Dog Days

Critic and essayist LaBarge debuts with a singular mix of memoir and criticism exploring the futility of language and narrative in the aftermath of trauma. In 2009, 25-year-old LaBarge, her parents, and sister were vacationing on an island in the Caribbean when six men entered their rental home with guns and knives, ransacked the house, and held them hostage for eight hours. They survived, but the random attack fractured LaBarge’s sense of time and self. She quickly learned people don’t want to hear the details but merely “the good story,” the abbreviated version that doesn’t make anyone too uneasy. Adequately describing such an event is impossible anyway, she writes: “As you speak the story becomes something else and the reality falls away to a place more horrible, less utterable.” She turns to books and films to understand her experience, learning from Joan Didion’s memoirs on grief that magical thinking—the act of finding signals and signs in everyday life—is a form of survival. In It’s a Wonderful Life and A Matter of Life and Death, she finds characters attempting to “reintegrate into normal society after a brush with fate.” Poignant textual interpretations combine with rigorous analyses of psychology and philosophy to reveal the unrelenting pull of the past. It’s an evocative quest to find meaning in the inexplicable. (May)