Review by Carole Mertz
Despite its many comic touches, I found Grace Before the Fall to be a serious book with a serious message. Its provenance is quite interesting: Lipschultz began the novel over forty years ago, but it did not reach the wider public until 2025. Lipschultz had been a student of John Irving, who first read the manuscript in 1982 and who promotes the work in the book’s foreword. Members of her dissertation committee at Ohio University furthered the novel along its way; later revised forms of the work became a one-woman show at New York’s New Federal Theatre and chapters of the work were published by The North Atlantic Review in 2002. Through these iterations, Grace Before the Fall became the significant work it is today, a thought-provoking and crafty entertainment, especially to anyone who experienced life in New York City’s 1970s.
Grace, a young career girl, makes an accidental discovery at her computer while selecting, at her boss’s command, specific housing units to be destroyed with their residents removed. She accidentally codes into a government site that has her computer / printer expectorating pages and pages of documents with their hundreds of subcategories.
In our AI dominated lives, we can readily relate to Grace’s circumstances. “What has she done?” she asks. Quoting from pgs. 103-104:
It’s then that a disparity strikes her, and she finds herself gazing back at the outpouring, containing more information than a person can take in, much less stomach. It is poison, is it not? …What is this thing called government? Isn’t it just the very grandest hubris there is? CIA in particular. Does she really want to know?… “Once I take this in,” she says aloud, “I will be part of it.”
She brands the file she has discovered, as “Frankenstein.” “It should hold everything most to be feared,” she states, “namely war and the instruments of war, the theory of war, the possibilities for Armageddon, all so cleverly arranged…” She confronts the unbearable realization that people in our era kill each other for reasons that have nothing to do with gaining food for survival.
The war theme and Grace’s dedication to Truth, is the crux of the novel. It has us racing through New York’s streets, avoiding the “authorities,” an oxymoron to Grace as she tries to survive her “undoing,” i.e. the “fall of Grace.” However, there is another “fall” offered through the delightful and passionate encounters she shares with two of her friends: the pianist who lives in her apartment building, and the doctor, who becomes Grace’s deepest love and sheerest (and sexiest) undoing.
I relate this in straightforward language; Lipschultz, however, relays her fantastic story by means of surrealistic visitations usually delivered into unidentified caverns of Grace’s unconscious after she has fallen asleep. Her imaginings come to her chiefly through the embodiments of a worm, a water lily, a housefly, and a Queen who is a bee. A green luminescence often announces the visitations. (Remember, dear reader, this is the psychedelic 1970s.)
What can we do for you? they ask. Grace answers: “Nothing I know of. But perhaps we’ll see what it is soon as it comes to be.” Grace, imprisoned, relies more and more on her visionaries.
Echoes of “high” transport her to a place of height. She finds herself rather high and looking down. Again, she wonders about the state of her body. She is quite aware that her body is locked, as it were, in a room where a bee —single handedly, as it were—has managed to upset a roomful of government officials, there to serve an elusive order of correction.
Grace has been arrested as a treasonous derelict. What will happen to her? Read the delicious book, dear friends, read the book!
Grace Before the Fall by Geri Lipschultz
Dark Winter Press, 2025
9781998441303
Carole Mertz is the author of Toward a Peeping Sunrise (Prolific Press, 2019), the poetry collection, Color and Line, (Kelsay Books, 2021), and a new collection Viewing Lyrical Landscapes, forthcoming 2027. Her recent essays and reviews are at World Literature Today, The Dalhousie Review, Cleaver Magazine, and (forthcoming) at Heavy Feather. Carole is book review editor at Dreamers Creative Writing. http://carolemertz.