Ontological Obstacles: On Pamela Ryder’s Daybreak Birdsong Always Wakes Him — Luke Dunne

Billy the Kid was born in 1859, twenty years after Louis Daguerre developed the first modern photographic camera. Although it was during Billy’s brief life that the tintype and other, less expensive successors to the daguerreotype helped transform photography from an elite pastime into a medium of mass culture, just one undisputed likeness of him remains. 

Much of this portrait is shrouded in darkness. Tiny flecks of white and grey emanate from the centre. Only by squinting can Billy’s boots be distinguished from his trousers, and his trousers from his gun. To one side of himleft, from the viewer’s perspective—is a tree, starkly illuminated. The white beam of its trunk seems to shine on Billy’s face, though presumably the true source of light is somewhere over the photographer’s shoulder. It would have made compositional sense for the photographer to ask Billy to lean against the tree; instead, he is stood awkwardly proximate to it.

Billy’s expression is difficult to parse. One eye seems to be pointed towards the camera, whereas the other, squinting slightly, slides to the viewer’s right, as if distracted by something out of frame. His mouth is half open, but it’s hard to say why; it isn’t a face of horror, surprise, boredom, or any other definite emotion. Perhaps it is simply the position into which his face falls naturally—although the tintype didn’t demand as much patience as the infamously exasperating daguerreotype, the sitter was still required to remain in position for a few minutes. Longer, if the light was poor.

It is, in any case, an expression of remarkable neutrality for a man who killed frequently and had been eluding the state’s own murderous attentions for his entire adult life. Perhaps what’s strangest about the photo is its very unassumingness; the ordinariness that severs it from Billy’s life as we know it, its repudiation of any symbolic rightness of fit between the photograph and the man it depicts.  

Daybreak Birdsong Always Wakes Him, Pamela Ryder’s fictional biography of Billy the Kid, saves the taking of this photograph for one of its final episodes. By this point, Billy is on the run for what will be the last time. He has no gang, no posse, no friends to speak of and no idea where he’s going: “Any direction could be away from whatever I’m running from. Or maybe closer to.”

Perhaps that is why he feels at liberty to stop and help a stranger, Ezra Dodson, haul the bodies of his wife and daughter out of a frozen river. Dodson explains that he’s been keeping them there through the winter, to minimize decomposition ahead of the tintypist’s visit. Once they’ve taken one last family photo, Dodson will, finally, put them in the ground. The two men retrieve the bodies, the tintypist arrives and, having duly taken Dodson’s photo, he offers Billy one of his own, gratis. 

Billy turned his back to the low-lying sun and held the tintype in front of him. Well now, he said. That’s my Winchester alright. So that must be me. 
Spittin’ image, said the tintypist.
I can’t recall when last I seen myself, said Billy.
Give it here, said Ezra Dodson. He took the tintype, cloth and all. Yep, he said nodding his head and passing it back to Billy. Yep, he told Billy. He got you good.
No sir, Billy told Mr. Dodson. He got me better than I am. 
Well I do thank you, said the tintypist. But it ain’t my doing. This here camera, it don’t lie. That’s what I tell folks. Go get yourself gussied up or don’t gussy, or whatever which way you want it. It don’t matter none. This here camera, he said patting the rich mahogany wood. It sees. More than you be seeing.

Strange though it may seem, the tintypist’s appearance is more jarring than Ezra Dodson’s efforts to flash-freeze his loved ones. By this point in the novel, full as it is with frontier gristle, Dodson’s scheme no longer strikes the reader as especially morbid, whereas the presence of a witness to Billy’s life, a witness with a face, a voice and a name of his own, is new and disarming. Whilst Billy has had an audience throughout Daybreak—from juvenile delinquency to major robberies and murders, his every move has inspired a flurry of news reports and wanted notices—he has only ever been observed at a distance, with the anonymity distance confers. Not one of those news reports or bounty notices bore a signature. Responsibility is always deferred to a collective body, be it a newspaper or the state. 

