Speak of Fondly: A Review of Colin Winnette's Fondly

To say that the two novellas in Colin Winnette’s Fondly are unrelated would be an understatement, as each is wholly different from the other in style, tone, substance, voice, character, plot – pretty much any identifiable feature.  In the current fiction marketplace, this type of range is rare.  Story collections are looked upon with more favor if the pieces are “linked” by some ostensible trait like setting or character or theme, or otherwise cobbled into an illusory whole that will be more satisfying to the reader (at least that’s what I suspect is the motive).

This is why Fondly is such a breath of fresh air.  The disparate novellas display a writer unafraid of diversity and capable of honing the unique voice that each story dictates.

The first novella, titled In One Story, the Two Sisters, is singular in its scope and presentation.  Dispensing with plot, the tale consists of a series of vignettes that are by turns surreal, hilarious, and heartbreaking.  The tie that binds is the presence of the titular two sisters, who morph into an array of shapes, people, and situations, each foregrounded by the vignette titles, which are meant to be taken literally:  For instance, in “In one story, the two sisters are Olympic swimmers,” the sisters spend their time swimming literally across an ocean as part of their training.  Among their crew are a writer, a Navigator, and a nefarious young man who introduces them to the gustatory joys of raw Orca meat.

The situations range from the mundane (“In one story, the two sisters decided to take a trip together”) to the absurd (“In one story, the two sisters were an olive at the bottom of a dirty martini and were clipped in two by a set of large teeth”) to the comically specific (“In one story, the two sisters were reasonably well-behaved nuns”).

Many of the vignettes bear the sheen of folk tales, set in forests or farms or old homes, with characters only referred to as “the old man” or “the younger sister” and so on.  And yet even this folk tale aspect doesn’t remain predictable, as some of the pieces feature trappings of the modern world such as computers, Mickey Mouse, and country music played on tape deck of a kidnapper’s car.  The result is a pleasantly strange experience for the reader, perhaps not for folks who desire easy connections and conventional narrative arcs.  But the novella will surprise and challenge, and Winnette’s prose is restrained yet artful:

She let her nails grow until they were tools.  Her hair’s gone wild.  She’s thin as a rake, holding out day after day for that smack of warm pumpkin, of spiced apple.  The sound of the wind is her asking kindly, plaintively, for the treat.  The scratching sound is her losing her patience.  The shatter comes when it’s already too late. (57)

The second novella, Gainsville, is more conventional, although it also takes risks:  most notably, the story is structured like a chain.  For example, we begin with Sonny and his unnamed brother, who progress quickly through adolescence until the brother has a child named Jiminy.  Then the story moves on to Jiminy; after eight pages, he has become an adult.  The focus shifts to Jiminy’s ex-girlfriend, who bears Jiminy’s child Osiris but raises him with a different father.  We follow Osiris’s sister Magdelene for a while, and so on.  Once we leave behind a character, we never encounter them again.

What connects the characters, and what propels the story forward, are the trappings of growing up – primarily the hormonal, sexual, and social pressures of adolescence – but also of finding one’s way through the world.  The home lives are grim and unsentimental, and the people in Gainsville’s universe constantly suffer in the wake of their parents’ (and their own) mistakes.  They get hooked on meth; they vandalize neighbors’ houses; they impregnate their teenage babysitters.  Whether or not they are redeemed is beside the point.  They are flawed and human, and therefore they are worth inhabiting.

In contrast to the first novella, Winnette’s prose is sparse:

The phone call was an update on the cat’s behavior.  She was moodier than usual.  She wasn’t eating much.  He was worried.  The next was an automated voice.  He let it play out while he scrubbed the cups and the bowls in the sink.  He pried the dried food loose with his fingernails.  The voicemail ended.  His girlfriend clicked on.  She was feeling better.  The whole thing was terrifying.  She’d thought she was going to die.  She could have died.  You don’t get many second chances in life. (174)

The universe of Gainsville is one in which humanity is displayed not through grand gestures or investment in individual failure or success, but rather through each new generation’s stubborn, irrevocable drive to simply exist, and to find in the smallest moments of affection the threads that tie us to everyone who lives in the shadows of our failures.

