Like Life: Radical Realism and the Fiction of Sam Pink
For the most part, “realism” in current discussions of fiction has become conflated with conventional narrative practice: “storytelling” employing the orthodox “elements” of fiction as developed in that latter 19th and early 20th centuries. While in American literary history at least, the rise of realism in this period did bring a change in the kinds of subjects addressed (more “ordinary” characters), in setting (less familiar sorts of places, made to seem “real” in the kind of description involved), and in the stories told (fewer stories about haunted mansions or demoniac white whales), as well as in the manner of telling (less grandiloquent, but also less stylistically dynamic), in both the new realism and the old romanticism writers ultimately perceived their task to be relating a story recognizable as such according to accepted dramatic form—elucidated perhaps most memorably by Gustave Freytag in his famous “pyramid.”
Almost all of the classic realist novels, however much they feature less fanciful or flamboyant stories, nevertheless take on this traditional narrative form. If many realistic narratives don’t seem conspicuously “dramatic” in their narrative effects, the even more radical mode of realism, American naturalism, frequently does manipulate plot structure so intensively that novels such as Dreiser’s Sister Carrie or Norris’s McTeague accelerate into outright melodrama. Even the fiction of Henry James, who endeavors to move the external drama of narrative realism into the internal drama of what ultimately came to be regarded as “psychological realism,” still tells stories that can be plotted along Freytag’s pyramid (including stories such as “The Beast in the Jungle,” which on the surface conveys the impression that “nothing happens”).
It is also true that a credible, coherent definition of realism in fiction—the attempt to produce work that is “like life”—could really be upheld in practice only if the role of plot is at the least minimized. Since “life” does not unfold along a neatly sequential dramatic arc, a properly realistic narrative would deemphasize if not eliminate the niceties of exposition and denouement, would acknowledge conflict—without necessarily making it the center of interest—but would not imply that such conflict usually is resolved (indeed, would more truthfully reveal that resolution is rare, at least as part of a discrete, self-enclosed experience). The realistic conclusion to most stories—loosely construed as some sort of serial progression—would be neither “happy” nor manifestly unhappy but indeterminate, merely a suitable stopping-point.
Few writers have consistently attempted this sort of radical realism, although the stories of Chekhov and Hemingway might be provisional models of what it looks like. Some might adduce Bukowski or Kerouac as examples of such unvarnished realism, but Bukowski often seems more interested in realism as the vehicle for an apologia of sorts for his protagonists’ romanticized marginality, while Kerouac, although he does abandon formulaic storytelling for picaresque narrative, also romanticizes his restless characters and their quest for enlightenment, which is ultimately more central to his fiction’s purpose than the faithful depiction of mid-twentieth century social and cultural realities. The minimalist realism of writers such as Raymond Carver and Mary Robison was frequently called plotless (a description that especially seems appropriate to Robison’s short stories), but while most of these writers did indeed reduce the role of plot in favor of atmosphere and setting, they did not so much abandon “story” as reconfigure it, so that “conflict” often remains unstated, emerging instead in a moment of revelation or heightened perception (including the reader’s perception) that works to unify the story’s elements without laboring to produce an overt, dramatic tension.
A writer whose work goes farther in removing plot as an obstacle to realism is the American writer Sam Pink. Pink has been described variously as “surreal,” “bizarro,” “experimental,” and “minimalist,” among other attempts to characterize his short novels and stories. That reviewers might respond differently in assessing a writer’s work is of course inevitable, but in Pink’s case the use of such disparate labels is surprising, since all of the fiction he has published so far seems readily identifiable as realism, albeit a particularly plotless, episodic kind. Pink’s fiction, at first glance, at least, seems closely associated with the “slacker” realism of Tao Lin and Noah Cicero, although the realism of Pink’s fiction is more outwardly directed, not simply a chronicle of disaffection.
Pink’s novels—most of them more accurately described as novellas—surely are in part chronicles of disaffection, but the male protagonists of these books are alienated more from any consistent belief in their own self-worth than from the social expectations and arrangements they confront, about which they generally remain impassive if not indifferent. Indeed, to the extent they acknowledge the social conditions in which they subsist, they do so not to decry their oppressive effects but to observe and often admire those others around them who are enduring the same conditions. In Witch Piss, for example, the protagonist’s own marginal circumstances recede into the background as he interacts with street people through most of the novel, becoming in effect a witness to their way of adapting to their situation. What in the novels preceding Witch Piss could seem like recitations of personal degradation becomes in this novel something more like objective reporting, almost a kind of documentary realism.
The Garbage Times (twinned with White Ibis) could also be described in these terms, although here the underachieving protagonist is more actively an agent in the social milieu he also delineates in his first-person narrative. But what The Garbage Times helps to make clear is that Pink’s fiction from the beginning was not an exercise in post-adolescent confessional but a more or less objective rendering of the profound stasis into which their characters’ lives seem fixed. So thorough seems their profound indifference to the cultural imperatives spurring ambition and aspiration, and so remote from any discernible compensating internal motivation, that we are offered in these works an almost disinterested anatomy of the protagonists’ radically passive mental state, as if the characters are dutifully reporting on their own emotional detachment.
But these novels are not just convincing depictions of their characters’ psychological makeup but are also palpably “realistic” in other, more customary ways as well. The Garbage Times begins with its narrator hauling dumpsters into the alley behind the seedy bar where he works, an episode (and a rather extended one) that establishes “garbage” as a motif that helps to unify a novel that, like most of Pink’s novels, doesn’t much rely on plot as a structural device. That narrator notes the salient details:
Something dropped on my head.
I touched my head.
Thick, dark-green gel on my head—like pureed spinach. . .
The dumpsters were full of broken glass and liquid collected from chutes coming from upstairs.
With that classic vinegar smell that cleared my face.
