Native Grey: Andrea Rinard Reviews Chuck Augello's The Inexplicable Grey Space We Call Love

Chuck Augello’s debut collection of short stories, The Inexplicable Grey Space We Call Love, presents a retinue of Everyman characters and their stories, revealing quotidian reality so painful and recognizable that it hurts, wonderfully. Augello doesn’t explore or examine loneliness, or hope, or grief or love as much as he breathes closer and closer to those ubiquitous human experiences, detail by detail. The characters who pass through Augello’s gaze express the exceptionality of the everyday, leaving us blinking and shaken in the marvel of the universe behind the faces of characters who are achingly familiar.

Flynn, the first character we meet in “Pizza Monks,” is an appropriate gateway to the stories that follow in this collection. As he weighs the ethics and inconvenience of staying after-hours to make pizzas to cater a self-immolation, Flynn speaks of the motions of kneading dough as muscle memory. This idea serves as an underpinning metaphor through the subsequent stories as the characters either succumb to or break free from the habitual motions of being human. Brother Phap Dong, the Buddist monk intent on setting himself on fire, exhorts Flynn to “find your pain and make an offering to it.” For all of Augello’s characters, the pain is merely the commonplace pain of being human. Their offerings are as disparate and profound as redemption, absolution, enlightenment, or simply momentary respite from the inevitable messiness of life.

For Kevin in “Smoke,” the pain is steeped in his regret of one youthful choice that has doomed him. Years later, his older, successful brother, Jerry, wants him to burn down his over-mortgaged, post-recession McMansion, and Kevin can see no way to refuse. Augello shows how the forks and bends in a life’s trajectory are as illusive and potentially destructive as fire. Kevin’s one bad decision lingers like a stench of smoke, cloying and unmistakable.

In “The Prerogatives of Magic,” a seven-year-old girl named Chloe accidentally makes her mother disappear, and the father is left not questioning whether or not his daughter’s “tricks” are real but simply and quietly begging for his wife to reappear. It doesn’t matter whether Chloe has a power that “just comes.” Instead, Augello presents the magic of two people who find “a comfortable spot and try to hold on.” Even through ten years of marriage, there is the magic of a husband who makes his wife a cup of tea every morning and leaves it for her when she emerges from the shower. He offers his pride in exchange for her return even as he imagines “a hotel room with her blouse and skirt neatly folded on the desk, her underwear dropped at the foot of the bed.”

In “Little Green Everything,” Keith is out of work and feeling “obsolete” and “useless.”  He struggles with the brutality of the modern world at the same time he tries to help his wife Penny through her response to it. “No other planet hurts like we do,” Penny says, and Augello distills that agony into moments that ache with the simplicity and banality of a bruise. That throb continues in “All God’s Children” as an unnamed veteran and a capuchin monkey liberated from a research lab mourn the loss of Kristin, the woman they both love who was killed in a hit and run.

Augello’s Dash in “Cool City,” clings to and depends on the reliability of numbers and the presence of fire extinguishers. He finds unexpected respite and acceptance from a “level one fast love practitioner” while in the oncoming path of a hurricane. Annabelle has her own gale force impact on Dash as she extols the virtues of avoiding finding reasons not to love someone while offering unexpected and heartbreaking moments of grace and love. Like Dash, William K. in “Languid” finds himself moved incrementally into changing from a listless and indifferent Best Buy employee who encourages his customers to pray in supplication to the appliances he’s selling for a 10% discount to a man rocketing into a new velocity.

Through the extraordinary, ordinary catalysts of murder, suicide, infidelity, computer code tattoos, natural disasters, alien abduction, arson-for-hire, mysterious packages, and the poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke, Augello’s cast of characters are familiar like a drop of water placed under a microscope. The proximity and access Augello provides is his offering to us and the heartbreaking wonder of being human. Each character is a foreign land for which we need no map or translator. As we follow the characters, we realize that “inexplicable grey space” is our native home, filled with people who are just like everyone we know. Just like us.