Lies Full of Truths: Rob Roberge's Liar, A Memoir

Rob Roberge’s Liar is a memoir, not so much about re-living the past, but rather trying to put the past together through a series of flashbacks. Written in nonlinear excerpts and vignettes, Roberge seeks to make sense of a past full of alcohol, drugs, relationships, murders, and music. The nonlinear narrative makes complete sense, as Roberge’s life is full of tangled lines, and the only way to make sense of it is to untangle them when and where it’s possible. Within this clashing and clanking and untangling and tangling, there is a remarkable beautiful buzz of energy that keeps his story moving along. This buzz of energy is transferred from one word to the next, from one sentence to the next, and from one memory to the next and as a result, we have Roberge’s life before us. There is elegance in his chaos.

It’s a constant tug-of-war between sobriety and relapses, between love and hate, and between guilt and solace. Told through the second person point of view, there is a triple layering that occurs as Roberge uses “you” to piece together his life. There is a “you” that refers to Rob Roberge writing to himself as he’s trying to make sense of his troubled past. There is a “you” which refers to the reader, solely as the reader, solely learning about the author’s life through bits and pieces. And then there is a “you” which transforms the reader into Roberge, causing some kind of mirroring effect.

In reference to his first girlfriend who was murdered early in their relationship, Roberge writes:

You try to think about what she looked like, but you really have no memories of this. You remember two long brown pigtails, but you could be getting those from her picture now on an Unsolved Murders in CT website, in her last school picture ever, taken the year she was killed. (2)

Here, we see a deep personal reflection of the author thinking to himself about his girlfriend. He is “talking” to himself, trying to make sense of what has happened. It doesn’t feel like he’s telling the reader a story, but rather, telling himself, and this allows us to enter Roberge’s mind, travelling around in his brain amidst the chaos and confusion.

Later on in his memoir, Roberge writes how he had stolen his wife’s painkillers for his own personal use, though his wife needs them for an illness that causes her strong physical pains. The author doesn’t tell her that he took them, but ironically, he pretends to help her find her medicine:

And you help her look. And you think of the saying that a junkie will steal your shoes and then help you look for them. You are a cliché. You are worse than a cliché for your wife. You are someone who hurts her. You are letting her feel terrible pain. What kind of person are you? (197)

Here, there is a distance created between the author and the reader. Roberge is making a commentary on the kind of person he is being, and the “you” separates the author from his audience. We are on the outside, trying to figure out the author, perhaps, judging the author as the author is judging himself.

Then, there is the “you” that transforms the reader into Rob Roberge, giving a feeling of a Choose Your Own Adventure book, where the reader follows along with Roberge’s choices, leading the reader into one dilemma after another in reference to drugs, alcohol, bipolarity, manic episodes and so on. The reader becomes the author, feeling his pain, guilt, and search for hope. Roberge writes, “You snort a line. Very soon, you are calmer and happier than you can ever remember feeling. It’s a perfect waking dream…It’s like you are living in someone else’s body. Someone not at all like you. Someone happy.” (176) The author brings the reader in close–we become the text. We snort the line, we are happier, we are in dream, we are not ourselves, we are happy. Here the reader becomes Roberge as he takes drugs. As he acts, we are acting with him, hoping to survive the text, hoping to survive Roberge’s life.

Roberge confesses that he is a liar–whether it’s to himself, to his friends, to his wife, he lies. He admits that at times, he is unable to separate truth from fiction, and that, ironically, is what makes the memoir so true. True in that his life has been one big blur, full of drugs and liquor and failed relationships and murdered friends. In there, somewhere, there is the truth, or, there are multiple truths. One important truth is the love for his wife, Gayle. This is the essence of his story–how he is still around, though he has thought about killing himself multiple times, because of Gayle. In those moments we see Roberge interact with his wife or write about his wife, we see the author at his humblest. It is in this humility, where the truth lies. It is within the guilt he feels for the pain that Gayle goes through, whether caused by Roberge or not, where the truth exists. He is embarrassed at times, He is remorseful. He is being truthful.