Before arriving at the bar, the narrator is on the train, where “There was puke on one of the seats and window behind it—like someone not only puked, but his/her head filled with puke, then exploded.” One of the narrator’s frequent jobs inside the bar is to clean up overflowing toilets, and this task is described with the same sort of unflinching specificity. Clearly one of the narrator’s goals in this novella is to expose the reader to the sensory particulars of the dingy environment in which he moves. Such attention to setting is manifested in Pink’s other novels as well, so that, if “story” is not going to be featured in these works, the characters and their surroundings will get especially pronounced emphasis: although “what happens” in The Garbage Times and Pink’s other novels is certainly of concern in the reader’s engagement with them, what they most immediately require is an initial fascination with the extremity of the protagonist’s peculiarly impassive attitude toward what seems to be a borderline existence.
Pink’s fiction does not convey the impression of crafted simplicity revealed in the chiseled prose and offhand dialogue of Hemingway and Chekhov, but this is arguably the most conspicuous sign of its own craftsmanship, as the apparent contingency and drift experienced by his protagonists is surely not a reflection of the writer’s indifference to structure but a purposeful effect that is carried out with remarkable consistency in all of the novels, in each extended only to the point beyond which the strategy might begin to pall, so that the episodes still seem to cohere as a “slice of life,” not just a random collection of scenes. If the novels couldn’t really be called “picaresque,” despite the loose sequentiality of the scenes, it is because the protagonists never seem to be on a journey to anywhere, although perhaps the goal involved is that whereby the reader is led to acknowledge that most lives are not journeys at all; muddle and inconclusion are more common, when outright failure does not prevail. Certainly in all of the books leading up to The Garbage Times/White Ibis there are no epiphanic moments, no portentous symbols that would otherwise bestow a false transcendence on their resolutely temporal and material concerns. Readers might be tempted to think of the titular protagonist of Pink’s first novel, Person, as a kind of emblematic Everyman figure, but in fact “Person” designates this character specifically, his sense of himself as a kind of nonentity. Even his desire to occupy space is attenuated:
I don’t have a bed.
I sleep on a sleeping bag, on the floor in my room.
My room is small.
I wish it were even smaller though.
Right now I can take like, two steps one way across, and three steps the other way.
That seems like too much.
It always seems like too much.
It would be awesome to just walk up to someone on the street and grab him or her by both shoulders then scream, “It’s always too much!”
It feels embarrassing when I require too much of the world.
Person might be classified as a “loser,” but he is a loser in his own distinctive way: he seemingly has little desire to change his status (even to the extent of following up on a possible job as a grocery bagger), but is also clearly enough dissatisfied with his life, using his chronicle of a winter in Chicago as the occasion for interrogating his apparent inability to reject his loser status.
The sense of spontaneity arising from Person’s narrative comes partly from this insistent self-questioning, but it is reinforced by the prevailing style and mode of narration, which continues to characterize the subsequent novels as well. Although the narrator’s account does not entirely proceed in one-sentence paragraphs as in the passage above (it comes close to doing so in The Garbage Times/White Ibis, however), it consists of a very fragmented and staccato prose, often conveying the impression the narrator is reeling off a succession of thoughts as they come to him—which he is, although that does not mean these thoughts themselves are disconnected and scattershot. Rontel begins:
After my girlfriend left for work this morning, I lay in her bed for an our looking at the wall.
Fuck, this is really good—I thought.
It was good, if you didn’t think about doing it as you were doing it.
Sometimes I put my hands up to cover my face.
That made it even better.
If the action (or inaction) here invokes what seems a static, desultory situation, the narrator’s comments are not merely random remarks. However much the passage establishes the narrator/protagonist’s extreme passivity, it also very succinctly summons a telling image and rather intricately reveals the narrator’s psychological predisposition: Clearly stillness and stasis is a state to which he aspires (even to kind of blissful erasure of consciousness where “thinking” is an obstacle). Yet such bliss also seems perilously close not just to a temporary self-renunciation but self-obliteration as well.
Neither are the narrator’s subsequent activities (once out of bed) simply a string of haphazard events and miscellaneous observations. Although often enough he is occupied by this sort of introspective self-scrutiny (not always flattering in what it reveals), just as often his attention is directed outward. Indeed, despite the interludes of acute self-awareness, he seems most interested in the external environment in which he moves. In both Person and Rontel, as well as Witch Piss and The Garbage Times, the setting is the city of Chicago, which is cumulatively depicted quite vividly, impressing itself as a place that both overwhelms its inhabitants and provides a sustaining attraction (especially for the novels’ protagonists). The No Hellos Diet is also ostensibly set in Chicago, although its immediate setting is the department store in which the protagonist works, which itself comes fully to life in its narrator’s rendering of his experience there. In one scene describing the narrator on his way to work, he evokes at length a walk through the Loop and other parts of downtown Chicago. While the scene refrains from figurative descriptions and other flourishes of “fine writing”—the narrator preferring instead simply to name and to list—nevertheless it seems motivated by the traditional goal of realism to firmly situate the reader in a specific setting that is presented with the kind of detail that persuades us to accept the verbal representation as a plausible likeness of reality.
This project is carried forward in The Garbage Times, which, like The No Hellos Diet, focuses most closely on the protagonist’s workplace, but this also, as in Witch Piss, offers the narrator the opportunity to broaden the focus to include a more general survey of a seamier side of Chicago. Although this novella, like Pink’s previous books, has its moments of astringent humor (frequently at the narrator’s own expense), The Garbage Times may be Pink’s bleakest work; the garbage conceit seems emblematically to represent the narrator’s acknowledgement that the world he inhabits is overwhelmed by filth and waste, although we also find this character at least willing to try and clean up the filth. If there are no subtle intimations that such a world might be redeemed (the novella’s final passage has the narrator clearly implying it shouldn’t be), Pink’s narrator endures.
