Skyscraper

Introduction by Jeff MannIt’s April in Appalachia, and everything’s flowering. The snowdrops and crocuses have come and gone; the Lenten roses, hyacinths, and daffodils are in full bloom. As I drive my pickup truck down back roads on the way to work, I pass the wispy white of wild sarvisberry and the pink champagne of redbuds, bright against the gray and brown of mountainsides not yet spring-redeemed with green. On the campus of Virginia Tech, I stop to snuffle the star magnolias’ fragrant white petals. They remind me of youth—not only those black-bearded students whose muscled physiques and hairy legs fill me with futile lust as they stroll pass, but my own youth, when I was not yet a sixty-two-year-old grizzled daddy-bear with a Viking-length salt-and-pepper beard, when I was still a black-bearded, hairy-legged boy yearning hungrily after other black-bearded, hairy-legged boys. In those days, an undergraduate at West Virginia University, I was brimful of intensity and desire, hankering silently after fellow students during forestry and biology field trips—to Core Arboretum, to Cheat Lake, to Coopers Rock State Forest—even then entertaining dark b**m-tinged fantasies I had yet to make reality and writing poem after poem about those hirsute, inaccessible redneck muses. Immersed as I was in both male hormones and botany courses, I thought of passion as a flower, marriage and middle age the fruit of that flower. Now, married, middle-aged, far from youthful Eros and all its often-unwise obsessions, many a fantasy long ago transformed into reality before fading into memory, I’m rereading Scott Alexander Hess’s Skyscraper, and his fiction and this flowering season have dovetailed inside my mind, reminding me of past passions long receded from this particular life. “April is the cruelest month,” says T.S. Eliot in the oft-quoted first line of The Waste Land, because this month’s burgeoning blooming forces those of us winter-numb once again to feel. Good literature does the same. Reading this novel, I’m reminded of Anne Sexton, one of my favorite poets, and how fond she was of quoting Franz Kafka: books “should serve as the ax for the frozen sea within us.” I’m reminded of the shadowy muses of my youth, men I’ve loved, pursued, bound, dominated, adored, and lost, and I’m thankful to Hess for the reminder, thankful for such a vivid depiction of perverse ardor, thankful for a word-created world still full of mystery, uncertain excitements, shattering epiphanies, and lyrical eroticism. If one could grow a star magnolia whose petals resembled black leather, you might have some arboreal equivalent of Skyscraper. Hess has given us fiction whose language and whose visuals very often approach poetry, poetry that arouses, thrills, captivates, and disturbs. Yes, the novel’s urban settings are stark, angular, manmade, and the season full of chill winds and snow flurries, yet in the central relationship—one between an architect/artist and his rough-edged muse, a deliciously written sadomasochistic connection ripe with the thrills of dominance and submission, pain grading into pleasure and back again—I find the organic world of spring: rich, rank, seething with animal cruelty, appetite, and exuberance, full of wild woodlands’ seed, root, and flower. Profound gratitude to Scott Alexander Hess, for Skyscraper has allowed me briefly to reaccess my youth, briefly to experience vicarious passions, borrowed loves and lives. I have no doubt that this dark gem of a novel will gift other readers with the same rewards. Part 1: Design