Blurring Lines, Fraying Edges: A Review of We Might As Well Light Something On Fire by Ron MacLean

“There is something particularly compelling about a detached foot, he says. Something sad. Almost Lonely.”

—from “Unfound”

Remember silly putty? Back in the day. When you kneaded the polymer dough into a pancake, pressed in headlines and comics from the Funny Pages. Doonesbury, Garfield, Peanuts. After you peeled away the newspaper revealing your new creation, you tugged and pulled, twisted the words, distorted the images. It was like having a fun house mirror in the palm of your hand. Then you rolled the political commentary, the cat’s ponderings and Charlie Brown, all that existential angst into a ball. If you pulled the sphere apart and peered inside, you could still see the essence, the infinite possibilities, amid the swirl of ink.

This is what it’s like to read Ron MacLean’s short story collection We Might As Well Light Something On Fire, published by Braddock Ave Books, where he stretches the boundaries of storytelling, plays with form, presses his thumb into the life of his imaginings, blurring lines, fraying edges, playing with time and space, following threads of energy, but always with the intention to question what it means to be human, to search for political and social justice, to expose our feelings of alienation, to illuminate the never ending quest for connection.

The sixteen stories divided into three sections are often off-kilter, zany and absurd. Consider: A quinceañera for a cat named Egg in “Quinceañera.” Or, dancing goats clad in tan raincoats, porkpie hats and Ray-Bans hiding in plain sight from their executioner, a theoretical physicist turned butcher in “Lesser Escape Artists.” Or disarticulated feet washing ashore in British Columbia, five in total, wearing size 12 running shoes in “Unfound.” Or a friendly haunting by turn of the century Wisconsin politicians in “What Remains” where a former Assistant US Attorney finds a father/son duo hiding in her bathtub. They hang around fixing her plumbing, cooking dinner, enjoying cable TV and facilitating the donation of food to Occupy Wall Street protestors while she battles the Lockport, NY police department over custody of her father’s ashes.

MacLean interlaces excerpts of recipes, musical refrains, travel guide books, historical anecdotes. He spins time in a blender, scrambles sentences like refrigerator poetry magnets. “River Song,” a prose poem like song lyrics, recounts again and again the saga of a dead girl, a doctor, a bridge, Blinky and Ray Ray and a freezer full of tinfoil wrapped money. With each retelling, the truth like memory becomes malleable, more elusive; it erodes away like the banks of a river.

Despite its unconventional underpinnings, the collection begins with and disperses throughout realistic straight forward narratives, in an earnest voice that’s like a conversation. A confessional. Grounded in the here and now — with keenly observed details — leaving head space for the surreal complexities to come. MacLean crafts dialogue and interior musings that are clipped and fragmented, proffered in inhospitable environs, highlighting an acute sense of dislocation.

In the opening story, “Toilet,” the narrator attends a birthday party for someone he doesn’t like enough because she has no need to shine. His thoughts ping pong off the concrete columns in the large industrial open space, a former toilet paper manufacturing concern, now an apartment. He’s not where he’d like to be in his career. He opines that he’s recently lost his context. Confides that he keeps a goat to clean his yard, to make conversation at parties, but mostly for the company. He’s connected to all of these people, he’s friends with them in one way or another, but feels alienated, disjointed. He’s so desperate, he’s willing to go home with a woman whether she’s “sexy or sick as a dog.” The partygoers are reduced to body parts in his mind: the mustache, the sexy clavicle, an ear. Everything is out of context. Even the party food doesn’t makes sense in this hipster Northeast enclave, in which the hosts serve biscuits and gravy.

In a triptych of stories “Prostate Frank Finds True Love,” “Bounce Goes Kissy-Kissy,” and “The Hemorrhoid Holds Court,” a group of mostly middle-aged men meet for their weekly Friday morning coffee klatch. Reduced to nicknames, Bounce, Max the Grabber, Hemorrhoid, Alter Boy, as if a person’s entire being can be summed up in a word or a phrase, they chat, each man assuming his roll, but no one is really listening.

MacLean’s musings of isolation are most profound in the “Night Bus” a travelogue of a tourist excursion to see the uppermost reaches of Northern Finland, the barren tundra, and the constellations. Initially the narrator is optimistic, energized by the crisp cold air.

“And the air. I can’t get enough of it, It’s so, I don’t know what. Cold. More than clean. Something that makes my pores sing Buddy Holly. Bjork. Like mountain air poured through a trumpet filled with lake water.”

He feels boundless love for the communion of parkas, mittens and boots, bib pants and balaclavas. He tries to communicate, practices in his head the sentences he parses together from his translation phrase book, but he never quite hits his mark. He tells a young woman she looks hot in her coat. A fellow traveler, “the Talker” is everywhere chatting everyone up from the bus driver to passengers, to the snack man. The Talker rhapsodizes: “I want to get closer and closer to unadorned yearning.”

There’s a disorientation that comes from long trips, the rhythm of miles lulling the brain to sleep. As the narrator clenches his frost bitten fingers (result of a failed college romance) he contemplates the polar night when the sun doesn’t rise above the horizon for 51 days. The Talker wants him to admit, “I have been lost in this night before.” The narrator refuses to voice the Talker’s directive but his despair is palpable.

I was frustrated at times with my inability to decipher the meaning, the author’s intent in some of these stories such as the madcap “Lesser Escape Artists.” I didn’t mind searching the dictionary or questioning the Googleverse. I desperately wanted to unlock the mystery of string theory and its connection to Mailer and Mahler and string cheese and goats shuffle stepping to what I presumed was Thomas Dolby’s “She Blinded Me With Science.” How was all that connected to the couple who bring a philosophizing rabbit of the wrong sex to a butcher shop to determine the state of the woman’s womb?

But perhaps that’s the point, the pondering and not knowing with certainty is what it’s all about.