{"id":121972,"date":"2022-08-17T09:01:00","date_gmt":"2022-08-17T14:01:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/?p=121972"},"modified":"2022-08-16T17:07:07","modified_gmt":"2022-08-16T22:07:07","slug":"book-review-by-conor-hultman-standish-blue-by-cole-phillips","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/book-review-by-conor-hultman-standish-blue-by-cole-phillips\/","title":{"rendered":"Book Review by Conor Hultman: “Standish Blue” by Cole Phillips"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Standish Blue<\/em>
by Cole Phillips
Ghost City Press ($10)<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

We have come to realize that a place can have as much character as a person. From Poe\u2019s \u201cThe Fall of the House of Usher\u201d to Larkin\u2019s \u201cHome is so Sad,\u201d the walls and windows we live in have been painted up to look like us. Standish Blue<\/strong><\/em> continues the tradition of seeing faces into our rooms, and it does it in grand style.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The narrator and their partner, Birdie, are working on homes. There is a motif of loss, revealed in cryptic flashes and changes in tense. But the lead actor here is the stage. Many of the twelve chapters that make up Standish Blue<\/em> begin with setting:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"\/<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThe camera wasn\u2019t in the bathroom.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cBirdie said to me, Let\u2019s make this a place we want to come to because cooking\u00a0sucks.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cI was supposed to be taking pictures of the rooms of the house because The\u00a0Woman kept telling me we needed pictures of every room, but I hadn\u2019t been able\u00a0to find the camera.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cIt\u2019s too small to be the living room.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This mundane quality of domesticity shapeshifts for different effects: quietude, romance, and an enhancement for tragedy. Objects are laden with a haiku-like presence, e.g. \u201cthe almost-empty can you could see the ribs inside of.\u201d Ditto for fixtures of the house, e.g. \u201cThere were scrapes along the floor with tiny coils of wood running alongside them where the bed used to be.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The authorial voice of Standish Blue<\/em> is consequently more self-assured and pleasurable than many comparable contemporary novels. There is nothing here so blatant as a metaphor; descriptions and actions stand for themselves, the story is just that, a sequence of actions and scenes between two characters, and the reader is allowed to draw it all in with minimum intrusion. It\u2019s like a painting; it\u2019s there, the beauty of it is evident and contained, and the only point<\/em> is to see it. There\u2019s sadness, sure, and you can expect to cry, but don\u2019t expect a denouement <\/em>in the style of a typical book. Don\u2019t expect the typical. Expect beauty, expect miniatures, expect the unexpected, and expect to look at your house in a way you never have before.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/a><\/figure>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Standish Blueby Cole PhillipsGhost City Press ($10) We have come to realize that a place can have as<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":123467,"featured_media":117396,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[20522],"tags":[6480,22188,20523,22189,22187],"class_list":["post-121972","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-book-reviews","tag-book-review","tag-cole-phillips","tag-conor-hultman","tag-ghost-city-press","tag-standish-blue"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/02\/2022-02-03-Book-Reviews.jpg?fit=620%2C349&ssl=1","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/121972","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/123467"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=121972"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/121972\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/117396"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=121972"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=121972"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=121972"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}