White Ibis, however, does seem to signal a change—whether it will be lasting or just a passing variation remains to be seen, of course—in both tone and approach from this writer’s predominant practice in the fiction culminating in The Garbage Times. Most obviously, this novel is set not in Chicago but in Florida, although the autobiographical features attached to the protagonist (which become even more explicit in this work) make his story clearly enough continuous with the narrator-protagonist of the previous novels. Whether the radical shift in environment from the Chicago novels to this one is deliberately mirrored in the narrator’s somewhat more relaxed persona, or his more congenial circumstances—he has moved to Florida with his girlfriend—has simply made him more content, less estranged from his own life, in White Ibis the dominant mood seems lighter; the protagonist, if not exactly ambitious, does reveal a sense of purpose (specifically related to art and writing) not really in evidence in the preceding novels.
The novella as well, while not radically departing from the formal and stylistic assumptions familiar from the previous books, is noticeably different in its strategies and devices. For one, it could more plausibly be called a narrative, as the narrator does more or less relate a story, one that might be characterized as the story of his adaptation to his changed circumstances. It also includes episodes more straightforwardly humorous than anything to be found before in Pink’s fiction, such as the protagonist’s climactic encounter with a Girl Scout troop, and its conclusion could even be called upbeat. Further, the novel’s title refers to the recurring appearance of this tropical bird throughout the novel, lingering at the end of the narrator’s driveway. Although the novel features much animal imagery in general, the white ibis clearly comes to represent the narrator’s burgeoning appreciation of nature in his new environment, as well as an incipient realization that in its stubborn persistence and wary reserve the ibis is similar to the narrator himself. Pink has not so brazenly indulged in symbolism before, as if the kind of starkly honest realism to be found in the first books requires avoiding all patently “literary” devices, a restraint no longer observed here in what is Pink’s most recent work.
It would not really be accurate, however, to regard even the grittiest of the earlier books as somehow something other than “literary.” However loosely structured they may seem to be—or even without structure at all—this is a deliberate effect the author creates; indeed, it is an effect Pink realizes with remarkable consistency and skill across all of the novels. To adopt a transparent and unaffected prose style is not to refuse style but to cultivate a particular kind of style, in Pink’s case not so much “plain” as deceptively artless, devised to seem as direct and “natural” as possible, unembellished by ostentation stylistic flourishes or gratuitous complexities. But Pink replaces these more conventional signs of verbal artifice with fragmentation and partial repetitions, ultimately producing a prose style with its own distinctive cadence, in contrast to the accustomed rhythms of most literary prose. And to successfully maintain a reader’s interest in a work of fiction that resolutely—even defiantly—refuses to center that interest in plot requires an otherwise deft and considered handling of form, not simply its disregard. While a reader sampling just one of Pink’s novels might understandably conclude that the author seeks to avoid the conspicuously “literary,” no one reading all his published fiction could plausibly maintain that this work is anything other than thoroughly composed.
Any conception of realism that would have it as the absence of all artificial devices—except for “story,” which is seen as identical with fiction itself—is simply not credible. Story itself is as much a contrivance as any other formal stratagem—it may in fact distort reality even more directly than many other ostensibly unconventional structural devices. Many of the alternatives to traditional narrative offered since the emergence of modernism (stream-of-consciousness, fragmentation and collage, unreliable narration, etc.) were introduced precisely to penetrate surface realism, to get at a perspective on reality not accessible to external description and linear narrative. If literary realism as traditionally understood is the attempt to create an illusion of “real life” in a work of fiction, to do that entirely through the ordering of language inherently requires not an eye for documentary detail but an aptitude for art.
The majority of current “literary fiction” would have to be categorized as realism, although most seems to regard it as a kind of default setting, as if invoking “real” life is simply an unexamined assumption about the goal of fiction. Few writers are as rigorous in their allegiance to realism in an unembroidered form as Sam Pink, but ever since the appearance of minimalist neorealism in the 1980s (exemplified by such writers as Raymond Carver and Ann Beattie), verisimilitude as an important literary value is no longer met with the skepticism that motivated many experimental writers during the previous two decades. (Perhaps its most noteworthy exponent now is the critic James Wood, whose notion of “hysterical realism” is meant to denigrate the postmodern legacy for neglecting ordinary realism). To be sure, there are current American writers who defy or disregard the realist imperative, most notably in a strain of fabulism influenced especially by George Saunders and Aimee Bender, although much of this fiction, as much as it embraces a kind of surrealism, nonetheless employs traditional narrative machinery almost as earnestly as Freytag could wish.
More so than the “quirky” diversions of these writers, Sam Pink’s realism could plausibly be considered “experimental” in its conceptual asperity and stringency of form. Neither realism nor anti-realism is itself inherently experimental, although in historical context either could certainly seem more or less audacious given established norms, so that fiction like Sam Pink’s can seem refreshingly adventurous even if it is best described within a mode that occupies a perennial—if contested—space in familiar literary history. If a writer’s motives, however conservative or conventional some might reflexively think them to be, prompts innovative strategies, there is no reason to dismiss what seems the “wrong” motivation. When “realism” is defined so vaguely that its alternative is simply some form of overt fantasy (as it too frequently seems to be in popular literary discourse), then the term is actually concealing a multitude of practices that shouldn’t be reduced to its most naïve formulation.
Still, it is not unfair to ask whether an approach that emphasizes what is absent—plot, dramatic tension, conventional prose—might have a better claim on originality if it also encompassed the presence of new or unfamiliar aesthetic strategies. Radical realists such as Nicholson Baker and Stephen Dixon deemphasize conventional narrative structure, but also manage to add a singular element that alters our perception of the ostensible formal or stylistic boundaries of fiction—boundaries that these writers reshape in ways that enlarge our appreciation of the elasticity of literary form and style, the extent of their still available resources. Dixon fashions a distinctive prose style (although influenced by Thomas Bernhard) whose chains of loosely linked sentences mirror the loosely linked scenes and episodes that in some ways resemble Pink’s non-narratives. Baker is able to seize on situations—a man on his lunch break, a man feeding his baby daughter—that would seem to have no dramatic potential at all and instead to magnify the moments in which we are nominally inactive and usually least reflective into episodes of heightened awareness that are often surprisingly compelling.
