Things that are Unanswerable; Moments that are Unpackagable: Tom Noyes's Spooky Action at a Distance

In his wonderful second story collection, Spooky Action at a Distance, Tom Noyes continues to explore the mysteries that surround us that we so often take for granted: faith, grace, and the irresistible urge to do things we know are not good for us.

In the brief but affecting “The Daredevil’s Wife,” the protagonist decides to go over Niagara Falls in a barrel. It’s a stunt he comes to almost haphazardly, ultimately choosing the barrel over crossing the Falls via tightrope because the former requires no skill: “This is the physics of the barrel: curl into a ball and hope. This is the geometry of Niagara: down.” His wife, anxious and afraid, asks him why: “Asks him over and over. But the daredevil has no answer.” He simply knows he has to, which strikes me as such a perfectly sad and human urge. The desire to do things that may hurt the oneswe love, and in the end leave us or them alone in the end. But we do them anyway.

In an interview with Scott Phillips, Dan Chaon (another author whose work I love) claims he himself is “not too interested in the idea of Truth, or even of ‘epiphany’ in fiction,” but rather “things that are unanswerable . . . those moments that are unpackagable.”

What could be more unanswerable than the kind of self-sabotage we catch ourselves practicing, the kind that injures those we care about the most, lying or hiding or putting our hearts’ deepest longings before theirs?

As he floats toward the roar of the Falls, the daredevil hears his wife singing and for the first time doubt consumes him, not at the choice he’s made but at what her singing might indicate. It’s a brilliant ending to a beautiful story in a book that’s full of them.

Grooving to Characters that Feel Vital and Awesome and Flawed

I cannot write a short story to save my life. Someone screwed me up somewhere along the way, either in high school English or college lit, or perhaps I should blame reality television or NPR news, or maybe it’s just a personality flaw – I am, after all, a consummate neurotic, secure enough, at least, to admit that I’m often uncomfortable in my own skin. Whatever the case, I suffer under the illusion that short fictions convey deep meanings, that they wrap tough little nuggets of truth in sweet story, that they communicate, that they do something.

Of course, this could be nothing more than a sign o’ the times, as we seem to think reading good for us the way eating spinach or running 5ks are, or can be. When I taught middle school Humanities, as I did for four years, I needed to prove via tests and five-paragraph essays that my students could dissect, summarize, and interpret a short piece of fiction. (No one really cared if they actually enjoyed reading.) “Everything is quantifiable,” my wife told me the other day, echoing the sentiments of educators across the country. But she teaches environmentalism and botany, where it’s clear, isn’t it, if a child can identify the parts of plant? How do we know if a kid ‘got’ a story?

Well, I’ll tell you what I got: a deep and abiding love of short fiction, along with a complex about writing it, a self-conciousness so deep, a set of approaches and questions – What’s my story’s theme? Who’s the protagonist and how can I show things about him or her? – that strikes me as entirely wrong, all work and no play, all head and no heart.

Julie Innis to the rescue! In an interview on Necessary Fiction, Innis said:

I think, and I say this as a former English teacher of fourteen years, one of the worst things to happen to “literature” is the demand from readers for analysis at the expense of empathy. When we teach young readers to hunt for clues to character, specific lines or gestures that are meant to reveal some sort of “deeper meaning,” I think we’ve pretty much fucked the whole thing up.

Amen to that, sister.

And now here she is, swooping down with her first collection of stories Three Squares a Day with Occasional Torture like a literary Avenger. I first encountered Innis’s fiction at a reading in Manhattan, the attentive audience decked out in dark jeans and well-pressed button-ups, faces freshly shaved or tastefully made-up. Innis did everything right, I thought. She took the stage with seriousness and poise, and then with egergy and engaging eye-contact read a story that featured the word ‘poontang,’ not once, but six times, if you count the variations ‘poon’ and ‘tang,’ as in, ‘Got the taste for tang when he was in Nam.’

