His Stumbling, Almost Dream-like Existence: On Cody James's The Dead Beat

The Dead Beat is a coming of age story for the slacker generation — surely, this being what some might label as Slacker Fiction—those who find themselves between great swathes of adulthood (school and careers, namely), unstuck in time with nothing but (little) money to burn and carnal instincts to explore. It sheds light on a particular foursome of dysfunctional twenty-somethings, childhood friends—not just meth addicts, but addicts of alcohol, of themselves . . . addicts to wasting away — and The High, not only from drugs, but from various facets of life, the relationships they take for granted (as we all do) and reform (again, as we all do) and others we cultivate from chance meetings. From living on the fringe, from not being a sellout and doing your own thing.

There aren’t many likable characters here, which isn’t necessarily a novel approach towards an empathetic audience (see, for instance, every character in Ellis’ Rules of Attraction, various Updike novels featuring Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom, Leopold Bloom from Joyce’s Ulysses), but somehow you find yourself smiling at the antics of it all. Even though these people may be a far cry from you, there are parts of them you recognize in yourself and in your generation. These friends — lead by the affable-yet-burned-out one-time writer Adam, our guide into this world of debauchery and apathy — are addicts, users, and the story follows them, through their ramblings, through their few ups and many downs, seeing their friends suffer but doing nothing, standing idly by as the world, the lives they had once planned out, pass them by.

There are moments of clarity in the book where Adam “wakes up” from his stumbling, almost dream-like existence, and as much as we want him to kick his habits and grow up, he doesn’t. You realize this is real life, not any sort of make-believe, and there are people out there, in every city, in every town, just like this. It’s not easy to kick habits so engrained in you—and it’s the lifestyle in general, not the specificities of the lifestyle. Their daily regimens, what they have grown to expect out of life, has molded onto them like some second skin and can’t so easily be picked off. Only in the last few paragraphs do we see a change in a few of them after a heinous event transpires, one that, potentially, could rocket them all on the path to righteousness once and for all.

But then the book ends.  It’s gone. And we don’t know what actually does happen at this pivotal turning point: Do they see the error of their ways, the irreparable damage they’ve caused their bodies and their minds and move on, or do they go right back to their old ways, those familiar ways?  We don’t ever find out, and that’s the point, really, that it’s not up to us, that people in this position, they have to help themselves, so the book ends, taking it out of our hands entirely, letting these characters’ lives live on in obscurity.

James’ writing is concise, not flashy, and rarely deviates from its set course — it lays out for us, almost diorama-like, the sets and characters, and doesn’t need this glitz and glamour that many young writers feel is necessary but, more often than not, isn’t. In fact, her terse style — which readily avoids fluttering up in the clouds with long, drawn out idioms and unnecessary dialog — strengthens the story: It’s these maddening, heart-wrenching characters, the snippets of human we see in them from time to time and their interactions, and the experiences they fall backwards into, that define the book, and with such color already present, anything more would take away and lessen the impact.

The Dead Beat truly offers a worm’s-eye-view of the world, through one deadbeat after another, and while there are plenty out there who have written or will continue to write about the dredge of society — those oft-overlooked “slackers” that represent, on a much larger scale, all of us in general (but, who are too afraid to let go, some might argue, as the dredge find so easy to do) — but James does it with such wit and style, with such a tight narrative that opens up just enough to let us in and poke around without overdoing it and creating pointless caricatures, one wonders how any could ever top her.

Tiny Pearls in a Big World

These people that litter Mary Miller’s stories in Big World are nearly broken and almost just as unlikable. Or that is to say they are living mostly unlikable lives, because Miller’s characters — the predominance of which are young, underachieving women — are not unlikable in the ways, say, Bret Easton Ellis or Jonathan Franzen characters are unlikable. These characters are unlikable in the secret ways we don’t like ourselves, hiding those things we try to hide in a big world: “I’m sort of horrified by the things I tell myself when I’m the only one around to hear them,” one aimless narrator confesses — to herself — in the untidy closing story, “Not All Who Wander Are Lost.” Untidy and aimless, these are apt descriptions. Miller’s characters often resist change and the stories themselves can teeter on plotlessness, like the wheels of a pick-up truck spinning endlessly in the Tennessee mud. One narrator scrubs her addict boyfriend’s camper in reaction to his half-hearted and ultimately unfulfilled promise to bring the thing to the state park. Another narrator attempts an affair with a co-worker in the absence of her alcoholic boyfriend, but that too does not stand to last. Oftentimes, we’re left simply to wait for sunrise.

But Miller is adroit in her storytelling, and where these stories are slight in their action they are larger in scope. The characters share a hopelessness that is often found in Raymond Carver’s characters, a certain grittiness, here removed from Carver’s lush Pacific Northwest and trapped in the honky-tonk and trailer park South where the landscape is pocked with beer bottles and cigarette butts; full of cheating lovers and surrounded by Ruby Tuesdays, Taco Bells, IHOPs and Dairy Queens. The stories of Lorrie Moore, too, come to mind. Miller’s characters make the stupid decisions that have been thrust upon them by all their stupid yesterdays, all of it soaked with death, with divorce, with loss.

Yes, these stories are tiny pearls, each one propelled by Miller’s pinballing language that is lyrical in its sudden turns: “We stayed in a house on the beach and ate seafood and went to the outlet malls, but my father wouldn’t let me go in the water because once I got caught by a riptide and almost drowned and after that I got stung by a jellyfish and after that my mother died.” It is clear Miller loves these characters: for all their misgivings, the author does not condescend to them. For all their hopelessness, Miller lovingly imbues the tiniest grain of hope into each character, and only Miller herself believes in the power of that grain to be polished to pearl. She understands the pressures that weigh down on these characters, how these characters are all, self-referentially, “fucked in the head.”

And not for nothing, but the artifact itself is wondrous too. A beautiful soft cover pocket book with moody watercolor cover art that somehow serves to reinforce the heart of this collection, as if the one thing these characters can hold on to, cradled in small hands, a curious logic of holding such a small book and calling it Big World.