Fiction Feature

Cloud Cuckoo Land, First Novel by Lisa Borders: Risky and Rewarding

Surely it is risky to name your novel after a conceptualized place in an ancient Greek play. And riskier still to have your main character express the concern that it was a name "no one would ever be able to pronounce... remember... or figure out what it meant." But Cloud Cuckoo Land, a beautifully executed first novel by Lisa Borders, is about nothing if not risk: unprotected sex in the '80's, street living, sleeping in abandoned buildings, scamming for meals, busking for cash.

Cloud Cuckoo Land charts the story of Miri Ortiz, a small person with a big voice, like "if Patsy Cline sang Blondie." Miri spent her formative years with her mother, a young single woman who has difficulty steering clear of drugs, drink and men. When we meet Miri, she's eleven years old and her mother has "drove me in the pitch dark to Grandma's, leaving me half-asleep on the doorstep for Grandma to find with the mail and the morning paper." Thus Miri finds herself back in the town where she was born-- Prairie Rose, Texas -- a place so tiny it isn't on the road map she consults years later. Miri is treated by the judgmental folks there as though she'd already made up her mind to follow in her mother's footsteps, till her grandmother's love and Miri's own singing talent earn her a warm spot. She spends three years in Prairie Rose, becoming "the youngest soloist ever at the Home Sweet Home Bible Church," until her grandmother dies suddenly and Miri's life is, once again, up for grabs.

Cloud Cuckoo Land is 400 pages of first person narration. It is a tribute to Miri's voice -- her storytelling voice, not her singing voice-- that the novel is funny and moving. And it is a tribute to Borders' power as a writer. There is a gap that opens up in every first person narrative, between what the character tells us and what we can see for ourselves. Borders handles that gap with sensitivity, neither cramping Miri's considerable style nor overstating the obvious.

Miri insists she's nothing like her mother. And in some ways, that's true. She doesn't do drugs or drink excessively, and she doesn't become pregnant at 15, but she believes that "singing is the only talent I ever had. Aside from lying and picking up boys." Miri uses her Texas accent and her smile, whose wattage she controls like a three-way light bulb, as the main components of her survival strategy. What she doesn't see is that she is funny and tenacious. The friends Miri makes along the way love her and want to help but Miri, like all of us, has to learn for herself how to find emotional stability.

Cloud Cuckoo Land is literally grounded in time. Chapter 1 is "October, 1977"; Chapter 41, "August, 1991," at which point Miri is 25 years old. During this time, Miri leaves Texas, lives in hotels with older musicians, goes in and out of foster homes, falls in love with a boy who winds up in jail, then ends up on the streets in Philly, where she hooks up with a gay musician named Jamie. Jamie's parents wanted him to go to Juilliard to continue his classical training as a pianist, but he has always dreamed of being in a band. He and Miri start jamming together and in a year's time they have formed a successful "folk-punk duo" they call Cloud Cuckoo Land.

When Borders throws the fairly predictable, or given the novel's time frame, simply inevitable, curve ball into the mix at the end, we experience several things simultaneously. We want Miri to grow up, to commit to others. Like Rick, the boy with whom Miri lived on the streets, we care. Only we're in Cloud Cuckoo Land, a "fanciful or ideal place," so perhaps any success or happiness there is unsustainable. But Borders has let us live with Miri for a while, and it's a tribute to her writing that we come away with the satisfying feeling that Miri will be okay. -- Susan Hradil

 

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