Three Ways of the Saw: Matt Mullins’s Walk on the Wild Side

It’s not hard to imagine the seamier side of life: it is, after all, shoved in our faces day after day in the papers, on cable news networks, and in late-night dramas aired at such an hour when all good children have supposedly gone to bed. Drugs, hookers, bikers, gangs — all seem to have their mysterious attraction as if we, the viewers, secretly wish to experience the thrill of it all without risking the danger of its very stark reality.

Growing up in the sixties in New York City, these realities were a daily part of everyday life, at least for some of us. Want to cop an ounce? Head to Washington Square Park in Greenwich Village where you’ll either score what you came for or, more than likely, get ripped off. Sex and the city? In those days, the phrase referred to a lot more than just the name of a Hollywood movie. Peep shows, prostitutes and pimps ruled the streets off of 8th Avenue which was lined with hardcore bookstores and triple X theaters.

Fast forward to Los Angeles in the eighties and life became even grittier. Punk rock ruled. Bands with names like The Germs, Black Flag, and The Circle Jerks rankled the airwaves with their music while films like The Decline of Western Civilization documented their often squalid lives. East Hollywood, in those days, was grungy and hip, another nod to middle class kids who wanted to experience the seedier side of life. Mosh pits were the rage, elimination dancing was hot and rowdy, and dark, smoke-filled nightclubs were the norm.

Perhaps the best book to capture the grit and grunge of the underground is William S. Burroughs 1959 classic Naked Lunch. This gut-wrenching book does more than just describe the sordid side of life. Unlike CSI: Miami and the like, it forces the reader to experience it almost first hand, so that, by the time you have finished with it, you have come as close as possible to the underworld of sex and drugs. In the end, you are left so sick and numb that it is as if you have directly encountered the reality-bend of hallucinatory life.

Three Ways of the Saw, by Matt Mullins, is, in some ways, similar though you will not come out of it with the same raw feeling that Burroughs leaves you with. The stories are often gritty and in-your-face, mustering up Midwestern street life in Detroit and its suburbs. There are the inevitable manifestations of sex, drugs and rock and roll and the not so inevitable Catholic school girls whose religious upbringing seems to push them to the opposite of what was intended by those good priests and nuns.

Yet, unlike Burroughs, these stories are page turners, creating tension in the reader which can only be mitigated by reading on. And, unlike Burroughs, there is redemption: characters whose lives have often been formed by a staid upbringing (Catholic school, solid middle class parents, etc.) who, unwillingly or not, fall between the cracks only to discover their own vulnerabilities and, in the end, are reduced to the common thread that binds us all: a humanity struggling with the reality of what it means to be alive in modern-day America.

There is guilt here as well — Catholic guilt stoked by Irish irascibility — a lot of soul-searching and, in the end, a confrontation with self which sometimes, but not always, leads to deliverance.

The book is divided into three sections, each containing longer stories as well as shorter, experimental pieces. Curiously, this format lends structure to a landscape of setting and character which often does not seem structured at all. And, like the Winnebago in “No Prints. No Negatives,” we meander through towns and deserts, through cemeteries and cities, through the lives of those who populate this landscape in a Travels with Charley-like journey that takes us through the wilderness and delivers us in tact back to our comfortable lives.

Readers will find Three Ways a bumpy ride, as it jolts them out of tranquility and takes them through the ups and downs of its characters’ lives. From the nameless guard in “The Way I See It,” who exhibits empathy towards a hooker while he comes to terms with his own guilt and failure, to Danny in “Dead Falls” who is forced to confront his sexuality and his self-doubt through a friendship that straddles staid suburban life and urban grit, readers will find themselves in unknown territory that smacks of familiarity: a familiarity that we are all, in the end, capable of the worst and the best that life has to offer.