“Do,” the story’s called, as in dojo, as in karate, as in ‘The Way of Do,’ ‘The Way of Action, the way of kicking some ass,’ of laying ‘the beadown.’ Nuts are shattered. Handjobs given. The tragedy of teenage angst plays out in all its vulgar extremes: sexual longing coupled with insecurity, boys posturing as men, attending bahmitzvahs and teasing exotic fish.

Carol Burnett is attributed with saying “comedy is tragedy plus time,” a cliché I picked up through Woody Allen’s movie Crimes and Misdemeanors. The fumblings of two adolesent boys trying to learn karate, and how to be men, are funny only when seen in the rearview mirror. To the kids in the moment, the stakes are all too real, the thought that the ‘poontang rainbow’ might be forever out of reach and maturity unobtainable, terrifying. “If you don’t laugh, you’d kill yourself ” — now that, Woody Allen did say.

Comedy can seduce you into wrestling with some of the fundamental issues of being human, and yet, comedy is unquantifiable. Explain a joke and you sap its punch-line of humor. ‘Laughter’s the best medicine,’ a husband tells his wife who’s dying of an inoperable brain cancer in Innis’s story “My Tumor, My Lover.” The wife names her tumor George and imagines what kind of man he might be if she could crack her head open and haul him out, as Zeus did with Athena. The woman’s wry moxie in the face of death has you grinning so hard, you’re only just aware of the crushing sadness lingering beneath her cracks, a minor-key counterpoint to the story’s light-hearted melody. It’s a lovely feat Innis accomplishes.

The stories in Three Squares a Day with Occasional Torture brim with imagination – a woman carries on an affair with a fly, the girl on the Swiss Miss box, Swiss Miss herself, comes to life and man, is she one nasty girl – and yet the work never feels unrealistic. I know that doesn’t quite make sense, but follow me for a moment. Like the work of Karen Russell or Haruki Murakami, Innis’s conviction in her imagination is such that she doesn’t try to lay it all out for the reader, sacrificing illumination for pontification, instead she seems to assume that you’ll hang with her sharply precise, rhythmic constructions and haunting imagery, and so you do, grooving to characters that feel vital and awesome and flawed, and awesomely flawed.

Innis follows the opposite impulse of what the over-anxious, over-workshopped writer does on the page, providing an antidote to the antiseptic world of “great literature” with its accumulation of analysis-ready details, quantifiable gestures, and grandiose emotional arcs that often lie only one step removed from melodrama. She reminds me of an ancient shaman, perhaps not so different from the Paleolithic cave painter in Chauvet who sketched a woman’s nether regions attached to the head of a bull, as seen in Werner Herzog’s brilliant documentary Cave of Forgotten Dreams. Herzog shows the evocative image, then cuts to a scientist talking about the primal importance of the combination of woman and bull, as evidenced by the myth of the Cretan minotaur and Pablo Picasso paintings like Guernica. Quantifying, quantifying, quantifying.

We’re talking about poontang stuck onto a bull’s head! Beautifully sketched, powerfully moving, and also funny. One can imagine the shaman giggling while he sketched it, and Innis would be there, laughing along with him. Sometimes, one should experience pleasure – of laughter, of emotion, of story –  and nothing else need be said.

The Big Lagowski: Savior of the World

Charles Bukowski freely decreed that after he turned 40 he stopped reading. Nothing was good, he said. Nothing was worth it anymore. I turned 43 recently and I have to admit, I had started to align myself with Hank’s controversial statement until I ran headfirst into Pat Pujolas’s wonderful book, Jimmy Lagowski Saves the World.

Due to personal preference, I don’t review collections of stories — I feel I’m much better suited at tackling longer works — but Pujolas’s acute, short pieces weave such a cohesive narrative of the human condition, that I can’t help but think of this as a protracted novel.

I am a sucker for starting off a book with some kind of a loud bang — a salvo fired above my head by the author announcing he or she is ready to eviscerate me: “Heads up, son . . . here it comes. Pay close attention now!” they say, and deliver a concussive propellant from their literary howitzer that nearly singes the hair on my head.  The first piece, “In Memoriam,” announces itself with this kind of ardor and static, and starts off a series of related taradiddles that follow the obtuse, curious twists of complicated, tragic, mostly broken lives in present day Midwest America.