No less striking is what that witness says. The tintypist might have claimed that the camera trumps the eye by offering a more objective record, a more sensitive impression, of appearances. Instead, the tintypist seems to be suggesting that the camera doesn’t actually record appearances at all; what it records are essences (“get yourself gussied up or don’t gussy…it don’t matter none.”) This is at once a palpably insane suggestion and a promising starting point for a great work of art. The temptation to take the tintypist’s ambition for Ryder’s own is, therefore, almost overwhelming, not least because she has a motive.

Just as stories of Billy’s escapades circulated throughout his life, so has his afterimage proliferated since his death. Billy the Kid has been the subject of more films, TV shows, novels and cartoons than any outlaw since Robin Hood, over whom he retains the distinct advantage of being real. As such, historians, museum curators, archivists and auctioneers have responded to the insatiable demand for more Billy with varying degrees of scrupulousness. As with other genocides, the westward expansion of the United States has generated a substantial cottage industry of well-heeled collectors. Even trinkets with dubious certifications regularly change hands for large sums.

 In Daybreak, Ryder is on a mission to salvage Billy’s real life from these vultures, a mission made explicit in the author’s note which prefaces the novel. This note is not, as such notes tend to be, an occasion for textual housekeeping, where issues of translation, reference and other legal niceties can be settled; it is an uncompromising statement of intent. Despite the incessant cataloguing, “a true account” of Billy’s life has been “lacking”. Lacking, that is, until now. In Daybreak, “it will be told before forever lost to time and the scouring winds of the west.” 

The novel proper begins with an extended flashforward. Billy, nineteen, sits in his cell, awaiting his execution or a last-minute reprieve. The sound of the wind scurrying across the courtyard outside the window “carries him back to fragments of his first spring in the world”. That this can’t be a simple impression (who remembers their very first spring?) is swiftly acknowledged (“Or so he seems to recall. Or does not recall but instead has assembled a memory from a mother’s story.”) Yet it is not, or is not only, a gesture towards the contrivance of recollection. That last ‘or’, ostensibly one among several possibilities, pivots towards the objectivity of Billy’s remembrance: 

A life does not play out at the moment of death as it is said to do but instead unravels in the hours or days before what we fear looms ahead.

Shortly after, we’re dragged back to the very beginning of the story; Billy’s mother, Catherine McCartney, a recent arrival in New York from the west of Ireland, has lost two sons already, and is pregnant with a third. That boy’s survival is soon overshadowed by Catherine’s conviction that her son is not really her son, but a “changeling child”; a doppelgänger planted by spirits, variously known as the “Wee Folk”, “Fairy Folk”, “Sprites”, who have taken her real son away. Catherine feels her suspicions to be confirmed by, among other things, Billy’s small stature and abnormal prominence of his shoulder blades. 

Whimsical epithets notwithstanding, the myth of the changeling child mars Billy’s childhood. Catherine’s fears persist and deepen. She sends for Biddy Doro, a local witch, who declines to rid Catherine of her child. Neither able to accept Billy as her own, nor quite able to bring herself to do away with him herself, Catherine settles into an unhappy motherhood, hardly alleviated by the arrival of Joe, Billy’s brother, though she holds no such suspicions of him.  

Billy’s father—a genial, absent-minded presence—abandons the family (or is pushed out - Billy doesn’t quite know and neither do we). The family relocates to Wichita, Kansas at the behest of William Antrim, another Irishman, who takes up with Catherine. Antrim’s quixotic prospecting drains the family coffers. They’re driven from Wichita in search of riches further west, settling in Silver City, New Mexico. Catherine dies. Billy makes himself useful for the local miners, before turning to low level criminality and then, almost incidentally, to armed robbery at scale.

Billy moves through a succession of partners (some amiable, others not) and ventures (some successful, others not), traversing huge swathes of the western United States in search of safety and moderate prosperity. He is not hanged on the day the novel begins, but is shot by a lawman, Sheriff Pat Garrett, shortly thereafter. 

Though it stands at just over three hundred pages, Daybreak comprises 114 chapters, some no longer than a page. Many of these chapters present themselves as found texts of some description, and though some of these interpolations do narrative work—news reports help to chivvy the story along, of course—others are tangential: medical textbooks from the period, lists of Irish folk-remedies, inscriptions placed alongside on Billy’s personal effects by 21st century curators, a modern day news report of a robbery involving said effects. 

