The Orange Suitcase by Joseph Riippi

Reviewed by Tracy O’Neill

The Orange Suitcase: Stories by Joseph Riippi
© 2011, Ampersand Books
92 Pages, Paperback

Try to categorize Joseph Riippi’s second book— is it a novel? Is it a story? Is it one of those MFA copout novel-in-stories novels?— and you’re asking in the wrong direction. This is a question for marketers and sales people. The question for readers is, should I read it? And the answer is yes, as long as you aren’t looking for a big old epic novel with lengthy descriptions of kitchens, rising action, and a single climax bursting in a grand example of cause and effect. The answer is yes, as long as you’re willing to read the book the way a person remembers: in bright increments.

Divided into several short sections— which depending on who you ask could be possibly stories, possibly vignettes, possibly prose poems—the book is a series of “somethings.” There are “Something About Borges and the Blind in Chelsea,” “Something About Ipek (On Valentine’s Day),” and “Something About Someone Else’s Poem,” to name just a few of the thirty-six. Some of these somethings are brief scenes, others dreams. The timeline remains muddy, presumably because these spare gems are meant to be understood as memories, though a temporal or physical location is not established in the beginning to explicitly ground them as such. Those who appreciate The Orange Suitcase will realize that these distilled memories are definitively “somethings,” not “anythings” however. As nonlinear as their chronology might be, they are not helter-skelter collected between covers; these are selected illuminations of love, family, art, and loss that loop back on each other through motifs.

In the childhood memory “Something About a Nail,” the narrator’s grandfather drives a nail into a tree with his bare hands, and this image returns when in “Something About The Rest” it is said that “grandfather used to say he built this house with his bare hands.” When the grandfather nails the tree, he says, “My hands are like the Finns. My hands are like Russian tanks.” So when the narrator’s grandmother tells him as an adult that his great uncle, a dead soldier, fought the Russians in Finland, we are suddenly sent backwards to grapple with the implications of the grandfather’s metaphor. By separating the two experiences into two distinct narratives, Riippi forces us into the position of the narrator; we must comb the evidence of his memories with him to understand the connection between the two somethings.

Other somethings such as “Something About Borges and the Blind in Chelsea” deal with the ironies of representation. As the narrator watches a blind man, he thinks, “I would like to know what a Borges story feels like. I’d like to know what the word goosebumps feels like.” In this musing on how the blind might represent physically what aren’t tangible— words and fiction— we sense an echo of “Something About Marriage, Part 1,” in which the narrator ponders the proper metaphor for he and his bride. As she pours a pitcher of water into the ocean, he wonders if they are the pitcher, the water, or the ocean, knowing that the expanse of their hearts cannot be constrained to a single signifier. Here thematic rhyming lends a sense of cohesion to the seemingly disparate, and we see lovingly actualized the maxim that is “Something About Poetry”:

A structure that will not hold water

…………Is not,

and should never be confused with,

………………….a waterfall.

Art, or the artistic life, figures prominently in “Something About Drinking in Baton Rouge,” as the narrator tells the story of another writer and him drinking and smoking in a hotel room. The narrator drinks but has given up smoking, while the other writer smokes but refuses to drink because he has quit alcohol. With the time lapsed since the memory, the narrator has gained the knowledge that the recovering alcoholic has since had to go back to rehab, which lends a sad film to their spirited quips about how despite the fact that Richard Hugo said the best advice he ever got from writers was to stop drinking, the best poems he wrote were about bars. This layering of irony is exemplary of the narrative logic in The Orange Suitcase, and much of the pleasure of reading the book derives from these glimpses of the strange echoes that ring through memories. As slim a volume as The Orange Suitcase is, certain sections do not quite seem to build toward the book’s larger goals, however. In particular the connections between the narrator’s dating life and his family history feel unrealized, and a couple sections like “Something About a Promise,” though a pleasure to read, simply do not belong.

As The Orange Suitcase draws to a close, a conversation between the narrator and his wife culminates with the sentence, “Art is defined by its contradictions.” Of course contradictions are what Riippi has been writing about all along, and if contradictions define art, The Orange Suitcase is indeed art. Both narrative and lyric, thematically climactic though lacking a larger story arc, this may be a small book, but it is written with so much heart.
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Tracy O’Neill is a freelance writer living in Brooklyn. She writes for publications such as The L Magazine and Publishers Weekly, and her fiction will appear in an upcoming issue of The Center for Fiction’s literary journal The Literarian.