Roberge is seeking for the truth in his own memoir. He’s putting bits and pieces together, and it’s almost like he’s posting a series of Post-it notes against his own brain so that he can remember what has happened in the past to the best of his ability. He reveals a countless amount of dark moments in his life, and it’s easy to see why it’s difficult for him to remember. You wouldn’t want to remember some of these events. You would feel pain trying to seek the past, trying to make sense out of a life that was on the brink of death more than once. You would wonder if it’s all worth it.

Liar is a memoir full of puzzle pieces, with some of the pieces missing. It is through these holes, we find beauty in Roberge’s writing. The constant inconsistencies in his life make his memoir extraordinary because there is no happy ending or sad ending–there is no ending, in fact, there’s just Rob Roberge. His willingness to give himself up, to call himself out, to tell us how he has been struggling with life since he was a child gives us a world where beauty doesn’t necessarily mean happiness, but where beauty means the truth. And by facing the truth, you are able to move forward.

Capturing Life in Colors: On Daniel Clowes's Patience

The kinds of books that hit me the hardest are the ones that tackle the full range of life. I like to see my fictional friends in public and in private. I want to know their earlier thoughts and their later decisions. Really, I like understanding what makes their fictional hearts tick and their minds process. These kinds of narratives usually appear in the form of a massive tome that occupies a certain—extra durable, solid, and near-the-bottom-of-the-bookshelf—shelf, but, as the grand and timeless colloquialism reminds everyone now and then, big things can come in small packages. And 2016 has delivered one of the greatest small gifts under 200 pages that I’ve ever received: Daniel Clowes’ beautifully written and spectacularly drawn graphic novel Patience.

Clowes opens his graphic novel just like how life begins—with conception. It’s 2012, and Jack and Patience, the young couple who serve as dual protagonists, are going to be parents. After receiving the news, Patience says to Jack, “I never thought I’d ever be happy.” Her kind of reaction is both exciting and upsetting. She has a promise of happiness, but it’s a promise that is probably unable to be kept. After all, I ask, can having a child really give a grown adult self-fulfillment?

For Patience, life is difficult. She grapples with difficult ideas about what could happen to her and her family. Patience asks, “Do you worry about the future? Like, what if global warming gets really bad?” She continues, “We’ll be dead before then, probably, but what about the poor baby?” And again, “I don’t want her to feel like a loser all her life.” Patience is a perfect example of a young American woman edging closer and closer to some kind of early-life crisis. She is so honest about her fears and her dreams, but her honesty serves as a kind of shield that keeps her separated from actually living her life. She’s been too present in a world of technology and worry. The hyper-reactive world has worn her down.

For Jack, life doesn’t seem as difficult. He’s a young person who is stuck in a mindless and seemingly endless job, but he’s going to be a father. He has the hopes of a bright future. Until, suddenly, he doesn’t. He comes home to find Patience dead—killed. She and the couple’s unborn child have been brutally murdered.

Patience’s death is not a spoiler. It happens too early in the book for it to be considered such. What unfolds after her death is beautiful and powerful to unravel. Instead of Patience standing as a graphic novel about a new family burgeoning on adulthood and adapting to the required changes, Clowes’ work turns into a psychedelic, science fiction, vengeance-bound love story that somehow—miraculously—manages to be hopeful and, yes, romantic.

After finding Patience’s body on the floor, Jack appears in split panels, saying first, “I couldn’t move for what seemed like hours, like I was stuck in drying concrete. Probably just a trick by my DNA to keep me from bashing my brains in.” Then, he says, “The fact is, I didn’t want to kill myself. My memories were all that was left of her. I couldn’t bear to snuff those out too.” His honesty is striking, but the emotional sentiment behind his words is downright tear-inducing.

Jack sets out to find who could have killed Patience and why someone would have wanted to commit such an atrocious crime. He travels ahead to 2029, and he goes back to 1985 and 2006. Each section of time shows Jack becoming more and more determined to understand the woman he so loved. As Jack encounters Patience in these different time periods, he approaches her with ease and kindness. He tries to help the woman he loves, but he always tries to respect the past that made her. Jack works a delicate balance in shifting from past to future, but he never falters on his reasoning for giving up his life to understand how someone could end the one he held the dearest.