Such pointillism risks making the story hard to follow or inducing a kind of Zenonic sluggishness in the reader. That Daybreak avoids falling into either trap is down to Ryder’s control of interruption, her use of it as a considered technique. It is a fitting one with which to pursue reality at the expense of verisimilitude, suggesting a kind of truthfulness at odds with what Tom Wolfe called “the ‘absorbing’ … quality that is peculiar to the novel.”

The most important of Daybreak’s many intertexts are Billy’s lists (early instalments of Daybreak ran under the title The Lists of Billy the Kid). Some of these lists are utilitarian in nature; shopping lists, notes to self. The very last list of the book, written just before Billy’s final run in with Sheriff Garrett, simply reads: “knife, tinderbox, tinder, matches, salt.” Other lists seem to serve as a kind of diary, albeit of a spare and idiosyncratic kind. There is, for instance, the list which contains most (but, crucially, not all) of the people Billy has encountered over the course of his life—including his mother, father, various acquaintances, the horse he rides – presented without further context. Not everyone on the list is dead, nor is everyone on the list someone Billy loves, or hates, or even knows particularly well. 

What Billy lists most consistently and with the greatest satisfaction are birds. This fascination is overdetermined: traceable, on the one hand, to a gift received in childhood (so far as we are aware, the only one); a book, The Birds of America and the Territories, rare and precious both as a personal possession and as access to written language. Whenever Billy sees a bird that’s new to him, he finds the corresponding entry in his “birdy book” and writes it down. Equally, his mother’s conviction that Billy’s stunted shoulders are nascent wings might have seeded his obsession, paranoid fantasy metabolising into pure aesthetic appreciation. Watching a flycatcher arrive on his window ledge, Billy “reached his hand to it as if to take it for his own, this marvel, this wonderment—birds being God’s own seraphim.”

Of the many birds Billy records, none features so frequently as the hawk. I have counted over thirty separate hawks in Daybreak, with a handful of goshawks thrown in. What makes the hawk an intriguing choice of totem is that it lacks the clear symbolic valence of (say) a dove, a crow or a nightingale. Hawks and falcons have an established place in literature, but their appearances tend to wax and wane with the enthusiasm for falconry among the aristocracy (the medieval period is the high watermark, as one might expect). Perhaps it is the very usefulness of the hawk—its dual role as a prestige object and hunting weapon—that explains its relative poverty as a symbol. When hawks appear, generic associations of vigilance, farsightedness and predatory instinct duly follow, as with the many forgettable hawks in Dante, Chaucer and the Troubadour poets. 

For Ryder’s purposes, it’s convenient that the falcon isn’t loaded with symbolic baggage of its own, which could interfere with its principal role, which is to provide a kind of fixed presence to the world within the story fixed presence, a durability, unity and density to the world of the novel, setting it apart apart from the restless subjectivity of its inhabitants and the inexorable, tragic determination of their lives, a world as inexplicable and remote as it is satisfying and whole. 

Daybreak’s many lists and intertexts advert to the expansiveness of this world, a plenitude literature struggles (though does not fail) to contain. They a way for Ryder to suggest the extension of the picture beyond its frame, as does her habitual pattern of description which, even when it isn’t mediated through one of Billy’s lists, often seems to come out bullet pointed (“the chatter and trill of pipit in the sage, of sparrow in the ocotillo, and wren in the smokewood.”) 

Roland Barthes used the term “insignificant notation” to describe those details which seem to be detached from a novel’s overall semiotic structure. He found such details to be inextricably bound up with realism’s emergence: 

All classical culture lived for centuries on the notion that reality could in no way contaminate verisimilitude. The motto implicit on the threshold of all classical discourse (subject to the ancient idea of verisimilitude) is: Esto (Let there be, suppose...) "Real," fragmented, interstitial notation…renounces this implicit introduction, and it is free of any such postulation that occurs in the structural fabric. Hence, there is a break between the ancient mode of verisimilitude and modern realism; but hence, too, a new verisimilitude is born, which is precisely realism.

