Yet to Come — Cris Mazza

Fiction. California Interest. Women's Studies. Music. Decades before #metoo, Cal chose his punishment for going too far with a girl he was crazy about: a life-sentence with a woman he could not love, whose frequent rages, untapped spending and ruthless children were his means to distract himself from longing and regret. The girl from his past also condemned him to periodic postcards bearing no return address. Rather than increasing his despair, the postcards helped stoke the imaginary life he maintained with her, including dialogue about his plight, images of her showing up while he plays his sax in a nightclub, and even sex, the very realm that had initiated her retreat from him.The layers of complexity in Cris Mazza's work never cease to amaze. YET TO COME is a drama of yearning and dissatisfaction, obsession and dysfunction, love and hunger and music and the kinds of lies we tell ourselves and others, all the way down. A love story, a family saga, a narrative of 'parallel perditions,' as one of the characters says, YET TO COME is a quintessentially American story, a history of the decades told in stinging dialogue and rich internal narrative, in postcards and journals and multiple layers of how we communicate, and how we can't. The scenes from an unhappy marriage are some of the most compelling, hurtful, and true I've ever read. Dip in, you'll be pulled along in a narrative that reveals itself in layers, unfolds itself subtly, lingers in the mind long after the book is closed.--Rilla AskewThe formal experimentation of the book's various textual attacks, its graphicness, its collaged nature, and its over-the-topness. make it a kind of opera, staking a claim for a kind of super- or neo-realism, overly rich as if it were a map more detailed than the thing it represents.--Michael MartoneCris Mazza is a master at depicting the ways the past haunts us. In YET TO COME, Cal's half-life of regret poignantly and at times painfully reminds us of the agency in our own lives, even in the face of closed doors. Never one to reduce complex human beings to stereotypes, Mazza also reveals here the way intimacy complicates gender dynamics beyond the easy ways we so often see portrayed in the media.--Rob Roberge