The images populating Clowes’ graphic novel are totally immersing. The colors pop, as Clowes uses sharp, bright coloring. They, in their naturally kind tones, work to illustrate the fact that Patience, even with its scene of murder and moments of revenge, is foremost a love story.

Clowes uses a variety of approaches in his drawings. In most of the more contemplative and internal segments, the panels appear closed off and centered. These images appear bolder and with a more focused vision. In other sections, the ones set in different times and the ones with a more boisterous narrative occurring, the drawings often become larger and more playful. The edges are more varied, with shapes less defined.

Yes, Patience is a short piece of fiction, but it’s one that spans decades and captures life in all of its glory and pain. Patience examines happiness, hurt, guilt, power, and hope. It’s a masterwork of the genre.

Daniel Clowes knows life. He writes about it and draws it so authentically. Patience is an extraordinary testament to how beautiful and selfless life and love can be.

What We Talk about When We Talk about Talking to Squirrels: On Elizabeth McKenzie's The Portable Veblen

The Portable Veblen is like it sounds, which is to say you don’t know what it is until you get to know it better. Because The Portable Veblen is near impossible to say with grace, and your mother will ask you to repeat it, “The Por-what the what?” although it will come to make sense with a sort of twisted logic: the novel’s protagonist, Veblen, is a thirty-year-old Alice in the Wonderland of Northern California who dares to ask of you, “Do you think wishful thinking is a psychiatric condition?”

Elizabeth McKenzie’s third book (and second novel) follows the eponymous Veblen as she hurtles toward marriage on a sort of whim. Her fiancé, Paul, is a neurologist with a flashy new invention—the Pneumatic Turbo Skull Punch (how Vonnegut-ian)—that lands him a government contract. But the device is rushed to market when there’s profit to be made, and ethics are challenged, and commitments are challenged, and maybe Veblen and Paul have rushed things after all because how much do they really know about each other?

It’s true, Veblen talks to a squirrel: an ally nesting in the attic of her house and Paul’s near-comic nemesis. And to Veblen, the squirrel talks back (sort of).

McKenzie is unparalleled in making her characters’ neuroses palpably real and ultimately important, angling a keen eye to the role of mental health in life. Veblen, who can empathize with the last lima bean on the plate that gets scraped into the trash, is forever “living in a state of wistful anticipation for life to become as wonderful as she was sure, someday, it would.”

Beneath its rom-com surface, The Portable Veblen exploits the hypocrisy of health and healthcare when economics is involved. As satirical as Vonnegut, McKenzie’s touch is light and effective, hinting at class clashes and culture clashes and morality clashes (oh my).

But most of all this is a story of love and family, chosen and otherwise. Veblen’s mother is a brilliant yet hypochondriacal loon, an irrepressible intervener, a woman who named her daughter after an obscure (but actually not so obscure) Norwegian-American economist, Thorstein Veblen—Thorstein coined the term “conspicuous consumption.” While (our) Veblen’s father is an institutionalized burden of a man, an absent yet still undeniable presence in Veblen’s life and legend to her mental health.

Then there’s Paul family. Paul’s mother and father are weed farmers, loving hippies but, in Paul’s eyes, unreliable parents. His developmentally-disabled brother has overshadowed Paul’s own independence, an unwitting saboteur since childhood, and since childhood Paul has done his best to extricate himself from it all.

McKenzie’s prose dances in those spaces where these repressed and dysfunctional emotions are dancing apart:

[Veblen] formed this estimation in faith that it would be so, because that was what she wanted, a family at ease, a family free from the heat of a central beast, traveling through vents to cook you in every room.

The sensitive and nuanced handling of the intersections of family and love and disability is nothing short of brilliant.

The Portable Veblen is not just one thing: not just a satire, not just a rom-com, not just a novel about talking to squirrels. It is all these things at once. But at its heart is love, the bleakest and most optimistic and strangest thing there is, the most squirreliest nut to crack. And isn’t that what we talk about when we talk about love?

