This a slim book about spaces. The spaces we inhabit, the spaces we invade. It all starts with a burglar whose taste for stealing tape decks (it’s the 70s!) is replaced by by his desire to simply exist in other people’s homes, consider their lives, drink their coffee and steal their used ashtrays.
There’s a strange feeling to being in someone else’s house, especially when they’re not home. We know that each item has its place, its emotional connections and history. Home robbery is a great violation of privacy, regardless of what is actually stolen. Magnetic Fields exists inside that feeling, both the field we create by living within it, and those fields others create that we can enter or attempt to penetrate.
From Albert the burglar, the novel moves on to other characters, other lives. The last person burglarized is a composer, who moves to a summer home with his family. He considers the inhabitants of that house, and the point of view shifts to enter their lives, and how their home is now invaded by the composer and his family, much like Albert invaded theirs.
Loewinsohn is a poet. Magnetic Fields is composed of short, tight sentences. There’s nothing lyrical about it, and “lyrical” is what I associate with poetry even though I know that is incomplete and wrong. It is only over time that the poetry influence of the book becomes clear: its structure. Passages recur, inexplicably, across chapters. Images repeat. Certain sexual acts or specific sounds. There is most likely some mathematical structure behind it; it elevates both the cohesion of the narrative and the discomfort conjured by the constant invasions of privacy.
The Scrying Orb 