Peter Markus's We Make Mud

But us brothers, we knew what it meant to be better than dead. We knew that when things die they sometimes just then begin to live.

It is moments like this within Peter Markus’s We Make Mud that make you read and reread sentences over and over. So simple and so understated, but, in many ways, those two sentences are at the very heart of this novel in stories.

Told in plural first person with the occasional transition to singular, a story about two brothers who call each other Brother, not Jimmy or John, which, as we’re told by them, are their names. There are a few other characters, but mostly it is the brothers. The most noticeable thing about this book, these stories, is the prose. It is not the kind of prose that shimmers ecstatically. It is deliberate and in such a way that it changes what you thought fiction writing could be. Not because it’s maybe somehow the way everyone should’ve always been writing, but because, for the first time, you realize that writing can look like this, can feel like this. There’s a distinct rhythm to the words and the syntax and grammar of the sentences should be awkward, but somehow manage to never be. Repetition is usually seen as a bad thing in prose, but these stories delight in repetition, and it works to a dizzying degree. And the book is built on this repetition of phrases, of scenes, of revisiting variations of already told stories. And that’s part of it, too, not only to repeat, but to vary, in the way that jazz uses variations on a theme to expand upon the initial melody.

And it turns this novel into rituals and prayer. It is a prayer. It is a collection of fairy-tales in the most serious of ways. There is violence, but it is never for the sake of violence: it becomes ritual. And the repetition is part of this. It is a prayer about childhood and what it means to have a single place, a river, be the entire world. Told by brothers who are children, reality bends and blurs and the impossible becomes common, either as daydream and fancy or actuality, the reader never knows for certain. It is a book that surprises and delights even as it becomes ugly and course but more so as it shimmers and grows, glowing.

We are brothers. We are each other’s voice inside our own heads. This might sting, us brothers will say to each other brother. Us brothers, we will raise back the hammer in our hand. We will drive that rusty, bent-back nail right through Brother’s hand. Neither of us brothers will wince, or flinch, or make with our mouth the sound of a brother crying out. Good, Brother, Brother will say. Brother will be hammering in a second nail into us brothers’ other hand when the father of us brothers will step out into the back of our backyard. Sons, our father will call this word out. Both of us brothers will turn back our boy heads toward the sound of our father to hear whatever it is that this father is going to say to us brothers next. It will be a long few seconds. The sky above the river where the steel mill sits shipwrecked in the river’s mud, it will be dark and quiet. Somewhere, though, the sun will be shining. You boys be sure to clean up back here before you come back in, the father of us will say. This father will turn back with his voice and go back away into the inside of this house. Us brothers, we will turn back to face back with each other. Us brothers will raise back with our hammer, will line up that rusted nail.

There are so many more moments I wish I could put in this review as I found myself highlighting almost whole pages. Because it is not the sentences themselves that hit hard, but the images that Markus builds over the course of five or ten or forty sentences: surreal, surprising, dark, beautiful, grotesque, magical.

We Make Mud is a great and short book.

Something About A Keeper—Peter Markus’s We Make Mud

When I was a kid, my dad and his brother and his brother’s sons and I would go fishing for trout a lot. We’d go out to a lake in Eastern Washington. We’d catch a lot, throw back a lot. Keep a few to barbecue. We used a lot of charcoal. My dad and his brother would send us cousins and brothers out for paper plates and the small kind of grills they sell for twenty bucks at the bait shop.

I don’t remember learning how to gut a fish but I remember the gutting. I remember having a dream once out there at the lake, about being gutted myself, a knife running me up from asshole to mouth, some giant thumb the size of a knee cleaning me out and running me under an enormous hose. I remember telling my dad and cousin-brothers and uncle about it. One of them said, Yeah, I’ve had that dream.

This, for me, was some way of defining family.