In Barthes’ view, such details were “scandalous” because they were wasteful, inefficient from a narrative perspective (“a kind of narrative luxury … increasing the cost of information.”) Insignificant notation presents an obstacle to the smooth progression of narrative, opposing its “essentially predictive”, its fixation on likely effects (“if you act in this way, if you choose this alternative, this is what will happen.”) 

Daybreak’s relationship with the realism Barthes described is ambivalent at best. On the one hand, it seems implausible that a novel published in 2026 could situate itself neatly within the same tradition as Balzac, Zola and Stendhal. Far too much water, far too many bridges. Yet, arguably the biggest change of all is that it is not narrative but affect that has become predictable and rote. Ryder recognises far better than most the need to interrupt what Jameson calls the “facile free association” of the contemporary Anglo-American novel, “the ease and speed with which a character can be shown to think when the truly ontological obstacles of objects and otherness have been evaded: a stream of perceptions, thoughts, desires, which are neither telling nor showing.”

Jameson, continuing this thought, concludes: “One does look back with a certain wistfulness at those mixtures of subject and object in which narrative carefully threads its way through the objective, its subject-centers brushing against this or that, luminously and momentarily transforming each passing thing into a flare of perception…(but) it’s too late to do this again.” 

Daybreak is an utterly audacious attempt to reinscribe just such ontological obstacles. Not only does Ryder create a world that exists rather than subsists, one with a measure of independence from the whims of its “subject-centers”, but she has found a way to represent those objects as subject-centres in their own right. 

Turning the latter achievement, it might be worth paying attention to Ryder’s own perspective on the role objects play in her fiction. 

(My) writing is indeed rooted in the objects that draw me to them. I almost said “the objects that fascinate me,” but that isn’t it at all—no, no. I believe—I know—that the artifacts I hold dear have lives of their own.

Sometimes Ryder’s objects live quiet lives, and their effects can easily be mistaken for the automatism of memory. When Billy arrives at the house of John Tunstall, the good-natured Brit turned would-be rancher who is Billy’s new boss, he takes note of Tunstall’s curtains:

They are the gauzy cotton sort Billy’s mother had hung in the log house on White Hog Lane that turned gray with stove soot and red-flecked from the spew of her cough. But an odd sort of curtain for a man’s house, for a ranch house window, but selected by Tunstall himself, remembering the same pattern in his grandmother’s house when he was a boy, where every spring Grandma Tunstall stood on a chair and slid the curtains from the rod and stepped down from the chair, and washed them by hand and rehung them fresh and white again.

At the beginning of this passage, we are fully enclosed within Billy’s point of view—his noticing the curtains leads so naturally to his recollection of the house on White Hog Lane we can only assume that this (latent) memory is a condition of the observation, rather than the other way around. Tunstall, meanwhile, is not, at that very moment, thinking of his curtains (or at least, we are given no reason to think so). Yet by the end of the paragraph we’ve passed into Tunstall’s psyche with the anecdote about his Grandmother, as though Billy’s thought has refracted through the curtains towards Tunstall, creating a link between them of which neither of the two men are explicitly aware. 

Then, when we run the story about Tunstall’s grandmother on a little further, something else happens.

That spring she became fearful of falling, of standing on a chair, of reaching up and sliding them off the rod, and that was the spring she left them yellowing in the window of the room where she sat, where she kept a skyblue parakeet named FiFi in a cage by the window. So it could hear the birds outside, young Tunstall was told. Until it escaped the cage one day, claws caught in the curtain threads but too high and out of reach for his grandmother to retrieve and there it hung and died of the struggle and there it stayed until both were found. Oh both were found. Oh yes he remembered. Grandmother Tunstall in her chair, mottled and cold. The parakeet an empty husk of itself and its sky blue feathers faded by the sun coming through the curtains. How well he remembered. How strange and hollow the remorse he had felt. But here he has them, here they are hanging in John Turnstall’s ranch house.”

