Orion You Came and You Took All My Marbles by Kira HenehanMilkweed Editions, 2010

The back cover blurb mentions the “off-kilter world” of Finley, our narrator: that’s an understatement. This book is a detective story but not really, or rather, it’s a detective story about finding oneself. It’s set in a world that is almost our own but not quite, or maybe it is our world and all the not-quites are in Finley’s head: it’s hard to say. Finley works as an investigator of some sort, except that the assignments she and her co-workers get are surreal/bizarre: one of them is assigned to act as Lolita in a play; another is assigned something to do with rooftops. Finley is assigned to puppets, though she’s not clear on what, exactly, she’s meant to be investigating. She’s also not clear on who, exactly, she is: early in the book, she tells us this: “I can win any contest involving silence or stillness or maintaining a straight face. I once, presumably out of some heartfelt anger, maintained a silence for so long I forgot who I was. With speech went character, with character memory, with memory me” (9). Yet even after this incident, Finley knows some things about herself, like the fact that she hates “the Russians,” without knowing why: it’s “maybe a memory that had been slow or stubborn and hadn’t left with the rest. Or maybe not a memory at all but a new kind of fact, of which there might be more, revealing themselves at whim, over time” (29). That seems like a pretty good description of the narrative itself: lots of not-knowing, with things slowly emerging. There are a few plot points that emerge to the reader rather faster than Finley picks up on them, but there are also things about which the reader—or at least, this reader—is left quite in the dark.

Overall, I liked the disorienting nature of the plot, and the wordplay of this book, plus the humor of Finley’s narrative voice, are excellent. Also excellent are the interactions between Finley and other characters, like this:

—Do you remember, said Murphy,—the Great China Wall?
— Do you remember, I said,—how it’s not called that.
Murphy jangled his pockets. The day outside the warm wood of the Tiki Barn was as was its wont quite gray, and heavy, heavy with quiet.
—Do you remember, said Murphy,—a time when you were not so difficult all the time?
—I do not, I said,—remember such a time. (202)

I first heard about this book when Stefanie at So Many Books posted about it last year; I hadn’t actually planned on reading it but then I saw it on the shelf at the library, and, well, it’s hard to resist library books. I’m glad I didn’t try.