Here you have Doreen, a 54-year-old divorced mother from Parma Heights, Ohio weighing her decision to board a bus chartered by her church group to a casino in West Virginia . . . as well as the choices she’s made in her life, and as a mother. There you have V., a retired maintenance man trying to confront his violent past while slowly descending into the madness brought on by his rising anger in a discount store checkout line. Julie’s first day at Starbucks is interrupted by a sudden, acute problem with a customer. Davis’s futile attempt at a seamless, night time bed routine with his three-year-old daughter while his wife is away parallels his failures and desperation in life. And then there’s Jimmy Lagowski himself: a badly burned, depressed, and possibly alien 20-year-old who casts the lone vote of dissension in a controversial murder trial.

These stories are all brilliant tableaux of real struggles and the sometimes paralyzing choices that pepper our daily, seemingly insignificant lives. Pujolas manages to channel the great, Modernist literature prose of Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio and Hemingway’s early Nick Adams stories. Dialogue is tight and sharp, and moves everything forward seamlessly. Hearing these characters speak, I found myself often thinking of David Mamet’s incising negotiations and palaver in Glengarry Glen Ross.

While I hate to go against one of my literary (anti)heroes, I can’t help but think that “reading life after 40” indeed gets better. There is good stuff out there. True, most of it lives in well-worn, handwritten notebooks that will likely never see the light of day, but from time to time the Literary Gods leak out some of their nectar and ambrosia to us mortals, and we are beatified with great, independent works like Pat Pujolas’s collection.

A Beautiful, Off-Kilter Viewpoint

“The horizon is a miasma of dream. Ghosts float through its skin and beckon me with snake-like arms. Wipe my eyes.”

There are few imaginations like Craig Wallwork’s. There’s a magic in his eyes, a beautiful off-kilter viewpoint that causes the world to turn in different directions, highlighting the bizarre and the caustic and the grotesque and the beautiful. And he’s certainly not afraid or ashamed to make the reader cringe at every sentence, making us oddly aware of our sphincters.

“‘Protect me,’ said the Minotaur.”

The stories in Quintessence of Dust create a world where Minotaur exist, drink too much, get in fights, and are afraid of the dark. But, more than that, the story “Men of Blood” is a profound meditation on friendship and the way that people grow together and then grow apart. It’s the kind of story where a man punching a Minotaur in the face can make you cry rather than be an act of heroism or a joke. He creates worlds where you can deliver a baby, kill a demon with an umbrella, and have your first kiss while hundreds of demons fly through the air, eating people just outside the bus you’re trapped in.

And though many of these stories push the boundary of possible and impossible, blurring reality’s lines, there are stories like “Railway Architecture,” a beautiful story about desire and commitment and the lengths one goes to for love.

“Three years after getting married, Peter Rankling fell in love with his wife, and about the same time, she fell out of love with him.”

“Anal Twine” is a story that only Craig Wallwork could have written, and, if you can’t guess by the title, it’ll make you cringe, but it’ll also hit you in places deeper than your rectum, somewhere near the heart as it struggles with questions of identity and memory and lust. And then there’s “The Whore that Broke the Camel’s Back,” a story that manages to be beautiful, satirical, and affecting despite its talking camel, bestiality, and extreme body modification. Or ‘Skin,’ where love involves literally climbing inside of the girl you love.

“Her heartbeat was the only noise, a dull rhythmic thud. I crawled into a ball and rested against the walls of flesh, pushed my head into my chest and brought my knees up. It’s the way sanctuary must be for the fallen. It’s the way life is before it starts.”

I’ve read a lot of short story collections in the last year and realised how difficult they are, not only to write, but to arrange. I was spoiled, all the previous collections I had encountered being by people like Borges or Nabokov or O’Conner, so it came as a surprise that some collections, even ones by writers I enjoy, simply don’t work and can feel like running waist deep in molasses, not because the stories are bad, individually or collectively, but the homogeneous nature of some writers can make collections more trial than enjoyment.

