Reading Gregory Vincent St. Thomasino’s new novel: Suicide by Language is a continuously revelatory experience; we move through beautifully supple changes in address and lexical register, situations opening up and following myriad different implications implicit in everyday language enriching our sense of occasion and occasions. Our language carries us and lays us open in its structures and deflections. Under the changing and sometimes urbane surface, there is a keen wildness at play here. The effects are exhilarating, absorbing, addictive and often very funny as St. Thomasino lays bare the double-binds and warp in the weft of our assumptions:
She is too intellectual to have children. The biology of childbirth disgusts her. She said the whole birth and death business, why subject a loved one to that.
Such a passage might remind us of Gertrude Stein: the fast connotative crossing and blurring, the burst of vividly-expressed passion and the subtle shadow realisation there would of course be no “loved one” without the “birth and death business” (and how uncannily that seemingly nonchalant “business” rings and expands in the mind). In this novel, our preconceptions in following such writing are always illuminated and transformed. This is an artist in full and confident flow, riffing and revealing the tangents and rifts in the way we think words and word thoughts. There is a sense of an angelic marauder about this novel, a filmic and insatiable curiosity taking us on and over, through leaps of group and situation and word-meshes, a vibrant and sensuous awareness at loose among the ways we pattern our perceptions in speech and print. This too is more than addictive.
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