It might be said that writers such as Dixon and Baker provide realism with an aesthetic supplement of sorts, a surplus of “literary” interest beyond the act of representation itself, although surely neither of these writers could exactly be called aesthetes. (Dixon’s work in particular avoids obviously lyrical language.) The alienated realism of Sam Pink, Noah Cicero, and Tao Lin, on the other hand, is implicitly an attempt to avoid the literary, or at least give the impression that “real life,” unmediated by literary affectation, is what the writer is after. Sam Pink’s fiction does an especially effective job of upholding this illusion, but precisely because it so clearly manifests a unifying artistic intelligence, it is inescapably literary. White Ibis suggests he may be moving toward more conventional literary strategies, but while this might be regarded as “experimental” in a trivial sense—a writer who previously avoided all the familiar moves now tries them out—such a turn could hardly count as an advance over this writer’s previous achievements in a more unadorned but innovative realism. That work shows that realism is not inherently a regressive literary mode reinforcing conventional narrative form but can readily enough lead an adventurous writer to renew and reshape literary form.
Reinforcing Hard Reality: Stephen Dixon
Reviewers of Stephen Dixon’s fiction have often taken note of the author’s lack of widespread recognition, despite the high esteem for his work expressed by many writers and critics. For now it is no doubt unlikely that Dixon’s work will gain the kind of attention that would in any way equal its genuine achievement, at least in the short run, although posthumous recognition is always possible. Dixon long acknowledged this, telling interviewers—in the few he gave—that he wrote for the sheer gratification of it, adhering to his own aesthetic standards and offering his stories and novels to available readers. Those of us who have accepted these offerings all along should ourselves be grateful he persevered in spite of undeserved neglect and gave us his singular fiction with seemingly undiminished dedication.
On the other hand, it is certainly the case that new readers of Dixon’s fiction would find that his aptly named Late Stories well-represents his most abiding strategies and assumptions and provides the kinds of satisfactions we can take from all of Dixon’s best work. They are satisfactions that are closely tied to the challenges and provocations of Dixon’s fiction, which on the one hand seems conspicuously unconventional, with its paragraphs that last for pages (sometimes the entire length of a story or even a novel), its run-on sentences that sweep in both exposition and dialogue in an undifferentiated rush, its narratives that seem to expand incrementally rather than develop; on the other hand, the ultimate effect of these initially disorienting devices is a very intense sort of realism—not the kind of unmediated, transparent realism produced by “normal” storytelling, but a kind of cumulative realism created by Dixon’s obsessive focusing and refocusing on specific events and details, often filtered through memory or alluded to in talk, sometimes through discursively drawn-out rumination.
In “The Vestry,” Philip Seidel, the writer protagonist of all of the stories in Late Stories, is contemplating going to a play being performed at a church in his neighborhood. Since his wife died, Seidel has rarely ventured out of his house, and surely nothing can be more convenient than an event held right across the street. Still, Seidel contemplates the prospect at length, first recalling his previous failed efforts to get out of the house and then attempting to fortify his resolve to make this one a success:
. . .Just try to get an aisle seat, if there’s a middle aisle, so he can see the stage better, though of course if nobody’s tall sitting in front of him. He doubts the seats are reserved, if they’re all the same price. And there’ll be refreshments there, he’s almost sure. In fact, he remembers now the sign saying so, the proceeds from it going to some medical research organization. No, a soup kitchen. But the point he’s making is he has to get out. He means, not doing just the same things every day. No, he doesn’t mean that. He means he has to stop giving himself excuses not to go to things. And the play’s right across the street. What could be more convenient? A two-minute walk. Doesn’t have to drive to it. No problem about coming home at night. And it’ll break the ice, sort of. If he goes to this, maybe he’ll go to other things like it. . . .
After Phil has made his way to the church vestry where the play is staged, he soon concludes the play is not worth his time and leaves after the first act. About the play and his response to it we learn only that “The play’s terrible. Everything about it: acting, writing, characterizations, laugh lines that aren’t funny, romantic and tender scenes and one tragic one. . .that are cloying, boring, totally unconvincing, something, but they’re awful. Fifteen minutes into the play, he wishes he hadn’t come to it.” That “something” may indicate Phil doesn’t have the right term to indicate his disdain, but it may also mean he’s searching for an excuse to leave, regardless of the play’s quality. The story is not about Phil Seidel’s trip to the theater but about his continuing inability to adjust to the death of his wife and resume something like a normal life without her, a state of affairs that Late Stories as a whole makes evident. Ultimately the book engages us precisely through its various inventive ways of reinforcing this hard reality.
Late Stories is obviously a book about the specter of old age and the shadows cast by declining vitality, but much of Dixon’s later fiction has an autumnal tone/ His previous novel, (excluding the novella Beatrice and the uncharacteristic caprice, Letters to Kevin), His Wife Leaves Him (2012) dealt directly with the death of its protagonist’s wife, although in this case the writer’s name is Martin. Dixon frequently drew on what we must assume were the circumstances of his own life, although it would undoubtedly be a mistake to assume his fiction can be adequately labeled as autobiographical. (In his interviews, Dixon admits both grounding his work in his own life experiences and freely inventing when that seems necessary to the aesthetic integrity of the work.) Many of his stories and novels center around a writer character, presumably modeled on Dixon, whose wife is ill or disabled, as was Dixon’s own wife, Anne Frydman, who died of MS in 2007. His late fiction thus in a sense brings this broader story to a conclusion of sorts.
If Dixon’s subjects and situations usually remain familiar, each work a piece of what could finally be considered a single, expansive fictional canvas, both the stories and the novels can still surprise, especially in their formal strategies. The first story in Late Stories, “Wife in Reverse,” sounds its keynote by relating the story of Seidel and his wife’s lives together, in reverse order, beginning with her death—“His wife dies, mouth slightly parted and one eye open” is the first sentence—to their initial meeting at a party, all in slightly more than a page. Suggesting that his grief has severed Seidel’s ties with the ordinary course of events, the second story, “Another Sad Story,” finds Seidel in a gloom-fueled reverie in which one of his daughters has also died. Excursions into the explicitly dreamlike and fantastic are not unusual in Dixon’s fiction—Interstate, for example, recounts in multiple elaborated versions the story of the shooting of the protagonist’s daughter in a seemingly random event, unless it hasn’t, since in the end we can’t know what really happened, only that the father is clearly filled with dread at the prospect of losing his child. Similarly, what we take most forcefully from “Another Sad Story” is not the daughter’s death, which is just a waking nightmare, but Seidel’s emotional incapacitation: “I am a corpse,” he pronounces at the end of the story. “I can’t move.”