What seems at first like deft characterisation, with the world of the novel subtly manipulated for the purpose, proves to be nothing of the sort. The curtains do not reveal Tunstall’s nature; they enclose it. We are given no explanation for why Tunstall would want to mount such curtains, given these morbid associations. We are no longer fully inhabiting his point of view, no more than we’re inhabiting Billy’s (“hanging in John Tunstall’s house” seems to have us back with Billy, or, in any case, outside of Tunstall). Yet the curtains somehow serve to deepen the connection between the two men, as if some kind of communication had passed between them. The curtains seem to have thought through the gap between Billy and Tunstall decisively. From the moment Billy enters the house, he ceases to be merely an employee, becoming Tunstall’s closest companion until the latter’s slaughter at the hands of his business rivals. 

This unexpected durability shows up again and again. Soon after Billy arrives in New Mexico, he finds himself, to his surprise, to be “happy in Silver City. Happy to hold up my hand to myself in that pure bright light of the New Mexico sky and see what was me and always was me but I never knew it.” Here again appearances condensing into essence, and here again the world that proves more durable than expected, revealing its human subjects to them, rather than those subjects projecting whatever they know, or think they know, onto the world. Though Billy grows up to be particularly receptive to such revelations, they can pounce upon anyone, no matter how stupid or cynical. Here, for example, the otherwise shifty, remorseless William Antrim at a loss in the hills of New Mexico as the promised seams of silver continue to elude him: 

He stood on the windy ridge taking in the lay of the land, and attempting to make sense of the scattering of rock and distribution of scrub and sage below, but there were no messages for him in the look of the terrain, no thought as to what looks lucky, what looks promising in the alluvium of a stone and pebble slide, in the auguries of his dirt streaked palm or the auspices of a loose flock of crows flapping overhead and laughing as they passed.

The crows here are less of a reminder of death or doom than they are the mechanical rigidity of our symbolic associations. A crows, as with a dove, a vultures or a nightingale, does not assign themselves symbolic meaning—they do not make themselves legible, or cliché. No wonder they’re laughing at poor William Antrim. 

When asked by an interviewer and why she began to write in the first place, Ryder offered the following Bildungsgeschichte:

My childhood—essentially one of self-loathing, was interrupted—no: redeemed—by my solitary rambles outdoors, not in deep and lovely woods, but in shabby, empty tracts of land in our neighborhood where whole blocks of suburban houses had once stood, having been smashed flat and hauled off to make way for an interstate highway coming through. The old yards and gardens went to weeds, the driveways cracked. 

As a kind of wilderness grew in that ruined landscape, so did a peculiar pantheism grow within me. I collected stones and seeds and leaves and feathers—took them to my room—cherished objects—a solace. And when, at some point during my adolescence, I was required—commanded—as perhaps we all had been in school, to “go home and write a poem,” I wrote ‘The Highway’.

Daybreak exhibits pantheist tendencies of its own. A ubiquitous aliveness of its world (everything is alive), a subjectivity that goes beyond the friction between the inanimate world and the subjects who enliven it. But there is also a stringent commensurability between kinds that follows from this premise; unpredictable agencies, democratic, gregarious. The prevailing effect is of a kind of equivalence between things, forging associations which are not merely free, but forced to be so. 

And what seemed to be a far-off thunder now seems to be the low wail of a yawning wind, the heave of swaying trees. But there are no trees left standing atop the tableland. No wind. It comes on louder and lifting from within the box canyon. The lowing of the captured longhorns that a believer might take to be the pleading calls and lamentations of condemned souls, and the chasm to be an aperture from which the heat of hell escapes.

The thunder, the wind, the cattle and the souls of the damned find their relation not because a character misperceives (it is not that Billy or some other character present in the world of the novel mistakes the lowing of the longhorns). Their resemblance is more fundamental. They are alike, as thinking things of comparable ontological dignity. 

Ryder’s debut, a novel about the Lindbergh baby kidnapping (Correction of Drift), didn’t appear until she was in her late fifties. A further novel (Paradise Field) and a collection of stories (A Tendency to be Gone) soon followed. Despite taking up very different subjects and all manner of formal positions, these three books abide the same meticulous balance of lyrical flight and descriptive precision, a style which Daybreak breaks with decisively. That Ryder began writing (or, at least, publishing) rather late might help to explain why her early work is so consistent; there’s no juvenilia to speak of, no tentative post-MFA novel, no break-out bestseller, no obvious progression through the gears. So too might the influence of her mentor, Gordon Lish.  

