‘The Red Parts: Autobiography of a Trial,’ by Maggie Nelson

Maggie Nelson is having a moment. Long a cult figure among nonfiction writers for her book “Bluets,” a gorgeous, slender gem about a breakup, Nelson won the National Book Critics Circle award in Criticism for her best-selling book “The Argonauts” in March and was recently profiled by Hilton Als in the New Yorker. Amid this fanfare, Graywolf Press has just rereleased her 2007 book, “The Red Parts,” which concerns the 2005 trial of a suspect in Nelson’s aunt Jane’s 1969 murder and is overall a meditation on how the specter of violence and grief enshrouded Nelson’s life.

Nelson’s work is often described as “genre-busting,” a turn of phrase that sounds weirdly comical, as though contemporary writers have gone on a prison break and we should lock up our Dickens and our Hemingway to keep literature safe. The very idea of genre speaks more to the demands of marketing than the impetus to turn lived experiences into literary ones. As a result, genre can easily become a hood and a noose over creativity. Thankfully, Nelson slipped the knot and brought us this excruciating work.

The words “thankfully” and “excruciating” make for strange bedfellows, but not if we truly reflect on a young woman’s brutal killing, her body left on a stranger’s grave, as “The Red Parts” insists readers do. Much has been said about how we are numb to violence, but not enough has been said about how victims’ families survive this numbness. Through a combination of narrative and analysis, Nelson affords us a glimpse.

“The Red Parts” opens with Michigan State Police detective Eric Schroeder contacting Nelson’s mother about her sister’s case, which has gone unsolved for 36 years, because DNA evidence has brought a new suspect to light. Oddly, Nelson has just finished a book of poetry about her aunt’s death titled “Jane: A Murder.” Nelson took issue with how her family had grieved Jane’s death in “a grim Ingmar Bergman scenario … played out in the small, lakeside town of Muskegon, Michigan” and believed that her poetry volume would “offer a more successful model in its place.”

As reopening the case peels the scab off some of Nelson’s own wounds from Jane’s death, the sudden death of Nelson’s father when she was 10, and the fresh cut of a breakup, Nelson recognizes the hubris in her poetic motivations.

The details of Jane’s death, once considered one of the serial Michigan Murders, and suspect Gary Leiterman’s trial offer Nelson and readers firm footing, but the book could be more aptly described as being about the negative spaces between these events, the spaces where grief lives. Nelson turns her critical gaze to how we as a culture sculpt this space into a positive shape through narrative, and how this narrative stands apart from its principal characters’ experiences.

When “48 Hours Mystery” contacts Nelson about the opening of her aunt’s case, Nelson chafes. “I feel strongly that your family’s story of struggle and hope has great relevance to our audience, the young CBS producer wrote. What story was he talking about?”

The first policeman at the crime scene sees “compassion” in how Jane’s body was arranged. Detective Schroeder sees “the hand of God” in the case overall. The court sees justice. Nelson sees none of these things. “As far as I could tell,” she writes, “stories may enable us to live, but they also trap us, bring us spectacular pain.”

Nelson is an unflinching writer. Perhaps this is why she mentions her “erotic fondness for asphyxiation” while engaged in this act with a lover who has just figured out that she has been cheating on him. She writes, “I suspected this when I said, aghast, This is how Jane died, and he said, without missing a beat, I know.”

The lack of analysis concerning this visceral link between the narrator and Jane falls sensationally, if not creepily, given the close scrutiny Nelson gives the crime-scene photographs of her aunt’s wounds.

After Leiterman’s trial, Nelson writes, “I felt an intense rush to record all the details before being swallowed up, be it by anxiety, grief, amnesia, or horror; to transform myself or my material into an aesthetic object, one which might stand next to, or in for, or as the last impediment to, the dull speechlessness that makes remembering and formulating impossible.”

To objectify one’s experience is an intellectually and emotionally cool move that is a painfully honest and apt response to trauma. Eschewing narrative and genre, along with their trappings of emotional catharsis and grand sweeping theories about violence and loss, for an object also seems self-referential for Nelson.

Later in the book, she writes of a lover who made her a box, a “container that can hold all the brokenness, and make it beautiful.” In writing “The Red Parts,” Nelson has made her own box holding the fragments of many things. It’s not a beautiful object, but a valuable, coolly shimmering one, which captures the raw bewilderment that can affect a family for generations after a violent loss.

The Red Parts

Autobiography of a Trial

By Maggie Nelson

(Graywolf; 201 pages; $16 paperback)