Reading “Bone Horn” is like watching a tightrope walker holding a long pole with weights on either side. The distance between the weights and their specific heaviness allow the tightrope walker to maintain their balance. In Prudence Bussey-Chamberlain’s book, one weight is the delightfully absurd case our private detective narrator has been hired to solve: Did Alice B. Toklas have a horn growing out of her head? The counterbalance is the sudden death of the narrator’s partner, May.
After May’s death in the middle of the night of a brain aneurysm, the narrator uses the life insurance payment to get her finances in order, have a child and walk away from academia to become a private detective. With the life insurance money running out and in need of a first case, she accepts a mysterious client’s request to find proof of Toklas’ rumored horn.
With little to go on besides a couple of contemporaneous quotes and Toklas’ penchant for hiding her forehead, the narrator drifts from place to place with little nudges from her client, chasing down the most tenuous references and implications. She meets a distant relative of Hemingway, she goes to Paris, then San Francisco, then Yale, then Paris again. She visits bookstores and archives. She stumbles into sex almost everywhere she goes.
Our narrator is a private detective. She is an ex-academic. She is a grieving widow. She is also a single mother. While she pursues the horn, she must manage and provide childcare. And she must balance her own need to be with her child and their need as a family for money. If May is one weight and the horn is another, perhaps her child is the bar itself. Yet another weight to carry, that is also part of how the narrator is able to proceed at all. The way Bussey-Chamberlain portrays the practical and emotional relationship between childcare and one’s vocation feels truthful to me. Every parent who works – and I think especially any parent who creates art – knows the tension between needing to be with their child and needing to be with their work.
The absurdity of the case risks making “Bone Horn” feel frivolous; a bonbon for people who love modernism and enjoy visiting legendary bookstores when they travel (not that there’s anything wrong with that). There is a kind of silliness to the narrator popping into random bars, browsing bookshelves and getting picked up by most of the people she interacts with. But there is that other weight holding the book in balance. Through her work on the case, the sex she has and the relationships she builds, the narrator is constantly processing her grief over May’s death. Despite having no presence in the plot itself, May could be considered one of the main characters in the story.
Bussey-Chamberlain accentuates the absurdity of the case, giving us a series of twists at home in any contemporary thriller (well, any contemporary thriller that centers Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas), and I wonder if there is something reparative, perhaps even powerful, in how and what absurdities we choose to care about. When faced with the sudden death of your partner, or any tragedy, how are we able to care about anything else? And yet we do. After all, chasing the horn did give our narrator opportunities and materials to process her grief, her relationship to her child and how and who she could be without May for the rest of her life. Whether or the resolution of the case is satisfying to her (or the reader), “Bone Horn” is a fun and moving story of personal discovery that maintains its precarious balance between absurdity and grief, work and childcare, bodies and books.
Josh Cook is a bookseller and co-owner at Porter Square Books in Cambridge, where he has worked since 2004. He is also author of the critically acclaimed postmodern detective novel “An Exaggerated Murder” and “The Art of Libromancy: On Selling Books and Reading Books in the 21st Century.” He has self-published the zine For White Dudes (Like Me) Who Have Not Considered Reading Trans Books. His fiction, criticism and poetry have appeared in numerous leading literary publications. He grew up in Lewiston, Maine, and lives in Somerville. If you’d like to read more about books, subscribe to his newsletter Yesterday Today Tomorrow Forever.
A version of this story appeared originally on the Porter Square Review of Books. Buy “Bone Horn” from Porter Square Books.
