Articles by Sal

Things That Pass for Love by Allison Amend
(2008, OV Books)
Robert Yune

Alison Amend has a gift for inciting incident, that magical intersection of character and opportunity. Most stories in Things That Pass for Love begin with characters in bizarre situations: a fifth-grade teacher attempts to conduct class as bodies rain from the sky, a government agent tracks cult members at garage sales, and a disabled photographer finds himself lost in Miami.

Although these scenarios seem ripe for cheap thrills and easy humor, Amend uses them as opportunities for psychological exploration. Ms. Gold, the fifth-grade teacher in “Dominion Over Every Erring Thing” is rightly horrified at the splattering bodies in her schoolyard. The fact that no one else seems to mind—her students, the school’s guidance counselor, even Ms. Gold’s husband remain unaffected—proves to be the source of the story’s tension. What initially sounds like a headline from “News of the Weird” becomes, in Ms. Amend’s hands, an examination of control and the quiet freefall that occurs in its absence.

Some stories in this collection map new physical and cultural terrain, such as the numerous destinations the climber/photographer conquers in “What Was Over There is Over Here.” Another, “How Much Greater the Miracle”, juxtaposes the genteel rules on a golf course with the strain of a 25- year marriage. Amend’s views into these worlds is warm and thorough—in many stories, she carves out space for a redemptive moment, something positive to salvage the story from the wreckage that this kind of fiction seems to require. Despite this range of serious subject matter (incest, insanity, suicide golf), Amend’s humor and sympathy for her characters rescues her stories from their own depressing ends.

Half the blurbs on the outer jacket discuss the Amend’s skillful range—and Things That Pass for Love is impressive in its variety of characters, settings, and conflicts. Amend is equally adept at writing from the perspective of a male Vietnam veteran, detailing corporate guidelines, and testifying for an entire town in the flash fiction piece “Bluegrass Banjo.” Although her language is consistently clear and calmly objective, Amend deftly accommodates the voices of her characters, as evidenced by the stylized prose in “The Janus Gate,” which moves swiftly to mimic the frenzied pace of a professor’s relationship with a pupil:

He could throw back his head and cackle with the thought of what he could make her do with his glances and his fingers. He could touch her pinkie next to the computer and feel her stiffen. Repulsion, attraction, surprise, it was all the same to him, so long as he provoked in her a sharp, uncontrolled physical reaction. He could make her scream, he knew, during sex. He did. Not knowing or caring whether it was out of pain or ecstasy, whether she craved or hated him. Whether she did it out of duty or gratitude, desire or curiosity. She was unused to it, he could tell, and he liked to look at her, both of them with their eyes opened wide, hers sparkling with terror or suspense.

Like many stories in this collection, “The Janus Gate” is itself a study in several themes: a racy story about a professor having an affair with a student, a meditation on language and duality, and a wry observation on academic politics.

Here and elsewhere, Amend’s strongest stories provide a multifaceted glimpse of their characters: in “Dominion Over Every Erring Thing,” we see Ms. Gold as a fifth-grade teacher, but also as a novice Hebrew student. Marca, the main character in “The People You Know Best” can navigate the chatty politics of the book clubs she hosts, but she’s also a successful cyberotica writer. It’s fascinating to watch Amend converge her characters’ dual worlds in unexpected ways.

Amend’s collection is impressive for its range, but it’s also an entertaining take on finding the unexpected in the mundane. Though their subjects and situations might appear to test the limits of possibility, these stories take place in our real world. Here, the current pulsing through Amend’s collection—connecting cults, cyberotica, terrorism, and suicide golf—seems to whisper, There is a logical explanation for all of this. And isn’t there? Things That Pass for Love offers a thoughtful, sympathetic, and often surprising view into the world that belongs to its characters, and to us.

A Better Angel by Chris Adrian
(2008, Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
Adam Reger

Chris Adrian has an interesting biography. He wrote his second novel, The Children’s Hospital (2006), while he completed his pediatric residency. Working as a pediatrician, Adrian enrolled in Harvard Divinity School, where he wrote many of the stories collected in A Better Angel. Adrian’s old teacher, Marilynne Robinson, blurbs for him this way: “Chris Adrian’s life is a dedicated exploration of the things that matter most, and his writing is his companion and interlocutor . . . as he travels a landscape not before seen by other eyes.”

Whether you consider this statement hyperbole will depend on your reading of Adrian’s stories, which share common threads of violence, grief, and the mystical. In “The Changeling,” a father exorcises a demon (actually, approximately three thousand tormented souls; more on that later) from his son by burning and cutting himself. The protagonist of “Stab” hopes to rejoin his dead brother by murdering ever-larger creatures. The title story dramatizes a drug-addicted doctor’s squandered potential by detailing his defiance of the angel who has followed him since childhood, prophesying his greatness.

The question with Adrian’s work is whether the darkness and grand scale of plots like these transcend the form and conventions of the short story. If you are inclined to believe that the father in “The Changeling” is sacrificing himself to appease the spirits that haunt his child—that this is not mere metaphor, or mental illness—you will find much of A Better Angel affecting, even revelatory. If that ending sounds like a standard-issue climax with the volume cranked up, you may find these stories a little arch, maybe even ridiculously so.

