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Disability: A Novella

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I first experienced Cris Mazza's fiction over a decade ago when I read her novels Your Name Here and Exposed. Like much of her work from the 1990s, these gritty, explicit narratives demonstrate the intrinsic link between sex and humiliation, and I found them worthwhile reading, books that transmitted white-hot anger on behalf of women everywhere. Sexual politics continue to play a role in Mazza's recent texts (which include the memoir Indigenous and the novel Homeland), but this is not always the dominant thematic focus. Instead, her newer work describes a fuller range of human experience, providing the reader with a richer variety of responses. Now, rather than anger, Mazza's writing often conveys, in writer Elizabeth Searle's words, "pitch-black compassion." Mazza's stunning recent novel, Disability perfectly fits this description; it is both edgy and empathic, a heartbreak with an attitude.

Reading Disability is rather like watching an able-bodied caretaker bathe a debilitated person; both experiences painfully remind us of the human condition's inherent frailty. Just published by FC2, an independent press dedicated to experimental fiction, Disability, Mazza's 13th book, uses subtle experimentation with point of view as a conduit for its overarching theme: that all humanity is, at its essence, vulnerable and broken.

The point of view alternates between two main characters, Teri and Cleo, who work as caregivers in a state hospital for severely impaired children. Both characters' narratives are relentlessly myopic and unflinchingly graphic, choices that could have backfired if made by a less capable writer than Mazza. In the hospital scenes, readers are given no relief from the pediatric residents' physical helplessness, their urine, feces, and saliva, their twisted legs, seizures, and bedsores. Meanwhile, scenes outside the hospital offer no reprieve from the main characters' emotional handicaps: Teri's self-loathing and Cleo's crippled self-esteem. Rather than create a claustrophobic experience for the reader, however, Mazza's deft shifts between the characters' thoughts, experiences and voices enable readers to understand the characters in ways the characters can't.

First, we see that both women are as deserving of the designation "disabled" as are the children in their care. Teri-a 31-year-old woman whose own child disavowed her-is so emotionally stunted that even her narrative is written in the truncated, disjointed shorthand found on medical charts. Cleo-who, at 22, desperately clings to a distant and punishing lover-has a narrative marked by self-conscious revisions, mirroring her disastrous self-image. Mazza is ever adroit in her use of dramatic irony, and the point of view also allows us to see how the women sublimate their experiences with rejection into steadfast loyalty toward the hospital's mostly-abandoned children, a loyalty which culminates in their unpremeditated kidnap of Teri's favorite resident.

Further, readers realize that none of the characters are more "disabled" than the systems they inhabit. The hospital's residents are subjected to a money-seeking "therapy" program incommensurate with their needs; the caregivers make minimum-wage for maximum work; children are appropriated or abandoned, and everyone falls prey to others' ineptitude, dishonesty, or cruelty. Within these flawed systems, the characters have two possible reactions to one another's disabilities: they can exercise compassion or look away in disgust. Both Teri and Cleo show compassion for the children and each other, but react to their own brokenness with unmitigated disgust. One of the novel's foremost accomplishments is its ability to enchant readers into feeling compassion for the characters that the characters don't feel for themselves.

More noteworthy still is that this novel is neither didactic nor moralizing, but a rigorously complex story whose plot ultimately reveals that compassion will sooner lead to loss than fulfillment. Naturally, Mazza fans will recognize loss as a principal outcome for many characters in her oeuvre, but Disability moves beyond the particulars of fictive characters and into a broader human context. This worldview is less grim than cathartic, however, and at the end of Disability, readers may feel more forgiving towards the pieces of us all that cannot be fixed, protected or saved.

Disability was beautifully written, taut, unsentimental, insightful as regards who/what is "disabled." The novel is a powerful indictment of how we treat the mentally disabled and is also a profound meditation on the process and purpose of education not only of the disabled but of any and all, especially in light of our "accountability" driven educational system.

What's amazing about this book is that Mazza can unfold such a tiny piece of the world into such an interesting shape.

Her characters aren't talking politics in Madrid, they're not having epiphanies in the desert, and they're not redefining cyberspace. They're small women in a small part of the world, doing an insignificant job, governed by an insignificant boss, serving people who can't respond. Instead of choosing, for her subject, people who usually find themselves being written about (those who are categorically superlative in some way - hidden or otherwise) she chooses two minimum wage nurse's aides in a hospital for the severely disabled. Mazza doesn't glorify these lives -she doesn't give them secret insights or hidden depths. They remain, outside the book, invisible. They do not articulate their own ideas about their lives or their problems. They do not triumph and they are not destroyed. What's superlative about these women emerges in a small flower for a short time, and then fades. But it emerges in excrutiating clarity.

Part of the fascination of reading _Disability_ is in seeing "behind the scenes" in an unfamiliar setting - in this case the hospital, where the children have names like "Boardboy" and "Scooterboy" and the characters detail their experiences with the work. The administration is predictably idiotic, prescribing hearing therapy for deaf patients, and most of the aides are lazy and neglectful. This book, however, is not about how severely disabled people are treated in state hospitals. The book is about taking two women, really any women, *any women at all*, and finding a story in them, finding "enough" for a novel - proving them "worthy" of having a book written about them. It's about taking up a hypothetical challenge - I dare you to write a book about *these two souls* and doing it in a way that had me turning pages intensely and reading at stop lights.

It may surprise you that the book is so compelling, given its small and honest scope, its lack of irony or plot twists. This is a story about women, told by a woman as only a woman could truly tell it. I think it's exactly what we heard about in "A Room of One's Own" - who cares about what the Prime Minister is doing - we want to hear about the girl behind the counter at the hat store. I think Virgnia Woolf would be very proud.