Quintessence of Dust manages to avoid this, singing and dancing, breaking hearts while its laughter rings through the halls. These stories are very much about love, lust, desire, and the difference between those words. They’re about fatherhood and marriage, about growing up and growing old: they’re about life. If Etgar Keret had grown up in northern England instead of Israel, he might’ve turned out to be Craig Wallwork, but Wallwork, I think, somehow hits harder and more often, both with humor and insight. I’ve known Craig for a few years, admired his work longer, and his début collection is somehow more than I expected it to be. I’m not sure if I’ve ever read a short story collection in one sitting before, but Quintessence of Dust never left my hands. And that, I think, is maybe the most impressive part of this collection, that all the stories work and keep the reader wanting more, needing more.

“Fifteen years later and Milton Ball can still feel the lump on his head, and every time he does, he is reminded of how ugly he is, and how wonderful a burning house looks at dawn.”

This is a collection I cannot recommend enough, and so I’ll do it as many times as my life allows.

Barely Touching the Brush on the Canvas: Neila Mezynski's Men Who Understand Girls

She started dancing. She liked dancing with short quick steps. She liked being at rest on the floor, body suspended in a certain position, waiting. She liked to start up again rapidly with the next step. She liked when the music skipped a beat.

She started painting. She liked painting with all different types of strokes. She sometimes liked to form the base with long heavy strokes, fill it in with short quick strokes. She sometimes liked to start with violent undersized strokes, finish it off by barely touching the brush on the canvas. She liked to paint trees. She liked to paint dresses.

She started writing. Words sentences stories and poems. She definitely started writing. Leaning words against more words to form sentences that curve and twist when read. Forming the basis for a new way of understanding how words relate to language to a reader to a page. Short bursts quickly are over and then commence again in sometimes longer but usually just as short bursts.

In Men Who Understand Girls, she writes about relationships. How those relationships emerge into something. Something that is unique to men and girls and also something that is not unique to men and girls. Something rather that is understood by all as long as there is a relationship between one and another not necessarily being men and girls. She also writes about how those relationships fizzle into nothing. Nothing that is understood by all as long as there was a relationship between one and another not necessarily being men and girls.

In Men Who Understand Girls, she writes about writing. Her writing is art. Her writing is dance. She writes about how writing is a thing and a concept. She writes about how writing may be the only that is a thing and a concept. She uses ideas from dancing and painting to show her words to a reader. She uses devices from dancing and painting to explain her words to a reader. Her dancing and her painting are important to her writing. How she dances and how she paints shapes the center for how she writes.

She writes about men who understand girls and girls who understand the men who understand girls. Miniature relationships made large.  She understands that men who understand girls can sometimes not understand girls. She understands that men who understand girls can understand but then girls may not understand men back. She understands that it does not always work out as planned for men who understand girls and the girls that they understand.

And sometimes it does. And sometimes it does.

Applying a Surgeon's Blade to Everyday Life: A Review of Joseph Michael Owens's Shenanigans!

With a title like Shenanigans!, I was expecting a lot of mischief in this collection of nine short stories by Joseph Michael Owens. I was surprised, then, to find a touching relationship at the center of the stories, a connection warmly rendered between the book’s main character, Ben and his wife, Anna. Commonplace becomes setup for epiphany, only the epiphany is more like a softly whispered melody,  gently inviting readers along. At the same time, the prose bursts with vigor, painting inanimate environments in ecosystems of exuberance and melancholy — there is a joy in the writing that revels in vivid details. The first story starts, “Contemptibly,” with “a hair — not one sprouted from Ben Palko’s own largish pores — floats, follicle, and all, atop the khaki-colored surface of his steaming cup of white-hazelnut creamer.” Even though contempt weaves itself gracefully in and out of the story (including the disturbing, but hilarious, climax), what’s even more fascinating is the peek inside Ben’s head working in IT as a data entry specialist and how the plot becomes a metaphor for the nightmare of corporate life.