Other stories in the book depict Seidel imagining himself literally on his own deathbed, (one takes place in the aftermath of his imagined death), having conversations with the ghost of his wife (or dreaming about her), while others more straightforwardly portray him recalling the past or continuing to cope with his bereavement and what seems to him the impossibility of returning to a semblance of his previous life. In some he does attempt—or thinks about attempting—to begin a relationship with another woman. “Just What Is” shows the effort failing, while the follow-up story, “Just What Is Not,” shows it apparently, if improbably, succeeding. “Remembering” is one of the more disturbing stories in Late Stories, as it relentlessly narrates a series of events clearly demonstrating that Phil’s short-term memory is failing, while “Feel Good” provides something of a breather from the prevailing atmosphere of melancholy and loss, as Phil experiences a day that seems to justify the story’s title. In “Therapy” he talks himself into consulting a therapist, again suggesting he might after all manage to persevere.
Perhaps the most affecting story in the book is “Missing Out,” a “what if” story in which Philip Seidel meets Abigail Berman at a party, but he is usurped in his attempt to ask her out by another man attending the party. Phil meets Abby a few additional times at the same annual party, where he learns that she married the man who had left with her at that first party. Years later he is told she has been diagnosed with MS, and eventually that she has succumbed to the disease, although her husband, unable to cope with her affliction, has treated her badly, divorcing her before the end. Phil expresses only regret that he missed his opportunity to become her husband instead, convinced as he is that he would have stuck by her through the bad years.
Seidel is clearly himself writing this story, although it is related more or less straightforwardly, without the sort of metafictional framing and interruption we often see in Dixon’s fiction. Perhaps Seidel is trying to assure himself through the telling of the story that finally he did do right by his wife, but the tone—and its ultimate effect—is wistful, as if the opportunity lost represents a profound impoverishment of Seidel’s life. None of the stories in this book really focus on the period of time in which Philip Seidel actually did care for his wife as her health declined, so we have no context, at least in this book, within which to judge the sincerity of the implicit declaration in “Missing Out” that Phil’s love for his wife eased the burden of caregiving. But in much of Dixon’s previous fiction, such caregiving, by characters generally similar to Philip Seidel, caring for wives very much in the same situation as Abby, is extensively depicted. Here the writer protagonist is sometimes prone to fits of anger and frustration at the tasks he is required to perform, although usually they are brief and do not lead him to abandon his responsibilities.
What is most notable, at least upon reflection, about Dixon’s collective portrayal of what we know must originate in the material circumstances of the author’s life is the disconcerting honesty of it. Even if we should remain cautious about attributing the characters and situations in the work to “real life” models, Dixon renders the Seidel-type fictional personae without flinching from their obvious flaws, at the very least taking the risk that readers will transfer their judgment of the characters to the author whose own behavior they presumably reflect. The impression of an autobiographical connection is perhaps reinforced by the habitual presentation of the characters as writers, although this feature of Dixon’s work actually introduces a destabilizing element into any final reckoning with both the formal and thematic implications of that work. The metafictional gestures are more than the perfunctory acknowledgement of the artifice of fiction but act to affirm such artifice as the means for getting a more truthful perspective on real life than can be provided by convention-bound realistic narratives, which in their way distort and reshape reality even as they ostensibly seek to faithfully reflect it.
While the life circumstances of characters such as Philip Seidel echo those of his creator, these characters themselves call attention to their acts of writing, so that we might say that writing stories is on one level just a character trait, their vocation. However, that the story we are reading is in the process of being composed is often made explicit through the activity of this character, who feels free to stop and start, to transform and transpose the details of the story being told—or just as often, not being told, due precisely to the fact that the narrative is in flux, subject to backtracking and revision. The act of processing experience, of attempting to bring to it a suitable form of aesthetic coherence, is Stephen Dixon’s most immediate subject. The myriad ways in which this might be done were abundantly realized in Dixon’s fiction for over 40 years now, and Late Stories is an excellent illustration of this achievement. Through Dixon’s work we come to recognize what is most “real” about human experience: the effort to understand it.
Sincerity and the Surface: On Nicholson Baker
Perhaps the most distinctive feature of Nicholson Baker's fiction is the way it seems both to ingratiate and provoke, aspires to be both accessible and difficult. Most of his novels could be described as at the same time formally simple--a man tends to his six-month old baby one afternoon, two people hold a telephone conversation--and quite radical, at least while we are still attempting to adjust ourselves as readers to such reduced narrative assumptions (which conversely expand the scope of the narrative's attention.) Stylistically, the novels are also simultaneously transparent, with few "literary" affectations, and elaborate, the sentences themselves expanding in length and complexity to meet the challenges of the kinds of minute observations and prolonged reflections in which Baker's narrators habitually engage. Even the themes of Baker's books can seem both obvious and not that easy to discern. What finally are we to make of the succession of images and memories that go through the mind of the narrator of The Mezzanine as he ascends an escalator, or are we left simply with the fact of their succession? How are we to regard the narrator of The Fermata, who tells us of his magical powers to suspend time, which he then exploits to remove the clothing of desirable women? Is he repulsive? Pathetic? An honest portrayal of the creepier inclinations harbored by all men, maybe by everyone?