Reading Peter Markus’ most recent book, We Make Mud, I felt myself again and again reeled back to those fishing trips, and I’ve been trying to figure the why. It’s a marvelous thing, this book, one that makes good on the promise of the shorter, previous story books Good, Brother and The Singing Fish. And like those, in We Make Mud makes much music out of a deliberate, repetitive river-language of fish and brothers. From the title story:

“Us brothers, we kept reaching down, with our hands, down into the mud. We kept on with our hands reaching down, into the mud, and when we did, us brothers, we kept on pulling up mud. But then once, when we reached with our hands down into the mud, us brothers, we pulled up Girl. We pulled Girl up, out of the mud, until Girl became a tree. Us brothers, up this girl tree, up, us brothers, we climbed.”

But like a muddy river, you can’t step into the same Peter Markus sentence twice. The continually torquing and repeating language wraps you up, disorientingly, more like lahar than river, until all you see is the river and the fish and mud. And perhaps this is what it is that reels me back to childhood. From “The Singing Fish”:

“Look here: there was a dirty river in our dirty river town. There were dirty river fish in this here dirty river that us brothers liked to catch. There was a house, just up from this river, with a back-of-the-yard part where, us brothers, we liked to take the fish that we’d catch out of this dirty river and, us brothers, we liked to chop off the heads off these fish.”

It’s childlike, this simplicity, in which a world forms slowly, and out of repetition. As kids we do the same thing every day. We wake. We play. We eat. We play. We sleep. We wake. We play. One day we’re playing and Boy appears. One day we’re playing and Girl appears. It seems as if by magic. Like the first time we tossed dirt into water and made mud.

On Peter Markus’s Bob, or Man on Boat

I’m usually late getting to books, because I have this dramatic assumption that books are responsible for finding you. I might have stolen this idea from the Lester Bangs of Almost Famous rather than the Lester Bangs who I used to want to be. I didn’t like Almost Famous but at the time it came out I wrote music reviews and interviewed bands for the now defunct Salt for Slugs, and I would read old reviews by Bangs and Hunter Thompson, in the hopes that, I don’t know, I could grow up to be somebody.

Yesterday I read Peter Markus’ Bob, or Man on Boat. It’s as thin as the skin of a blister, and as warm as cigarette’s cherry. It’s a fish tale. Moby Dick is referenced — “Call me Bob” — there’s a fish who should be caught. There are relationships that pulse and jangle, bob as though on the water.

I’ve never read the word Bob so many times, and not got offended. It’s a peaceful name to me now.

There’s a scene in Great Expectations where Pip discovers Joe can’t read. That, while Joe often sits by the fire with a book, he is merely finding the letters of his own name. If there is a Bob out there, with a similar condition, this book is assuredly for him.

But there is a greater quality to this work than this. A repetition fantastic. A rose is a rose is a rose. A fish is a fish is a fish.

Markus’ story telling is elegantly out of focus. The aperture of his imagination is wide. The characters in the scene are seen, but all else on the perimeter is blur. This is unique for a story that takes place outside.

The river is a river. It’s not a ribbon of wet green slung between to hills as though a length of rope dangling from the branches of a tree.

The fish is a fish. It is not a shiny fleck of flesh beneath the surface of the choppy water, smiling mildly with the flash of sun.

Or some shit.

There is an agenda: to catch a fish.

There is a complication beyond that: families buckle beneath the strain of addiction to river.

After that, there are lovely muted hues. Blues and greens, yet somehow piquant with emotion.

The story stretches on beyond the 133 pages. The conclusion is in absentia.

What is it then?

A fish tale, where the fish is not gutted.

A story about two men on one river hunting to find a thing they know they’d only throw back.

So what are the 133 pages: a fish on a boat, naked in the absence of water, its gills fumbling for something to breathe, its eyes wild with fear.

But nothing is greater than almost dying. And while Markus might not produce a carcass with this thin novel — or a trophy well mounted — he allows us to catch and release the moments in our own way. He gives us a story to hold.