Ben’s dogs play a big role in the stories as in the case of, “We Always Trust Each Other, Except for When We Don’t.” Outwardly, it’s about clipping the toenails of his Hungarian Vizsla, but a question of canine trust comes into play and becomes a commentary on the threads that tenuously link man and nature together. In, “Winsome Mshindi,” the eponymous greyhound, “bless his ninety-one-dog-year-old heart, makes the cut on that bum shoulder and chest-plants into the ground at roughly twenty-five miles per hour.” I’m struck by the image of this proud dog trying to, “collect himself,” shrug off the pain, but finding it too much for him, eventually giving in with hoots and yelps. It’s a visceral sequence filled with angst and pity. John Steinbeck had a gift for bringing animals to life in his novels. In this particular story, Winsome jumped off the page and onto the bed right next to me.

“Musings in the Mountains,” was one of my favorite in the collection. Ben bikes up the Colorado’s Rocky Mountains alone and realizes he’s unprepared. “The air gets colder as it gets thinner. Clouds begin rolling in and flecks of rain spit erratically against the carbonite lenses of my sunglasses.” Getting higher, he realizes, “It could be an illusion precipitated by the lack of direct sunlight in combination with the shade of my tinted lenses, but I’m pretty sure my skin is turning a bluish-purple from the cold.” He fears hypothermia and takes recluse at the Visitor’s Center. The buildup is suspenseful and I cringed at the thought of him having to ride down by himself. Fortunately, Anna comes to the rescue, surprising Ben whose heart flutters, “Like the first time we’d ever met.” Of course, when she expresses her concern, he jokes about it with, “faux macho bravado.” Their playful chemistry is endearing and a perfect example of the wonderful dynamic Owens crafts between the characters, never forced, always in a natural progression.

Dynamics and time are one of the central themes in the collection, especially in, “Boxcars and Bomb Pops,” when Ben is reflecting on a story/anecdote that he meant to write.

And that was going to be the real point of the anecdote: that something like waiting on a train out in stale, roasting, middle-of-nowhere kind of heat was just life’s way of telling the two men, the two of us — plain and simply— to stop rushing around everywhere all the goddamn time because really: what’s the hurry?

Indeed, what is the hurry? Owens takes the time to scrape away the veneer and apply a surgeon’s blade to everyday life. “What We Talk About When We Talk About Lasagna,” is an anatomy of a fight between Anna and him. But it’s also about the ambivalence of language, the inexplicable capacity people have to talk about one thing and mean another. What I appreciated about this story was that there was no resolution, no makeup scene. Confusion is the focal point, frustration is the theme.

Situational humor provides quirky insights into human behavior as well as laughs throughout. “Curiosity Doesn’t Discriminate,” is one of the more surreal stories and involves a dead horse in a barn, whereas, “Ninjas! (…in the Suburbs?)” contemplates a mysterious neighbor who Ben had, “previously mistaken for an oafish and bruising pummeler who likely dealt with unlucky transgressors only through the brute, Mephistophelian machinations of his meaty fists,” but, “turned out to be actually quite lithe,” with nunchakus. I could envision every motion, every swing through the details — Owens has a gift for painting with words, drawing from a splattered canvas that gets finer with each added contour. These are abetted by footnotes that provide information and act as wry asides. One particular note describes, “Symptoms of freedom,” which, include:

. . .vomiting, dry mouth, constipation, diarrhea, suicidal thoughts, heart burn, incontinence, itchy or watery eyes, irritability, changes in mood or behavior, sudden itchy rash, hair loss or runny nose. If you experience any of these symptoms, please stop taking your medication and call your doctor immediately.

The final story, “The Year That Was. . . And Was Not,” is the tale of their engagement and is as epic as they come, involving life, death, family, love, sacrifice, and mortality. It’s the longest of the stories and a brilliant end to a compelling collection. Owens does something special with both his characters and his readers; he builds relationships and invites us in to help bridge the gaps. After the story is finished, their words, their actions, their images reverberate and linger. There’s a moment where Ben decides to pick up a third dog despite it being against the rules of their apartment. It’s a spur of the moment decision, and I enjoyed the interaction he had with Anna. Just recently, my wife wanted a dog. I thought it was a bad idea in our current situation and we vacillated back and forth. Finally, we happened to be passing a pet store when she noticed a miniature pinscher she absolutely adored. I initially said no, but then remembered the scene in the collection:

Puppies are fantastic — wonderful — especially before you take them home with you. They are an awkward and bumbling mess, innocent and eager, excited to romp around maniacally before falling asleep. . . When they are still at the kennel, or the pet store, or the breeder, before they are yours, they are close to perfect as they ever will be.