Baker is probably best known for works such as The Mezzanine, Room Temperature, and A Box of Matches, in which the dilation of time, the obsessive recording of detail, and the constant sidetracking onto secondary and tertiary paths of thought characterizing his work are most pronounced. These novels test the reader's patience with their narrators' propensity to digress, as well as their intense interest in such things as shoelaces and airplane tray tables, but the narrators go about their business with such good cheer, assuming we will of course share such interests and appreciate the painstaking delineation of them, our resistance is weakened, ideally leading us to reconsider our presumptive need for a more recognizable story to develop. As the first, most audacious, and probably most successful of these books, The Mezzanine in particular seems likely to endure as a signature work, both standing as an impressively achieved first novel and providing potential insights into Baker's strategies that I believe can help us approach Baker's other books as well, even those that might seem departures from the expectations set up by The Mezzanine and Room Temperature, his second novel.
Because at the time The Mezzanine was published "minimalism" was the most prominent trend in American fiction, some critics did attempt to associate this novel with minimalist neorealism, and there are on a first impression some reasons to regard Baker both as a minimalist of sorts and as a realist. Although his minimalism is a minimalism of plot rather that style, Baker's first books do seem to share with minimalism an inclination to pare back the ambitions of fiction and to return it, after the purported excesses of postmodernism, to a more willing acceptance of the conventions of realism. However, their reduction of plot to such microlevels of act and observation are so extreme, their fixation on surface details so insistent, they could almost be regarded as parodies of minimalism. Fiction's scale and scope have been constrained so radically in these novels that it may even at first seem they do not ask to be taken seriously. When it eventually becomes clear the author is sincere indeed, the effect is if anything more comic yet, although certainly Baker's narrators do not intend for us to take their accounts with anything other than the dedicated seriousness of purpose with which they are related.
Ultimately Baker's minimalism is really its own kind of maximalism. The microscopic focus on quotidian objects and processes that ordinarily escape our notice is a way of rescuing them from neglect, of preserving them in their actual profusion as elements of human reality. His characters are so immersed in their environments and their interests that the perspective normally provided in a work of fiction, which avoids proliferation of detail and refrains from following all streams of thought in the selective way that allows a story to emerge, is necessarily replaced with one that sacrifices story but arguably stays closer to reality--at least as these characters engage with it. Moreover, their preoccupations are certainly not registered in a style that could be called minimalist:
. . .For a second the fifteen-percent figure made me unhappy, and then I thought, Fine, yes, I welcome all this imperfect mingling--I want this circling refluxion of our old reconditioned pleasures and our new genuine ones to continue for years, decades, until it becomes impossible to trace backward the history of any particular liking, just as it was impossible to unstir the rash dollops of red or yellow tint my mother used to add to the custom-mixed paints she got from Sears: she used old peanut butter jars as receptacles, and sat cross-legged in the side yard pouring imperceptibly different yellow-greens from one jar to another, refining the color that she wanted for the porcelain-knobbed dresser in my sister's room, though the young technician in the paint department at Sears had with apparently scientific precision injected what seemed to me a perfectly acceptable series of squirts of yellow, cyan, and magenta from the paint organ into a while base, according to the recipe in a notebook for the sample chip my mother had matched to the border of the cloth calendar. . . . (Room Temperature)
In what may be Baker's most notorious books, Vox, The Fermata, and now House of Holes, we are presented with characters whose preoccupation is with sex, but even here the emphasis is on variety and detail. Baker is not really concerned with the psychology of sex, with sex as an expression of love or intimacy, or even with sex in the conventional form of sexual intercourse. All of these books emphasize the multifarious ways of eliciting sexual arousal and of achieving sexual release. Autoeroticism and mutual masturbation occur as frequently as actual sexual congress between a man and a woman (and Baker's depiction of sexual activity is almost entirely heterosexual). Fantasies of sex are perhaps as common as sex itself. The most noteworthy quality of Baker's treatment of sex may be the way it emphasizes the sheer enjoyment it provides. The depiction of sexual desire and the myriad ways it might be satisfied is relentlessly sex-positive, even in The Fermata, whose narrator acts on his fantasies in a way many readers could find distasteful. Vox is an unambiguous celebration of sex, in this case allowing both its male and its female protagonist to indulge their uninhibited fantasies.
House of Holes is even more emphatically about sex than Vox or The Fermata. One could argue that Vox is also about the need for caution in sexual relations in the AIDS era, with its protagonists confining themselves to the safety of phone sex, or about "sex" as an artificial construct, a phenomenon of language, while The Fermata could be taken as a satire of the male preoccupation with sex. Both of these novels certainly offer representations of explicit sexual activity (at least in fantasies), but neither could really be called pornographic in either legal or artistic terms. Each features well-rendered, believable characters whose existence cannot be reduced to their participation in sexual activity. The creation of these characters involves subtle uses of point of view, so that in Vox the more aggressive and at times more explicit conversation of the male caller is balanced off against the more restrained sensuality evidenced in the talk of the female caller, each influencing the other, eventually approaching a kind of harmony that mirrors the movement of a love story. The Fermata is related to us in the first person by its potentially unsympathetic narrator, but Baker gives him a voice that is undeniably engaging and helps to mitigate the contempt we might otherwise have for him, an aesthetic triumph that in itself brings redeeming value to the novel that raises it beyond the pornographic.
House of Holes has few of these complexities and might indeed be the most direct and sustained exercise in pornography of the three sex novels. It is about people having sex, explicitly and in almost innumerable varieties. There is no single protagonist or controlling consciousness, simply a third-person narrator relating the various characters' escapades at the “House of Holes,” an erotic resort to which its sundry visitors suddenly find themselves transported by entering real holes. This initial fantasy device—characters are sucked through a hole on a golf green, through a straw, etc.—sets up the House of Holes as itself a place where sexual fantasies can be fulfilled, and Baker lets his imagination loose. In addition to depicting a multitude of sexual positions and expressions, the novel features a severed arm and hand adept at pleasuring women, a "crotchal transfer," whereby a man and woman exchange genitals, and a sculptress who gives birth to her sculptures (made of "ass wood") after engaging in anal intercourse. As in Vox and The Fermata, sex is portrayed with great energy and humor, and while it is all very colorful and explicit, it would be difficult to call this a "dirty" book, if to be dirty or smutty requires that sex be implicitly regarded as shameful, something that otherwise should remain furtive, hidden from view and excluded from conversation.