Stepping Outside the Genres: A Review of Melissa Goodrich's Daughters of Monsters

I’m a fan of literary fiction that dips into the strange. As much as character development can be interesting, characters arguing in coffee shops get dry after a while. Similarly, ghost can be entertaining, but weird occurrences by themselves don’t always provide enough to really chew on. However, literary fiction that isn’t confined to our precise everyday world can take advantage of the best of both while avoiding the respective drawbacks, being both entertaining and mentally stimulating. That’s why I jumped at Daughters of Monsters by Melissa Goodrich, hoping to find enjoyment as well as something to think about.

For these aspects alone, Daughters of Monsters delivers. By way of example, “Lucky” centers on a young child fleeing with his family from a mysterious and immediately deadly toxic gas that is quickly sweeping over the country. The apocalyptic elements of the story were inventive and captivating, but the realistic behaviors of the characters give the story a great amount of depth. The behavior of the children is particularly interesting. The adults are panicking, trying to figure out how to save themselves. The children know what is going on, but they still react in the situation as kids. Deadly gas nearby; they are still playing:

Elsa goes sailing into the next room and jumps knees first into a beanbag sack and Eric and I surround her with the other beanbags, mashing them over her head and making her punch at us through them. Her voice is small underneath, and I kick her beanbag several times, and I like the games I can win.

Breathe! I dare her. I dare you to take a big breath in!

Then later when we’re done being jerks, the three of us lie on our bellies and wonder how long we have to live in our neighborhood together.  The gas is already at the edge of the Carsons’ property, three blocks down, and they up and left, the doors of their house wide open and definitely haunted.  Their laundry gets up in the night and walks around the place, turns on faucets, locks and unlocks windows, punches holes in the screen door, rattles the chain link of the old dog fence.

This contrast between the situation and how the children behave, which is likely exactly how children would behave in such a situation, both adds tension as well as makes the story more than a simple apocalypse evasion story.

That kind of stepping outside the genres, as well as it’s done here, is interesting enough on its own. Quite a few of the stories are interesting on a language level even beyond that, though. Perhaps it’s Goodrich’s poetic side creeping in, but there’s an ethereal feeling to many of the lines that makes the rhythm and word choice at least as intriguing as whatever is going on, as in this section from the titular story:

Your mother throws her breasts over her back when she’s cooking so they won’t bother her. She’s boiling corn, she’s shucking it over the stovetop and she’s half-naked. Her hair’s in a towel. It’s hissing. Your boyfriend sneaks up behind her and takes a wallop of a suckle. Ew Henry, you tell him. Your mother turns around and says, Normally I would kill you but since you sucked my milk…merely whaps him with a broom. But she’s still thinking of killing you. You can see it in her eyes, the bugling way she watches you.

Your mother is a mystery. You don’t know how it is she lays eggs and makes milk. You don’t know how it is you look okay, your sister looks lovely, and the new baby your mother is making will be stunning, will be fire, will make hearts snap like celery. Your mother is wildly pregnant. Your mother never nursed you. Your mother packs you a basket with cheap wine and cold pancakes, hands you an ax, sends you outside, and you know your luck is beige.

I found the stories in Daughters of Monsters to be wild and wonderful, plenty to dazzle while still having plenty to think about. There’s a great deal of poetry to the language of the stories as well, making them as intriguing on a microcosm sentence level as they are on a macrocosm plot level. Indeed, this book is interesting on a number of levels. I thoroughly enjoyed reading.

The Power of the Alien Cohort: On Helen Phillips's The Beautiful Bureaucrat

What I found perhaps most impressive about The Beautiful Bureaucrat is the way in which Helen Phillips navigates the difficult business of making a surreal reality feel realistic and credible in a real-ish world. In this briskly plotted and thrilling novel, Josephine and Joseph Newbury are a pair of newlyweds who have recently moved from the “hinterlands” (“hinterland, hint of land, the term they used to dismiss their birthplaces, that endless suburban non-ness”) to a city reminiscent of Brooklyn, although it is never called that. After months of unemployment, Josephine has finally landed a job. But right from the very beginning things are not as they should be. For one thing, Josephine’s boss has no face. (“The person who interviewed her had no face” is the first line of the book.) And what’s more, this person (of indeterminate gender) has the worst breath Josephine has ever smelled. Hitherto, he/she is referred to simply as The Person With Bad Breath. Following a series of uncomfortable and inappropriate questions (“Does it bother you that your husband has such a commonplace name?” “You wish to procreate?”) Josephine is led to a small box of an office, with “pinkish clawed walls,” where she enters a jumble of indecipherable names and dates into a mysterious system known as the Database. It is a mind-numbing task that Josephine is neither encouraged to understand nor question.