Best known as an editor (at Knopf and Esquire) and a creative writing teacher (at Yale, Columbia and elsewhere), Lish has worked with Don DeLillo, Cynthia Ozick and Raymond Carver (many of whose stories Lish famously ‘saved in the edit’). Whilst some of Lish’s writers eventually sought to distance themselves from the master (not least Carver), Ryder, evidently, is not one of them. As per the author herself: “Simply put: If not for Gordon Lish, I would not be a writer.” All of Ryder’s books, including Daybreak, are dedicated to Lish and Lish alone. I can’t think of another writer who has dedicated every single one of their books to the same person; certainly, none for whom that person was not an immediate relation. Though Lish’s students unanimously describe his approach as a precise and demanding one, he hasn’t offered a definitive account of his poetics in writing. For something approximating that, we must turn to his students. 

The Sentence is a Lonely Place, Garielle Lutz—like Ryder, a woefully underread Lish acolyte—is at once an explanation and defence of some of Lish’s prescriptions and preferences. The essay (originally given as a lecture at Columbia) begins with a deceptively simple claim; that the sentence “is the site of your enterprise with words, the locale where language either comes to a head or does not.” This is not, in itself, especially original. Since Flaubert at least there have been writers who felt the sentence ought to be the primary unit of authorial attention. As per one of his final letters to Louise Colet: “Sentences must stir in a book like leaves in a forest, each distinct from each despite their resemblance.”

Read carelessly, Lutz’s lecture sounds like a generic endorsement of pretty writing—fiction which is ‘poetic’ or ‘attentive to language’ or ‘pleasing at the sentence level.’ While the writers from which Lutz draws her examples (Barry Hannah, Christine Schutt, Sam Lipsyte) are surely all of the above, what Lutz describes in this essay is more specific: “Lish…instructed his students in a poetics of the sentence that emphasized what he called consecution: a recursive procedure by which one word pursues itself into its successor by discharging something from deep within itself into what follows.”

Consecution may be a recursive procedure, but its effect is not repetitive. Indeed, the point is to surprise, in much the same way poetry often seeks to surprise: by upending our usual expectations about how sense and sound serve one another best. Consecution is meant to help one to produce a certain kind of sentence, “an outcry combining the acoustical elegance of the aphorism with the force and utility of the load-bearing, tractional sentence of more or less conventional narrative.” On Lish’s own account, the former consideration supersedes; in a recent interview, he remarked, with characteristic gusto, that if given the choice “between idea and sound, if you were to put a gun to my head, I’d take the bullet for the acoustic and every last one of its relations in the domain of speech.” 

Consider this sentence, plucked almost at random, from ‘Hovenweep’, the opening story from Ryder’s collection: 

I lie flat to this rock floor, crawl to the shank of light and lookout. It is all sky, wind, downspin of birds. It is all overhang and scarp, hoodoo, spire, the twist and course of river that does not show how deep it cuts until it’s done.

This is classic Early Ryder. For all the various forms of repetition at work here—half-rhymes and sight rhymes, the reassuring patter of rhotics (over, scarp, spire, course, river) through the middle section of that long final sentence, the metrical verve of those last six feet—the effect is not repetitious. In fact, it’s the contrast that pops out, both at the level of sound and the uncanny deformation of idiom; a shank, rather than shaft, of light; the river autonomously cutting its own depth. 

Why stray from this approach? In her essay, Lutz acknowledges the risk of “weak central coherence” resulting from the “isolative attentions to the sentence” she advocates. Ryder’s first two novels lean into this difficulty, finding it a generative kind of constraint, and so elevating it from the level of the sentence to highest level of form. Both carry the subtitle “a novel in stories” and, indeed, their respective subjects (the Lindbergh kidnapping in the first, Ryder’s father in the second) are a theme around which quite different fictions are arranged. 