In an essay criticizing Baker for writing a book like House of Holes, Barret Hathcock asserts that it is indeed a dirty book and cannot "be evaluated as anything but pornography." That House of Holes consists of graphic representations of sex is undeniable, but Hathcock's assumption appears to be that if the novel is pornographic it is thus by definition irredeemable as literary art. He goes so far as to charge that Baker is "demeaning" himself by indulging in the pornography of this novel. But there is no reason to conclude that even if a literary work can be called pornographic it can't also be worthwhile as art. The possibility that the pornographic representations in House of Holes might make some readers uncomfortable or even offend them is not itself a reason to assert the author ought to feel shameful because he is not also uncomfortable. It is also no reason to regard the work as without value, however difficult one might find it to appreciate that value because of a distaste for the sexual content it offers.
Hathcock believes that House of Holes could be aesthetically credible only if it were to "comment" on "our current sex-saturated culture" or if it revealed "an interesting inner life" in its characters, neither of which is attempted by the novel. This assumption that a work of fiction can be regarded as "art" only if it is engaged in "saying something" or in "going deep" into human consciousness (ideally both) is a widely shared one. It betrays the further, rather strange, assumption that aesthetic success has more to do with subject and content than it does with the actual fashioning of art through style and form. Presumably if Baker could be found to be satirizing sexual mores or critiquing the cultural preoccupation with sex as reflected in pornography Hathcock would find something aesthetically valuable in House of Holes. Similarly, if it were to focus on revealing what goes through the minds of the sexually adventurous characters as they frolic their way through the narrative, we would be witnessing something more appropriately aesthetic. But Baker merely presents their frolics without satire or social commentary (although certainly with humor); this is content of which Hathcock disapproves, so it by that measure alone lacks art.1 Such standards seem to me misguided as applied to any fiction with specifically artistic ambition, but they are especially misguided when applied to Nicholson Baker's work.
Baker is neither a satirist nor a psychological realist. However much his fiction examines the shared (if often ignored) details of contemporary social reality, it does so not in order to dissect it but to record it, not to mock it or call it into question but simply to apprehend it fully. If anything, Baker's fiction could be accused of being too uncritical of the reality it records, too willing to accept things as they are, especially the "things" that exist as the commodities of modern capitalism. One could say that Baker's novels are "about" their characters' self-conscious immersion in their reality, but this focus is on the "inner life" only in the way in which the novels' protagonists themselves bring it to the surface. Since most of the novels are first-person narratives, we have access only to the thoughts and perceptions the narrators have chosen to verbalize. Psychologically, these characters are remarkably transparent: one would hardly think to look for their hidden motives or deep psychological conflicts. Finally, that House of Holes offers no social criticism and attempts no exploration of its characters' minds should not be at all surprising, since these ambitions have always been absent from Nicholson Baker's fiction. Baker's art is the art of sincerity and the surface.
In some ways, sex seems a quintessential subject for Nicholson Baker's art and House of Holes his most adventurous treatment of the subject. It is a common human activity that might be considered fundamentally simple but that invites almost infinite expressions--especially in Nicholson Baker's meticulous rendering. The multiplicity of sexual acts might seem obsessional, but what have Baker's books been from the beginning but chronicles of obsession (including his own obsession with John Updike in U and I)? Similarly, one might find the episodic structure of the novel, by which each episode relates a new sexual experience, repetitive, but why would anyone familiar with Baker's work find the strategic use of repetition surprising? That House of Holes completes what is now a trilogy of sex novels suggests not so much that Nicholson Baker has a dirty mind but that he himself recognizes that this subject allows him to exploit his distinctive approach to fiction in a particularly felicitous way.
Yet at the same time, House of Holes significantly departs from Baker's previous novels both formally and stylistically. Although it shares with those novels a refusal of conventionally plotted narrative, its use of sequential episodes, each of them tidily provided with a proper story structure, aligns it more closely with traditional storytelling, while continuing Baker's resistance to larger-scale narrative development. This episodic structure combined with the novel's large cast of characters necessitates that Baker use a third-person point of view for the first time in his published work. The narrative voice is lively enough, specializing in particular in colorful names for the sexual organs—"She lay on the bed and stuck two fingers up her simmering chickenshack and shook them"—but this voice does lack the more personal charm many of Baker's first-person narrators are able to convey through their sincere efforts to share their experiences, however strangely magnified or entangled they become. The most immediate manifestation of the different sort of voice we encounter in House of Holes is literally in its style, which is much more functional, less disposed to the sometimes circuitous syntax of The Mezzanine and Room Temperature:
Pendle peered closely at the ad, and suddenly he felt a powerful air current pulling his hair and the whole of his head downward. He was vacuumed down into the black circle. He lost consciousness for a moment, and he came to he was in Lila's office. Lila was the director of the House of Holes. She was large and pretty in bifocals, about fifty, with lots of loose light-brown hair. Pendle told her that he was there about the job in The Rooster.
It may really be the tamer prose style represented in a passage like this, more than the pornographic content, perhaps, that prompts some readers to regard House of Holes as a disappointment, "unworthy" of Nicholson Baker. In those scenes depicting explicit sex, such a style would seem to even further emphasize the sexual content, leaving the impression that Baker's usual facility with language has been sacrificed for the naked (so to speak) pornographic imagery. Even so, we should not overlook that much of this imagery is actually conveyed through dialogue, making House of Holes closer in form to Vox and, as in that book, framing the subject as talk about sex and the healthy loss of inhibition such talk can bring at least as much as about direct representations of sexual acts. This loss of inhibition seems to have a particularly liberating effect on the female characters, who are portrayed affirming their sexual desires and asserting their right to sexual satisfaction. If what Baker has produced here is "pornography," it is certainly much in contrast to the usual male-centered focus characterizing pornography as a genre.