Ben and Anna talk back and forth, wondering how their apartment manager will respond. Eventually, they end up adopting a third dog and the scene evokes the depth of their affection for one another in all that’s said and unsaid between the two.

At the pet store, I thought of the story, saw the ‘perfect’ puppy, and relented. And now, we have a third member. It’s rare when I can say a book tangibly affected my everyday life. Joseph Michael Owens does this with almost every scene in his book, and in this case, I have a little puppy to thank him for it.

How to Save Your Friendships: A Review of Matt Bell's Cataclysm Baby

You know when someone develops a deep love for a movie, TV show, book, or video game and, before too long, it’s all they’ll talk about? Or how repugnant your sister is in the first few weeks of her new romance? We, as humans, are compelled to express our deep love for things, a habit which will murder your relationships unless you find people who love the same things you do (the reason people who like weird stuff like dubstep and electrocution tend to gather together).

This isn’t really a recommendation that you buy this book. Matt Bell’s name on the cover should be all the incentive you need to do that. But when you buy Matt Bell’s Cataclysm Baby, which you absolutely should, I’d recommend you buy at least a dozen copies, or one for each friend and family member you’d miss when they get tired of you obsessively talking about this book and stop returning your calls. Supplying all your loved ones with copies is an invitation into your new-found pleasure and will hopefully keep them from having sudden emergencies just as you arrive and staging interventions.

And talk about this book you will. You’ll talk about Bell’s prose, some of his finest yet, which has something of the biblical in it, something of the prophecy. About how you can imagine these stories told in dusty, burned-out rooms by grizzled fathers with thousand-yard stares sliding down the other side of survival.  You’ll talk about this passage, and dozens more like it:

The day [my son] turns thirteen, he tells me I will wait three more months before I sneak into his room and read his diary, and that by then it will be too late.

He says, I know you could save us if you read it today, but I know you won’t.

You’ll talk about the references, the intelligent re-workings of Greek mythologies, Arthurian legends, and biblical stories. The Sirens make an appearance as three daughter mimics, luring villagers out into the floods destroying their world. A man, driven by the ghosts of his daughters, builds tower after tower, not to get closer to God, but to find the voice of his wife. A tanker carrying the world’s last women floats off the West coast, waiting for the world to be clean enough to deserve their return. A man chooses his own calf-child for sacrifice in a lottery. Bell’s handling of the sources is elegant, keeping to the core of what the stories are about, and might provide enough conversation material to ensure that your favorite barista will never ask how your day is going again.

You will probably, more than anything else, talk most about the endless variety Bell achieves, despite adhering to a restrictive formula. In almost every story, children are born deformed, mutated, something other, into a drying out or burning or drowning world. Of course, Bell shows off his impressive imaginative range with the “wrong-born” infants: some only balls of fur, some born as only invisible puffs of air.

What keeps Cataclysm Baby from being just another menagerie of impossible disasters are the variations in the fathers themselves, who each struggle to deal with the guilt, anger, pride, and obligation fatherhood brings with it, apart from the apocalypse-fractured world outside the window. Some fathers regard their strange children with single-minded affection, others with scorn. Some sacrifice their mutated children, and some others sacrifice themselves. As the lights go out on the human race, some cling to hope that their children represent some sort of future, while others hold onto only what they can. The family dramas, the reality of the fathers in these stories trying to hold onto a world that inexorably spins away, keep these stories from being just another meditation on the ways the world could end.

And the end.  You will talk about the ending, the last chapter.

Obviously, this is the kind of book that can leave a reader sitting by himself on the bus, other passengers clutching purses and children while he mutters under his breath about how no one reads great books anymore. You don’t want to be that guy, so get a dozen copies. More if you actually like your family.