The representation of speech as it is ordinarily spoken also poses a problem. It’s telling that Lutz explains the attraction of Lish’s approach because it is unlike the banal utterances of upbringing: 

From early on, it seemed to me that the forming and the release of words were the least significant of the mouth’s activities—and more by-products of those activities than the reason for them. When words did come hazarding out of a mouth, they did not lastingly change anything about the mouth they were coming out of or the face that hosted the mouth.

For Lutz, the approach to writing she learns from Lish is everything those early experiences with language were not. But what if you should wish to represent the banal utterances that remain (unavoidably, for most) the mainstay of everyday conversation and conscious reflection? What if the true account obliges one represent ugliness, tastelessness, dross? 

In Daybreak, Ryder’s uncompromising pursuit of reality forces certain concessions. She presents the tapestry of voices Billy encounters much as he encounters them, without much by way of literary stylisation, without making an event of every sentence.  

The earlier style hasn’t disappeared, but its monopoly has been broken. It remains one of the novel’s main strands, but no longer the entire fabric, and those parts of Daybreak which hew closer to Ryder’s earlier style—landscape seems especially amenable to it—are often obliged to compete for room with more “tractional” speech from one paragraph to the next. The following, for example, taken from a passage in which Billy’s father has brought him to witness a hanging. Billy, on his father’s shoulders, starts to pull his hair in distress: 

Quit it now I say! his father says. Ow! Leave go I tell you, you little shite. 

But Billy does not leave go. He is pulled down screaming and clutching a sizable tuft of his father’s hair in his fist, later to be discovered by a crow picking through the food refuse of picnickers and be carried off to line a nest. 

Mother of God what is it Billy? his father told him. What’s wrong with you lad? Is it the fits you’re taking? says his father setting him down.

This compromise also allows Ryder to do other things; the intertexts, for instance, would have been impossible in one of her earlier works, as would some of Billy’s lists. But perhaps the most important development here is the removal of the pressure consecution places on her characters, who must both be able to observe the world with incredible acuity and to draw associations guided not by the constraints of actual perception or a realistic psychology, but by the aesthetic demands of language. If, as Lutz put it, the objective is to produce writing that is “not about something, but that [is] something itself,” that makes it harder to depict the kind of inner states that militate against hyper-articulacy—tiredness, grief, fear: 

This Appaloosa mare, she’s a good horse, she is. Smart. Like the Choctaw I had before, but Appaloosa smart. She knows same as me that something’s closing in behind me. Or coming up ahead. One or the other. Or both. It might be the law, and likely is, since it was the law what got most of The Boys, except for the one of them I got myself. Same as some other killings I done by just me, Billy.

If it’s hard to find a lot of music in this passage, that’s because it’s hard to find a lot of music in any train of thought even approximately transcribed, let alone that of a man at such a low ebb. The circularities are not satisfying to hear—why on earth would we expect them to be? Ryder’s naturalism, if we can call it that, serves to widen the novel’s scope—to put as much of the world as possible into the novel, an objective that, incidentally, would have been totally recognisable to realism’s earliest practitioners. 

Yet, paradoxically perhaps, what remains of consecution and the accompanying density of large parts of Daybreak, as well the fundamentally unpredictable character of this prose (a synonymicon is, after all, essentially a compilation of predictions about what word one might wish to insert in place of another), also serves a kind of realism. It is, indeed, a highly appropriate stylistic accompaniment to the durability, the descriptive intractability, of Daybreak’s world. If it is the efficiency of thought that characterises contemporary literary fiction as a popular genre, then this is enabled above all by the flexibility of associations that allow thought not one, but many possible paths through whichever scene, theme, plot or psyche is before it. In Daybreak, there is only one way through—the way things really happened. 

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Luke Dunne is a writer from London. His poetry has appeared or will appear in The New Republic, The Kenyon Review, The London Magazine and berlin lit. His criticism has appeared or is forthcoming in Boston Review, The Little Review and Review 31. He has won the Jane Martin Poetry Prize and been longlisted for The London Magazine Poetry Prize, the Dan Veach Prize and the Bridport Prize.