Pipette
by Kim Chinquee

Description

A novel in flash fiction style, Pipette starts with a woman on a train returning from the ballet, to her dogs, her partner.

Trouble at home escalates. The country is on edge. She tries to escape a threatening situation.  Then comes a pandemic; our protagonist hangs out with her dogs, manages remote teaching.

With leitmotifs of skiing, dogs, trains, waterways, birds, nature, spiritual guides, triathlons, she writes, she teaches, she swims/bikes/runs. The novel dips into her past—trauma, relationships, activities, working in the lab—which pendulums, then finally propels forward.

Pipette was include in IndiReader’s list of Best Reviewed Books, October, 2022.  Also see the very nice review by David Reyes for The Book Commentary  and an interview with Lisa Haselton.

Distributed by Itasca Books.

Comments:

“At turns unsettling and inspirational, Pipette tracks the lengths one woman must go to keep herself healthy, sane, and safe. When the narrator moves out of her boyfriend’s home because of threatening behavior, she must grapple with not only rebuilding a home for herself but also with the resurfacing of troubling memories from her past, memories of playing nice to stay safe. As the COVID-19 pandemic advances, the narrator, a writer and English professor, takes a temporary job as a lab technician analyzing test results, finding satisfaction and even pleasure in the precision of her pipetting skills. A tool used to transfer measured liquids safely and accurately, the pipette might also serve as metaphor for how the narrator calibrates her daily activities, parceling the day into writing, self-care, and grueling exercise routines, ever pushing the limits of her body. ‘I study variations of my heart rate,’ she says. The pipette is also an apt metaphor for Chinquee’s prose—sharp, precise chapters, each with the compression and satisfaction of a flash fiction. A moving novel of crystalline structure.” (Eva Heisler, author of Reading Emily Dickinson in Icelandic)

”

Chinquee, a rock star in the flash fiction world, has published several award-winning collections of flash fiction. The chapters in this novel are flash-like in length and they propel the reader through the story, like scrolling through a Tik Tok feed. It’s hard to put down.

Her prose is spare and clean and the narrative voice is dispassionate, which only makes the story more dramatic, more powerful, more heartbreaking, and ultimately more uplifting.

It is the story of a woman who does not let her fears control her life. It is a story of courage and triumph.  Highly recommended.” (Len Joy, author of Dry Heat and Casualties and Survivors)

“A woman confronts her personal demons against the backdrop of the Covid-19 pandemic in Chinquee’s novel in flash fiction.

Elle appreciates order. She’s an Air Force vet with an adult son (who is currently serving in the military himself) and lives in Buffalo with her partner, the fitness-obsessed Henry, and their four dogs. She teaches fiction writing at a local college. She jogs. She tries to learn to ski, though she finds it exhausting and terrifying. In therapy, she explores her relationship with her late father and the ways his schizophrenia affected their relationship. She also consults her spirit guide—whom she imagines as a man in a beret—who helps her reconnect with her memories of childhood. Henry’s emerging Trumpism proves a strain on the relationship—one that gets even worse when he loses his job at the car dealership. Henry kicks Elle out of the house they share, and immediately after she moves into a new neighborhood, Covid hits. In this new life of isolation, Elle adjusts her priorities. “The mattress in the guestroom is comfy, and the frame is broken, so the mattress just sits on the floor…Sometimes I fall asleep to the TV. Some nights I get up and go to the master bedroom, which is clean and organized. Most nights I fall asleep in one bed, wake in the night and move to the other.” As the pandemic wears on, she confronts her troubled relationships with the now-dead men in her family—her father, her uncle, her paternal grandfather—as well as her attachment to dogs and her compulsion to stay in shape. But will greater self-understanding require her to relax her grip on the ordered life she’s long struggled to build?

Chinquee’s measured prose breaks over the reader like shallow, slow-moving waves. Here, she jogs in the early days of the pandemic: “The park is pretty bare now. I miss the bustle of bikers, children, people on the golf course. There’s a zoo on one portion of the park and I see some cars there. The zoo is closed. I breathe and take my steps. I opt for another loop. My legs feel heavy. My heart feels heavy. My lungs are pretty healthy.” The novel unfolds as a series of flash fiction stories, most less than a page long, each with its own title. The reading experience is not so different than that of an autofiction novel—The Department of Speculation (2014) by Jenny Offill and The End of the Story (1995) by Lydia Davis come to mind. The narrative unfolds slowly through the accumulation of trivial details: the positions of the dogs on the couch, the exercises Henry is doing, the meals Elle makes with her Vitamix. Chinquee’s moves are oblique, and they often take Elle and the reader away from the most engaging material in favor of the mundane. In doing so, however, the novel replicates a bit of what it’s like to repress or avoid or deny one’s personal issues, sprinting (or biking or skiing) ever forward in the hopes our problems can be outrun.

A quiet, fragmentary novel about the chaos roiling beneath life’s surface.” (Kirkus Reviews)