Helen Phillips writes with a wonderful accuracy about the doldrums of office life. “It was wise to put bureaucrats in windowless offices,” she observes. “Had there been a window, September might have taunted her with its high and mighty goldenness. As it was… she spent the rest of the workday blasting through files, devoid of curiosity, dying to get the hell home and just be a person with Joseph.” The mysterious agency where Josephine works is located in a “vast, windowless” complex that stretches endlessly down a block; the concrete halls, punctuated at regular intervals by closed doors, drone with buzzing typewriters, an anxious noise that reminds Josephine of scurrying cockroaches. “So, what do you do for work,” a person asks Josephine at one point. “Such an uncouth, painful question,” Phillips writes. For anyone who has ever worked at a soul-crushing office job, these observations ring horribly (and hilariously) true.

On nearly every page, I found myself marveling at the deft touch and careful craftsmanship with which Phillips omits and reveals, elaborates and elides. Such is the case with Trishiffany, whose very name (“My parents couldn’t pick between Trisha and Tiffany”) is an example of what I mean. Aside from the Person with Bad Breath, Trishiffany is the only one of Josephine’s “busy lookalike bureaucrats” to have a significant role in the book. She looks like a Barbie, wears “bubble-gum” pink suits, and always seems to appear out of nowhere. She also seems to know more about Josephine than Josephine reveals. The first time they meet, for instance, Trishiffany asks, “Mind if I call you Jojo? I’ve always wanted to call someone that. Such a cute nickname for Josephine!” It is only later that Josephine realizes “she hadn’t told Trishiffany her name.”

There are literally dozens of instances like this throughout the novel, which skips from one strange incident to the next, such as when Josephine enters her boss’s office to find The Person with Bad Breath sitting at a desk “covered with a white tablecloth and set for an elaborate luncheon for two.” “The table is set for you, Ms. Newbury,” The Person with Bad Breath says. “I have been awaiting you.” As the luncheon unfolds, The Person with Bad Breath behaves in an increasingly bizarre fashion, monologuing about cats, devouring Josephine’s pumpkin pie, swallowing shakers of salt and pepper, licking “pats of butter off their foil wrappers,” drinking the “remainder of the cream straight from the pitcher.” It is remarkable that Phillips is able to get away with this. But she does, time and again, by telling the reader just enough to make things plausible before wisely moving on, with a sort of dream logic or fairytale momentum, as though the bewildering were the most normal thing in the world. She plays a straight-faced game, and for that reason the surreal-within-the-real works absolutely.

In addition to the strangeness and corporate satire, The Beautiful Bureaucrat abounds with allusions and symbols. A neighbor’s three-headed dog snarls and barks in one of the many hellish sublets the Newburys rent, reminding us of Cerberus. Is there really a three-headed dog, or are Josephine’s tired eyes simply imagining things? Phillips never clarifies. But this strange detail, along with so many others, entices and unnerves, lingers and haunts. Phillips knows this, and she uses the ambiguity to create a mounting sense of unease. Pomegranates play a key role, recalling the Myth of Persephone. And there is plenty of religious symbology: Virgin Mary candles, everything in sixes, sevens, and threes. It can’t be a coincidence that Joseph wants a baby.

Beyond the allegory and satire, however, there is a beating heart, and Phillips is at her best and most sincere when portraying the Newburys’ fledgling marriage, the mundane intimacies and small heartbreaks of which will be recognizable to anyone who has ever been in a meaningful relationship. In one passage, Josephine returns home from work, and Joseph says, “You look like you need a hug.” “She felt like an alien,” Phillips writes. “As though she had never before been exposed to the ways things are done on Earth: that you can return home to someone who cares for you, that a few overused words can hurt your heart with their appropriateness, that your muscles can soften into the muscles of another human being… She wanted to cry out when he pulled away from her.” This was the most winning aspect of the novel for me. As I read, I found myself desiring my other, as Josephine, in her loneliness, desires Joseph; and in the end, I was left with a heightened awareness of the power and importance of having a partner—an “alien cohort”—in this strange and often bewildering world.

