Autobiography of Red by Anne Carson

Panic jumped down on Geryon at three a.m. He stood at the window of his hotel room
Empty street below gave back nothing of self.
Cars nested along the curb on their shadows. Buildings leaned back out of the street.
Little rackety wind went by.
Moon gone. Sky shut. Night had delved deep. Somewhere (he thought) beneath
this strip of sleeping pavement
the enormous solid globe is spinning on its way--pistons thumping, lava pouring
from shelf to shelf,
evidence and time lignifying into their traces. At what point does one say of a man
that he has become unreal?

Geryon is a terrible red monster of myth, who was killed by Herakles in one of his famous labors. In Anne Carson's Autobiography of Red, he's also a young gay man, growing up with a mother who loves him but who cannot protect him from the sexual predations of his brother. Herakles--whom we know is Geryon's murderer--becomes, in Carson's telling, a charismatic young lover who will end up breaking Geryon's heart. All this is told in a "novel of verse," in a loping alternation of short and long lines that seems something like an awkward gait, perhaps the discomfortable rhythm of a young man who feels he is a monster.

Carson puts Geryon on a backpacking trip to South America, where he reconnects with Herakles in Buenos Aires, along with a kinder and more insightful man named Ancash, a Quechua-speaking Peruvian who forms a third point in this new love triangle. Together, the trio go off to Peru and the town of the flank of the volcano where Ancash is from. It's strongly suggested that Geryon's red skin makes him an associate of the volcano, perhaps even that a volcano somewhere in history or time has produced his red skin, and Carson quotes liberally from some of my favorite Emily Dickinson poems, where she uses the volcano as a metaphor for the kind of rich inner turmoil that marks the human condition. Maybe that's it; maybe Geryon wears his turmoil on the outside. Maybe we all feel we wear our turmoil on the outside from time to time. I was expecting the story to end like the myth, with the literal death by Geryon at the hands of Herakles, but the ending is much more ambiguous, with the trio stopping to witness a bakery built into the side of the volcano to use the natural heat. Geryon is slain, perhaps, but not in the way we were expecting, and not in the way that the ancient Greek Stesichorus wrote.

Honestly, I thought this was fine. I thought the slippage between the monster and the man was well-done, but not exactly all that illuminating. The doubling up between realism and myth felt to me like an attempt to make a whole out of two two-spare parts, as did the doubling up between the narrative and the poetry, neither of which felt wholly convincing or wholly successful to me. Perhaps a more patient study would reveal more; after all, we're not really acculturated for novels in verse anymore, and that Carson made a popular work out of one in our day and age really is something of a miracle.