Pipette

Advance praise for PIPETTE

“A 52 year old woman deals with life and its disappointments.

She’s ex-military, a divorcee, middle-aged. She visits hypnotherapists. She’s vegan. She’s a liberal. She goes on retreats. She keeps herself fit. She moved in with Henry who she met on Facebook. They had a lot of mutual athletic friends. That was years ago. Most of the time they get on fine. “I buy his groceries,” she says, “We wake up. We love each other. We watch movies. We drink coffee. We fuck. I get on his nerves sometimes.” Sometimes they break up. Sometimes Henry kicks her out. They get back together. She moves back in. This time she thinks that Henry might be looking for somebody new on the social media running app they both use. She thinks the next time they argue might be the last. And then she has moved out again. And this time it is for good.

Kim Chinquee’s PIPETTE is the story of a few months in the life of an early 50s woman told in snapshots. Short chapters, some no more than a few lines long, each given a title. Some descriptive. Some more abstract. Reading Glasses. Hide Under The Bed. More Like A Meander. Each chapter reads like a very short story. Then the stories build on each other. It’s a narrative stitched from urgent paragraphs of flash fiction, the protagonist gradually revealing herself. The disturbing incidents of her past and the dashed or fragile hopes for her future. The stoicism in the face of actions outside of her control. There’s truth embedded within the words. An unflinching honesty that can catch the reader by surprise. And though much of PIPETTE is seemingly full of good humor and casual wit there seems to be a shadow of sadness cast over the protagonist.

Chinquee’s novel is a bold exercise in form--urgent and experimental yet easy to understand and eminently enjoyable. There is a simplicity to her prose, much of it is pared back and precise. It takes some skill to write so sparingly and requires a self-confidence born from experience and commitment to the craft of writing. Chinquee is a clever writer who is always in control of her material. It’s no surprise that her previous work has been nominated for numerous prizes and published in a variety of well-respected literary journals.

IR Verdict: Kim Chinquee’s PIPETTE is an inventive and intelligent novel with writing so spare and carefully considered that not a word is wasted. A gem of a book."

—IndieReader

“A woman confronts her personal demons against the backdrop of the Covid-19 pandemic in Chinquee’s novel in flash fiction.

Elle appreciates order. She’s an Air Force vet with an adult son (who is currently serving in the military himself) and lives in Buffalo with her partner, the fitness-obsessed Henry, and their four dogs. She teaches fiction writing at a local college. She jogs. She tries to learn to ski, though she finds it exhausting and terrifying. In therapy, she explores her relationship with her late father and the ways his schizophrenia affected their relationship. She also consults her spirit guide—whom she imagines as a man in a beret—who helps her reconnect with her memories of childhood. Henry’s emerging Trumpism proves a strain on the relationship—one that gets even worse when he loses his job at the car dealership. Henry kicks Elle out of the house they share, and immediately after she moves into a new neighborhood, Covid hits. In this new life of isolation, Elle adjusts her priorities. “The mattress in the guestroom is comfy, and the frame is broken, so the mattress just sits on the floor...Sometimes I fall asleep to the TV. Some nights I get up and go to the master bedroom, which is clean and organized. Most nights I fall asleep in one bed, wake in the night and move to the other.” As the pandemic wears on, she confronts her troubled relationships with the now-dead men in her family—her father, her uncle, her paternal grandfather—as well as her attachment to dogs and her compulsion to stay in shape. But will greater self-understanding require her to relax her grip on the ordered life she’s long struggled to build?

Chinquee’s measured prose breaks over the reader like shallow, slow-moving waves. Here, she jogs in the early days of the pandemic: “The park is pretty bare now. I miss the bustle of bikers, children, people on the golf course. There’s a zoo on one portion of the park and I see some cars there. The zoo is closed. I breathe and take my steps. I opt for another loop. My legs feel heavy. My heart feels heavy. My lungs are pretty healthy.” The novel unfolds as a series of flash fiction stories, most less than a page long, each with its own title. The reading experience is not so different than that of an autofiction novel—The Department of Speculation (2014) by Jenny Offill and The End of the Story (1995) by Lydia Davis come to mind. The narrative unfolds slowly through the accumulation of trivial details: the positions of the dogs on the couch, the exercises Henry is doing, the meals Elle makes with her Vitamix. Chinquee’s moves are oblique, and they often take Elle and the reader away from the most engaging material in favor of the mundane. In doing so, however, the novel replicates a bit of what it’s like to repress or avoid or deny one’s personal issues, sprinting (or biking or skiing) ever forward in the hopes our problems can be outrun.