Double Feature Fanfic Heaven: Peter Grandbois's The Glob Who Girdled Granville and The Secret Lives of Actors

The Arctic deserves more consideration from us. We ask so much of it. We expect it to take on so many of our failed experiments, our alien discoveries – our monsters – without noticing the toll it takes on the polar region’s ice cover and permafrost.

Two of our most important abandoned Arctic legacies are, of course, the Blob and the Thing. The Thing was first immortalized in John W. Campbell’s (aka Don A. Stuart) 1938 novella Who Goes There?, then reincarnated on film as The Thing From Another World (1951) and The Thing (1982), whereas The Blob emerged fully formed as the B film of a double feature with I Married a Monster from Outer Space. While physically contained within the polar ice now, the Blob and the Thing re-emerge in new iterations and formats continually.

One such example is Peter Grandbois’s Double Monster Feature, The Glob Who Girdled Granville and The Secret Lives of Actors, two novellas in the Wordcraft Series of Fabulist Novellas. The A-side, The Glob Who Girdled Granville, imagines a world in which Mr. Gregory Glob, an anthropomorphized version of the monster in The Blob, begins anew after three years penance in the Arctic Circle as an office worker, with wife Jane, née Martin (Steve McQueen’s teen girlfriend in the film), and their children in small town Ohio. The B-side, The Secret Lives of Actors, places the Thing (here, as a seven foot tall, red haired, failed Hollywood actor Jim, whose most famous role was the monster in the 1951 film) in a suburban Denver community theatre troupe, still recovering from his failed love affair with Nikki (Nicholson – a character from the 1951 film).

Both novellas unspool from slightly misshapen balls of thread. Characters and actors co-exist, are sometimes conflated, and are repurposed for their new worlds. Both novellas are quick reads, at under 60 pages each. But The Secret Lives of Actors is the more successful of the two, both in narrative and style; in true double feature fashion, after reading both novellas, the B-side has taken over feature film status. While both books draw heavily from their filmic lore (with references to their legacies throughout), The Secret Lives of Actors does more work to establish itself as a standalone, through stronger characterization and a more fully developed narrative arc.

In the first pages of The Glob Who Girdled Granville, Mr. Glob splits himself in two, and thus so does the reader’s attention. Alternatively, The Secret Lives of Actors begins with vegetable-based Jim severing his own finger to grow a better version of himself, and here, the reader finds connection with the monster in his search for emotional evolution. While the clichés are gratuitous in The Glob, they’re held in check more in Actors, which develops an alternative twinning to the two Mr. Globs through exploration of both Things: Jim, from the 1951 version, all vegetable matter and orange shuffling, and newcomer John, from the 1982 version, possessed with a new range of abilities far darker in scope yet much more overtly appealing to Nikki.

Development of the female leads, Jane and Nikki, suffers from these overburdened dual male roles. Yet while Jane remains a mere phantom, Nikki gains a certain status in The Secret Lives of Actors from her mystery; even in its final pages, the reader is left to imagine what powers Nikki might possess of her own.

While either of these novellas can be read without prior knowledge of the Blob or the Thing, bringing at least a basic understanding of the monsters and their physical dimensions to the books will definitely help you as you read. Grandbois does a bit of front-end description, but his references to the films are largely devoid of backstory dump; a reader unseasoned in cult film legend may find themselves lost to some of the more nuanced allusions. I confess, I have seen both The Thing from Another World and John Carpenter’s The Thing but went into The Glob Who Girdled Granville with no points of reference, and as much as I tried to avoid it, this disparity in my own background knowledge affected my readings. These novellas act, in some ways at least, as tributes to the films (and the novella) that came before them.

So really, why try to avoid the full pleasure of the experience? Grendel is rewarded by an understanding of Beowulf, Wide Sargasso Sea by first reading Jane Eyre, and any responsible moviegoer wouldn’t dare show up to The Avengers without having seen at least some of the Marvel cinematic universe. Treat yourself to a night of B movie delights, then pick up the most literary of fanfic in Peter Grandbois’ Double Monster Feature: The Glob Who Girdled Granville and The Secret Lives of Actors.

