Sea, Poison

Beilin’s exhilarating second novel (after Revenge of the Scapegoat) portrays a writer’s struggle to progress with her work after eye surgery. Philadelphian Cumin Baleen, seeking a prescription for hydroxychloroquine to treat her autoimmune condition, is first required to get an eye test, where the ophthalmologist warns her that she’s in danger of sudden blindness if she doesn’t get laser surgery. After the procedure, Cumin’s life spirals: her boyfriend breaks up with her and she experiences cognitive issues, including an inability to write sentences with “more than one clause,” which causes her to stall on her novel in progress about gynecological malpractice. As Cumin attempts personal and artistic recovery, Beilin employs a host of narrative tricks to reflect her unsettled state, including sudden time shifts, a dose of metafiction, and Ouilpian constraints such as Cumin’s rewriting of a passage from Shusaku Endo’s novel The Sea and Poison without using any of the letters from the word uterus. Above all its tricks, this rewarding and uncompromising novel is distinguished by its deliriously wild writing (the moon is described as “bright as a hexed white plate”; the toilet in Cumin’s new apartment is “a little bad. Its flush was a show flush, everything spun in an unswallowing circle”). It’s impossible not to be swept up in Beilin’s wake. (Oct.)