Book Review: VHS by Chris Campanioni

Reviewed by Victoria Lilly

A collage of dreamlike, visceral images—an experimental arthouse movie in shifting literary form

VHS is an eclectic patchwork of forms, styles, and formats—an array of vignettes loosely tied to the narrator’s experience of growing up a second-generation immigrant in the United States.

The narrator’s father immigrated to the United States from Cuba in the wake of the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1961. His mother moved from socialist Poland to America, and the two met in a toothpaste factory in the industrial zone of Long Island City. The narrator, driven by a mix of ennui and homesickness for a home he never knew, drifts from career to career, town to town, on a vaguely planned trek east to his mother’s native Poland.

Among those chapters with defined settings, most take place in Berlin, Germany; another prominent locale is New York City. Over the course of the collection and the narrator’s journey, he shares snippets of his life—events, sensations, musings—and intersperses them with vignettes from the lives of his friends, lovers, acquaintances, parents, and absolute strangers.

The narrator is a great fan of the visual medium, so the microfiction-style chapters are named after movie classics, such as Only Lovers Left Alive, Total Recall, The Lives of Others, and more. The fragmented, stream of consciousness style blends the essay form with that of diary entries, letters, and poetry—often within the same short chapter.

Boundaries of said fragments are muddled—melted down, one could say—and pieced together without seams or needlework through the use of an even more dizzying array of techniques. Single-sentence paragraphs, graphically broken-up text, ellipses and enjambments, strikethroughs and caesuras, all are deftly utilized to create the stream of consciousness effect. And a stream it is, as the reader has no choice but to surrender to the meandering, confusing, language-breaking and language-loving voice of the narrator.

Some stories are funny despite the overall serious and contemplative tone of the collection. One such section is “Vision Quest,” in which the narrator obtains special newly tinted glasses which he dubs “Tinman Elite,” complete with a “heavy-duty double-lock ‘High Performance Resin Case’” with a handle on it. His students (in this chapter, the narrator is working as a college professor) remark that he looks like “the Matrix;” the narrator muses on the nature of vision and the (dis)advantages of having one’s eyes so concealed as he heads for a rave party in an East Berlin nightclub.

On the other end of the spectrum are dry, grey, melancholy stories such as “Only Lovers Left Alive:” a brief piece about a girl (presumably the narrator’s mother) waking before dawn in a windowless room with bare walls. The girl heads to the immigration office to present her “white card,” dreading the strangeness of the new country she found herself in, bereft among the unfamiliar language and unadorned walls.

As is always the case with experimental writing, summary of individual tales within VHS is a shadow of the true depth of the text, which lies in the playful use of language (even if the author has a sometimes overbearing fondness for the use of parentheses). The immigrant experience is a theme as old as time in American literature, but Campanioni breathes fresh life into this tradition through clever turns of phrase, surprising depths of the narrator’s inner life, and a steady hand with prose and genre alike.

VHS is not a rollercoaster but a contemplative train journey—a shifting, colorful, and surreal landscape of cities, persons, and memories going by—to bring you out of the grey dullness of everyday life.

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