So Much Depends Upon A Title: A Review of Kathy Flann's Get A Grip

So much depends upon a title. Titles can do a lot of different work for a book, but a truly useful one is invaluable. I found the title of Kathy Flann’s new short story collection Get a Grip particularly significant. It’s possible that I’m going off on my own a bit, but I think the math adds up regardless.

Playing devil’s advocate against myself briefly, “Get a Grip” is the title of one of the stories in the collection. Many collections take their title from one of the stories and there’s no more to it. It’s a tradition. However, all of the stories in Get a Grip seem to involve characters getting some kind of grip on some aspect of their lives.

The elderly mother in “Neuropathy” struggles to get a variety of different grips, both literal and metaphorical. She (phrased as a second person “You” in the story) struggles with metaphorical grips, coming to terms with the death of her husband and increasing independence of her son, as well as a literal grip relating to a crippling arm injury she received in a car accident. In fact, she desperately needs to get a grip on living life in general:

Ever since Wayne died, you crave a calling, a flourishing endeavor, like the ones church friends have—Monique gathers restaurant breath mints for women’s shelters, Pat takes old people to The Golden Corral on meatloaf night, and Ken fills out tax returns for the needy. You have tried some things that fizzled, like a used medical equipment bazaar and a clothing drive for big & tall homeless men.

But then God showed you. A junkie you’d given a dollar staggered off the harbor wall. Dropped. Disappeared under the brackish film. His matted hair drifted on the surface like seaweed. You watched, frozen. It seemed like a long time before that soldier in fatigues brushed past and sprang from the edge. He lugged the incoherent, babbling man, shoved him onto the retaining wall. The soldier, freckled baby-face all red, climbed out and hurried away, trailing water. Didn’t even give his name. This was it. Could anyone be more inspiring, more filled with the holy spirit, than a warrior, someone who tamed death?

Similarly, in “Show of Force” Franz tries to get a grip on his son and wife, hoping that they haven’t drifted so far away from him as to be unreachable:

“I’m the champion of the whole country. I’ve got an ATV and ten grand and, as of next year, a learner’s permit.” He leaned forward, making sharp, angry gestures with his hands. “What happens is I go to Korea for the World Cyber Games. Mom’s talking home schooling! She says we’re moving to Vegas!” He laughed and put his hand up for a high five. “I’m going to be the Tony Hawk of Firestorm3.”

The 1980’s Tony Hawk reference, he knew, had been for his benefit. And some distant part of him, in a windy backwater of his brain, knew the high five was a monumental gesture from Rory. But he was too stunned to return it. Korea? Vegas? Home schooling? Why hadn’t Babette mentioned any of this? He touched his forehead, cold from the air conditioner.

Alexander is trying to get a grasp on the fact that his driven career isn’t the personal connection he really needs in “Little Big Show.” Ned grips his life failures relating to his intense feelings for his ex-wife and love for his current wife in “Homecoming.” “Leaving Reno” involves Fiona trying to get a handle on various complex family relationships. All of the stories seem to involve getting a grip in one way or another, grips that the characters desperately need to have. Some get them to one level of success or another, but some do not. Or, perhaps the grips are more complicated than can be evaluated with a simple get/not get analysis.

Personally, I found this to be particularly compelling. Whatever people want to consider universal, trying to get a handle on the significant forces in our lives has to be on that list. Some of us do better jobs than others in looking like we know what we’re doing, but (unless you all are way better than me) we spend most of our lives just trying to keep up, keep our heads above water as the tremendous flow of life’s complexities blast at us. I must spend most of my time trying to get a grip. How could that sort of struggle fail to engage me? My empathy is flaring as I read, each and every time.

These are some intense stories. The different ‘grips’ that these wildly different characters are trying to get are unique, but share the same level of urgency. I can’t imagine reading Get a Grip and not getting pulled in by that, feeling it with the characters. I don’t know if Flann intended to indicate that commonality when selecting the title, but it works for me. The stories all certainly do.