City of Roses is a serialized epic firmly set in Portland, Oregon, only with more sword fights: an urban fantasy mixing magical realism with gonzo noirish prose, where duels are fought in Pioneer Square, and river gods retire to comfortably shabby apartments.
Rereading is the key here. We’re familiar with rereading whole stories that we like or ones with endings that puzzle us. But what Lish, and writers of this ilk, ask us to do is to reread sentences in the course of making our first reading. This assumes a reader, a listener even, with the patience to linger over the page, its construction. (Gary Lutz prefers a “page-hugging” to a page-turning reader.)
If, as the reader, you drew moral conclusions about them, if you drew conclusions of any sort, they were yours. Of course she was cheating. She wasn’t absent from the text. She had gone underground and you were hearing her voice speaking from every part of the fiction, even the furniture in the central character’s front room.
Who built this great dyke? Dante says it was built by the builder—a tautological answer—although he also says, of the identity of this architect, this “engineer:” “qual che si fosse,” “whoever he was.” Who was he? Sayers, in her note to this passage, glosses the ‘maestro’ as God, which seems wrong:—why would Dante add qual che si fosse to God’s name? Which is to say, in the sense that God is behind all creation, in one sense He is of course the maestro, the builder. But the question is: who constructed this specific structure, this dyke?
Ysabel triumphantly lifts her hand, her middle finger poised, circling the phone’s disconnect button. “Why, no,” she says into her telephone headset. “Thank you. I can only apologize for how badly the questions were written, and how boring it must have been for you. Not at all. And you have a good evening yourself. Goodbye.” She punches the button. Sighs. Peers at the computer keyboard that takes up most what little desk space is left by the monitor and taps a couple of keys with index fingers poking out of loose fists. She peers at the screen, then punches a couple more keys. Becker kneels down next to her chair as she reaches for the phone again. “Hey,” he says. “It’s after nine. You’re done.”
“Oh,” says Ysabel, leaning back in her chair.
“You’ve been on the phone about five hours. You logged 42 complete surveys. That’s, ah, pretty much a record.”
“Oh,” says Ysabel. Jo comes up behind Becker, her arms folded, her mouth wryly turned. Behind her, other dialers are scooping up bags, books, empty water bottles, candy wrappers, gathering their things and heading for the door.
“Yeah,” Becker’s saying. “Seth monitored several of your calls– you did a fantastic job. We could maybe do with a little less, you know, insulting the survey, but–”
“It’s like Twin Peaks had a baby with Once Upon a Time.”
“It’s what urban fantasy might be now, if it’d gone in different directions.”
“Our reviewers loved the world-building and well-drawn characters.”