simply because she’s “bad at naming things,” however, this adds a distinct mood to the novel. It is one of uncomfortable familiarity: knowing so intimately about these characters’ lives but not given permission to learn their names. The narrator does not name those around her because she doesn’t deem them as important as details like the drowned girl having eyes that were slightly different sizes or that her father thinks a loon bird’s call sounds like women screaming. 

This economy of language is only part of Steinberg’s restraint as her approach to the structural forms of each chapter is also deliberate and contained. Chapters are written in long sentences connected only with semicolons, there are moments resembling verse, and paragraphs that mimic hanging indents making them read as literary MLA with prose that readers could hold between their fingers. Every chapter subtracts something from traditional form—taking away periods, capitalization, paragraphs—either speeding up or slowing down the narrator’s voice and planting the reader firmly within her perspective, moment to moment.  

Many people were in attendance at Steinberg's reading on October 11th, with her former students making comments about being here purely for the reception cheese and the audience laughing at anecdotes about vanity license plates. During the Q&A section, everyone found themselves falling for Steinberg’s wit as she defended herself as not a poet—though many chapters in her novel may read otherwise—and her work as never essays—because what even is an essay nowadays? The overall light-hearted nature seemed in direct contrast with the content of the book. Steinberg read from a chapter with one of the more overtly violent scenes in the entire novel—where the family runs over a dog that was sleeping in the street. But it was this dissonance that made the reading mimic the harsh, textured edges of Machine.  

Though obsession rests at the core of this book, a resolution to these obsessions is not something with which this narrative is concerned. The narrator admits to the readers that she’s been “trying to tell just one story for nearly [her] entire life” (149). The novel ends with the haunting phrase “still trying” (149) as the narrator reveals this one last obsession. Obsessions remain cyclical in Machine, something the narrator will always return to, mirroring the seven repeating titles of the chapters: Lairs, Animals, Ghosts, Killers, Saviors, Stars, Machines.