In the Era of Acid Rain

Lawrence Mathews is an associate professor of English at the Memorial
University of Newfoundland.

A back-cover blurb promises that this book is “about our own time, its
crises and contradictions.” But this is the sort of posturing,
self-important pap that it delivers: “While I search the skies, high
on the Tibetan plateau, through the template of Modern Painters,
wondering if Ruskin’s clouds, or Turner’s, would ever come so high,
in England scientists, government and farmers have called for the
slaughter of half the beef cattle in Britain, about six million cattle
who [sic] are part of an epidemic of Mad Cow Disease.” Funny old
world, isn’t it?

“I must dumbfound all rules and categories of aesthetics,” Karen
Mulhallen writes at one point. “My experience can never make a
presentable story, an artistic product.” Such rejections of artistic
discipline are nearly always fatal. In Mulhallen’s case, the result is
a book not likely to interest anyone outside her own social circle.

In the Era of Acid Rain in fact presents itself as a series of 17
letters to a friend. Written from various places in Europe, South
America, the Caribbean, and (especially) “high on the Tibetan
plateau” and its environs, they document the minutiae of Mulhallen’s
daily life and thought. Consider this gesture of cross-species
solidarity in the wilds of “Phuktal Gompa,” for example: “They
kill Minnie our goat. I refuse to eat her. I have looked into her eyes.
I am starving.” Or this visionary insight: “Summer Solstice, 1991.
The void is beginning to grow a skin.” Or this brief but intense and
enigmatic encounter: “At the large refugee camp, I consulted a jolly,
smiling doctor who felt my pulse and told me secrets about my groin
which few know.” This sort of writing does indeed “dumbfound all
rules and categories of aesthetics.”

Mulhallen edits a major literary magazine. One can only speculate,
sadly, about what underlies the publication of this exercise in
self-indulgence.