A quiet, fragmentary novel about the chaos roiling beneath life’s surface.”

-Kirkus Reviews

"At turns unsettling and inspirational, PIPETTE tracks the lengths one woman must go to keep herself healthy, sane, and safe. When the narrator moves out of her boyfriend’s home because of threatening behavior, she must grapple with not only rebuilding a home for herself but also with the resurfacing of troubling memories from her past, memories of playing nice to stay safe. As the COVID-19 pandemic advances, the narrator, a writer and English professor, takes a temporary job as a lab technician analyzing test results, finding satisfaction and even pleasure in the precision of her pipetting skills. A tool used to transfer measured liquids safely and accurately, the pipette might also serve as metaphor for how the narrator calibrates her daily activities, parceling the day into writing, self-care, and grueling exercise routines, ever pushing the limits of her body. “I study variations of my heart rate,” she says. The pipette is also an apt metaphor for Chinquee’s prose—sharp, precise chapters, each with the compression and satisfaction of a flash fiction. A moving novel of crystalline structure."

-Eva Heisler, author of READING EMILY DICKINSON IN ICELANDIC

“This extraordinary novel tells the story of a woman’s ordinary days, lived under the twin shadows of war and the Covid-19 pandemic. In elegantly compressed prose, each short chapter opens a window onto an event or encounter. Sometimes we barely glimpse these moments, seen as if from a passing train. Sometimes the window widens into a door and we’re invited inside: kitchen, bedroom, night streets, park. The narrator meditates on time passing, on life and death and meaning, all while focused on the details of each day. Here she is, massaging kale for salad. Here she is, missing her puppy during a workout. Here she is, in bed with a man who kisses her softly, then leaves the next day. Here she is, buying scrubs for a job at a Covid testing center, which brings back memories of time in the military, of faraway family, of the sickness that hovers everywhere at once. What a gorgeous book, full of believable and urgent details that capture this moment with wisdom and precision. Understated and generous, Kim Chinquee’s beautiful debut novel is a delight to read.”

—Carol Guess, author of Girl Zoo and Sleep Tight Satellite

“Pipette is Kim Chinquee’s novel of a fifty-something single woman navigating the life challenges of relationships, career and family history in the age of COVID.Chinquee, a rock star in the flash fiction world, has published several award-winning collections of flash fiction. The chapters in this novel are flash-like in length and they propel the reader through the story, like scrolling through a TikTok feed. It’s hard to put down.Her prose is spare and clean and the narrative voice is dispassionate, which only makes the story more dramatic, more powerful, more heartbreaking, and ultimately more uplifting. It is the story of a woman who does not let her fears control her life. It is a story of courage and triumph. Highly recommended.”

Len Joy—author of Dry Heat and Casualties and Survivors

”What makes a life and gives it meaning? In Pipette, Kim Chinquee explores this question through a hypnotic examination of daily rituals: how we care for the body, the self, and others; our behaviors as friends, lovers, and consumers. Like a lid of ice over a lake, these everyday acts support us through triumph and tragedy. But when the Covid pandemic shatters the world and its surfaces, Chinquee shows the reader in deft and compelling language that sometimes diving far into the depths is the only path to survival.”

—Emma Bolden, Author of The Tiger and the Cage

"In her new book, Pipette, Kim Chinquee deftly explores the possible ranges of meaning that can grow out of the declarative. Frequently, we are invited to examine her speaker caught in her own rut, drawn in the prosaic domestic. But these pieces are more than mere portraiture; instead, they are expert studies in the range of significance that arises from a single moment, no matter its seeming insignificance. This an author who knows how to take nothing for granted!"

—Kyle McCord, Author of Reunion of the Good Weather Suicide Cult