The Red Parts
By Maggie Nelson
Free Press, 201 pages, $24
Maggie Nelson has murder mind.
The term is Nelson’s for an obsession with violent death, and it’s the dark sensibility that permeates her memoir, “The Red Parts.” True crime meets tell-all in this sequel to Nelson’s collagelike meditation, “Jane: A Murder,” in which the poet-turned-memoirist first addressed the long-ago, random killing of her mother’s sister. So how do we get our arms around a writer who keeps going back to the same gruesome source for her material? And what does this new book tell us that the other one didn’t?
Let us start, as the lawyers might advise, with the facts of the case. In March 1969, before Nelson was born, Jane Mixer was a campus activist and law student at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. The 23-year-old had become engaged to a man her parents didn’t like. So, to break the news gently, she decided to go home to Muskegon.
Mixer put her name on the campus ride board and left school. The next day she was found in a rural cemetery with two bullet wounds in her head, a pair of pantyhose wrapped around her neck and her copy of the novel “Catch 22.”
Police lumped the killing into a series called the Michigan Murders, but they failed to crack the case. Mixer’s family absorbed the loss with what Nelson describes as “Calvinist” dignity.
Having learned of Mixer’s death as a little girl, Nelson, a poet, latched onto it later for several reasons: their resemblance, the discovery of Mixer’s diary and the dreams she started having about her when she reached the age at which she had died. Nelson spent five years composing “Jane: A Murder,” which weaves together her words and Mixer’s in an homage to the victim and an evocative exploration of the trickle-down effects of this senseless tragedy.
“It is not the time to ask why these things happen,/but to have faith, the reverend said,/and four hundred people wept,” Nelson writes in “Jane.”
“Thirty years later the morning is quiet/and faithless. It is time to ask questions.”
“The Red Parts” is different in tone and format. This coda to the first book sprang from the unexpected news that a DNA match had led to a suspect in the killing just as the first book was going to press in 2005. Suddenly, Nelson the poet became Nelson the reporter, tracking the trial and the sensational TV coverage about her aunt’s murder while also reflecting on her own life. Here Nelson takes us more deeply and graphically into the circumstances of Mixer’s death. She contrasts the spectacle of media coverage with her family’s private anguish. One of the book’s most touching moments comes at trial’s end, when her 91-year-old grandfather evokes his long-dead wife, Mixer’s mother: ” ‘Marian should be here,’ he sobs.”
Yet there’s a self-absorption to this book that makes it weightier and less successful than “Jane: A Murder.” Nelson covers her own litany of woes: her mother’s infidelities, which broke up her parents’ marriage; her father’s unexpected, premature death; her own recurring problems with men.
The book’s title is its most-poetic aspect, a reference to the New Testament and the tradition of highlighting Jesus’ words — the ones that matter most — with red ink. Nelson strains to connect the “thirty-six-year-old spiral of dried brown blood” to her own life. But what she really illuminates is our fascination with violence and the narcissism of grief.
“We’re talking about what the living need, or what the living imagine the dead need, or what the living imagine the dead would have wanted were they not dead,” she writes. “But the dead are the dead. Presumably they have finished with wanting.”
“Jane: A Murder” is about a woman who died young and tragically. “The Red Parts” appears to be about that event, but its real subject is the author. The first book reveals the sense of loss that stems from Nelson’s aunt’s death, the second her willful preoccupation with it. Nelson’s murder mind needs a rest.
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Ellen Emry Heltzel is a writer based in Portland, Ore., whose Internet column can be found at www.thebookbabes.com.