A number of the stories in A Better Angel deal explicitly with the September 11 terrorist attacks, casting the spectacular horror of that event in spiritual terms. In “The Changeling,” the narrator’s possessed son speaks with the voice of the 9/11 dead–yes, all of them. In “The Vision of Peter Damien,” images of falling people, immense silver “angels,” and burning towers afflict the children of a small Ohio town at least a century before the morning of the attacks. And in the collection’s strongest and most hair-raising story, “Why Antichrist?” a man who has died in the World Trade Center uses a Ouija board to tell the narrator that he is—you guessed it—the antichrist. Among Adrian’s great strengths is the ability to sell conceits like this one without winking at the audience or falling into self-indulgent darkness. “Why Antichrist?” is full of legitimately creepy Ouija messages like “What matters time when time is soon to end?” and “My suffering is great but yours will be greater.” But it’s also, often, disarmingly offhanded: hours after drinking holy water to show that he’s not the antichrist, the narrator reports that “the burning came again, and though I made it to the toilet this time, I had barely finished throwing up before I had to sit down and shoot black blood out of my ass.”

At times, the off-handedness of Adrian’s prose distracts. Seven of the nine stories in the collection are written in the first person, and Adrian occasionally suffers from the flabbiness and weird rhythms that can afflict first-person narratives. In the title story, the narrator says after taking a droplet of morphine that “[i]t was too good, and it made everything too beautiful, not just the angel, whose ugly skin flew off as if blown by a real hurricane wind, so her wings were clean again and her naked face and body were open and compassionate.”

Even so, the reader understands the occasional flat sentence as the price of writing (and reading) stories this ambitious in scope and theme. The stories in A Better Angel begin with images of everyday life, but use those ordinary moments as openings to something larger, something less familiar and less comforting. This is the joy of reading Chris Adrian: the sense that Marilynne Robinson is right, that the writer’s life is a grand and novel journey, and his fiction dispatches from that distant territory.

Ablutions: Notes for a Novel by Patrick deWitt
(Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, March 2009)
Emily Testa

This debut novel from ex-bartender and ex-Angeleno Patrick deWitt appears as a series of “notes for a novel”.  The observer and transcriber of these events is a bright, young, whiskey-guzzling bartender who catalogues (in the second person) the miseries and misdeeds of a ragtag bunch of regulars at a faded Hollywood lounge:

Discuss the regulars.  They sit in a line like ugly, huddled birds, eyes wet with alcohol.  They whisper into their cups and seem to be gloating about something—you will never know what.

Here are tattooed teachers, charming crack addicts, mute transvestites, psychotic surfers, and a bloated former child star.  He knows they lie to him and to each other.  He knows, too, that his own future sits just across the bar from where he stands.

Newcomer deWitt revives a tired theme—addiction begets despair—with razor-sharp prose and a startling twist: the never-named narrator (a version of the author, it would seem) is neither self-pitying nor self-loathing to the point of extinction.  He acknowledges his downward spiral with an uncommon clarity, and never reports his circumstance as though it just happened upon him.  Thus, even the most debauched behavior of the regulars is related coolly, dispassionately.  The narrator is reluctant to condemn them because he recognizes himself in their unconscionable actions.  For this reason among others, Ablutions is more than a book about a bar and its resident aliens.

Part travelogue (Grand Canyon, inner psyche), part documentary (destruction and despair in Hollywood), deWitt’s novel defies easy classification.  Undoubtedly, though, the formal elements of the author’s style are pitch-perfect.  Whether delivering news on the bar’s ghost-in-residence, a tragicomic gangbang, or the dissolution of his marriage, the narrator remains distant but deeply involved:

You stagger closer to the old horse, thinking of him standing in the alley by himself with nothing in his mind but gray sound and all of a sudden you are so sorry for hitting him like that, and you cannot understand why you would do such a thing and it seems to be the worst thing you have ever done in your life.

Though he is always attuned to the real pain of his regulars, he rarely steps this close to his own.  While basic sentiments—sadness, or anger—are revealed as a matter of course, the narrator’s (and the novel’s) emotional nucleus is avoided at all costs. This is deWitt’s greatest risk and a probable source of his readers’ frustrations.  The novel hints at—but does not affirm—its narrator’s more complicated feelings and eventual fate.  The narrator, replete with acute insights and a quick wit, certainly has a brain.  But where is his heart?

Emotional evasion aside, Ablutions resonates because it does not forgive the indiscretions and toxic opportunism of its characters.  The novel’s narrator offers, for all of them, the only apology he can muster: this will have to do for now.  deWitt emphasizes, at every pulsing turn, the thread of loss and regret that holds his ‘notes’ together.  Here, the hilarious and pathetic escapades of the narrator and his barflies are less evidence of moral turpitude than of searing loneliness.  They are greedy because they have nothing, selfish because they have no one.  Only the narrator is hopeful, remotely and occasionally so, and in a way that tugs at the edges of a reader’s restraint.  Even as the narrator destroys himself, we root for him to win.  In these, its best and most unsettling moments, Ablutions aches with honesty.