Since Baker has now written three novels about sex, we must assume that he himself considers this a subject both worthy of his time and consistent with his concerns as a writer. Perhaps it is coherent to believe that he shouldn't think so, but unless we are led to conclude that taking up this subject makes Nicholson Baker some sort of moral reprobate, I don't really know what purpose it serves to insist he should write about something else. It seems unlikely Baker would have written these novels only to provoke indignant responses from readers and critics, although House of Holes reinforces the impression his ambitions do not include the attempt to court universal approval.
1It should also be said that Hathcock otherwise expresses admiration for Baker's work and has intelligent things to say about Baker's fiction, even if he does disapprove of House of Holes.
Entering Cross River
Rion Amilcar Scott’s The World Doesn’t Require You is both continuous with his first collection of short fiction, Insurrections (2016), and a significant departure. Most obviously, both books offer stories set in Cross River, a fictional Maryland town outside of Washington D.C. The characters, almost exclusively African-American, in both collections are in general quite acutely aware of themselves as residents of this community, which is given its own unique history (the site of America’s only successful slave insurrection) and geography—abutting the “Wildlands,” a kind of wilderness area in the middle of an otherwise urban landscape, and bisected by the great river that gives the town it name.
The shared setting almost inevitably makes Cross River as much the subject of these books as the characters portrayed and stories told, but Scott as well reinforces the town’s centrality in The World Doesn’t Require You by moving more directly toward a mythopoeic treatment of it through emphasizing the fables and folklore that have accumulated through the community’s history, and by adding to the more or less realistic short stories in Insurrections more formally adventurous narratives marked by fantasia and a kind of magical realism. From the stories in the first collection to those in the second, it is as if Scott has moved on from the effort to convey the palpable reality of Cross River to the attempt to render the setting in the service of a larger, emblematic vision, as a kind of archetypal African-American milieu in its historical circumstances and cultural inheritance.
Both books together thus offer us a rather wide array of characters, all of whom are compellingly individualized but also collectively representative of the inhabitants of Cross River. However, while some stories, such as “The Slapsmith,” about an abused, transient woman and her encounter with two homeless men encamped near the railroad tracks, portray the most marginalized members of the community, a significant proportion of the characters are, if not exactly prosperous, notably well-educated and mostly middle class. Indeed, several of them, including “Good Times,” the first story in Insurrections, and “Special Topics in Loneliness,” the novellas that concludes The World Doesn’t Require You, feature characters who attend or teach at Freedman’s University, the local historically black college. Both books depict their characters interacting or in conflict with other black characters; few white characters appear, remaining on the periphery of a fictional world that is presented as a self-sufficient creation that in no way requires contrast to a white-dominated society to reinforce its authenticity.
This is not to say that the relationship between this African-American community and the racialized reality of American culture is obscured or unexplored. The history of this relationship suddenly intrudes in “Klan” (Insurrections), the narrator of which recalls “the time the Klan galloped through the main yard of Freedman’s University late in the evening. . . Four white-sheeted ghosts on white horseback riding in procession.” It is hard not to be aware of this history (and its accompanying stereotypes) when reading “Party Animal,” which takes the form of a dispassionate psychological case study of a young black man who has succumbed to “Reverse Animalism,” a disorder that has caused him to enter a “backwards evolution and descent into what can only be described as simian behavior.” For white readers especially, the effect of this story can only be unsettling; on the one hand, the transformation from metaphorical (party animal!) to literal might seem like an exercise in absurdist comedy, but to learn that the man, Louis Smith, after being confined to a psychiatric facility “often violently attacked other males for supremacy, sexually accosted female patients, and swung through the facility, hopping from wall to wall as if they were jungle trees” surely leaves the reader disconcerted. If the story is not quite an allegory of white racist perceptions of the black male, its bold manipulation of historically racist imagery evokes that history in an unanticipated way.
In The World Doesn’t Require You, Scott similarly incorporates such charged imagery in two stories featuring robot protagonists (although the robot’s creator plays a prominent role as well). “The Electric Joy of Service” and “Mercury in Retrograde” are narrated by Jim, a “Robotic Personal Helper”—RPH, or “Riff”—created by a man Jim refers to as “the Master.” Jim was one of the original Riffs, a survivor of the virus plague inflicted by the Master himself when his business partners object to his plan to “paint these fuckers black”:
Give them big red lips, dress them like lawn jockeys. Sell them to white folks. They’ll have slaves again and we’ll get rich.
The Master is himself a black man, and each of the stories track the ambivalent relationship between Jim and his creator—the Master chooses to call the narrator “Nigger Jim,” and while Jim is eventually fully aware of the implications of the name, he has nevertheless been programmed to meet his master’s needs—“coded to love and to serve him.” In the latter story, the robots carry out their own insurrection (after accessing tapes about the Great Insurrection in Cross River), but most are subsequently deprived of their self-created programming language in an Electric Holocaust” intended to suppress their revolt.
“Mercury in Retrograde’ is not satirical, and the connection between its SF-ish situation and American slavery is too unequivocal for the story to be taken merely for its allegorical parallels. Jim’s struggle to maintain solidarity with his robot compatriots despite their suspicion (if not outright hatred) of him, and despite the imperatives of his conditioning, makes him quite an affecting character. The story’s conclusion highlights the strength of that conditioning, and perhaps Scott wants to emphasize how insidiously the slaveholder mentality can warp the consciousness of the enslaved. But almost any interpretation of this story is going to oversimplify it, eliding some of the lingering uncertainties—how are we to respond to the Master?, what are the implications of the robot-slave conceit?—the story doesn’t really resolve. Something similar is true of “A Loudness of Screechers,” although in this case the inconclusiveness comes from the story’s hallucinatory quality: A young narrator tells us of his family’s encounter with a flock of Wildlands “screecher birds,” an encounter that apparently involves an ritual of appeasement the narrator is witnessing for the first time. The boy’s uncle makes an offering to the circling birds but is last seen “climbing higher and higher in the sky” as a screecher clutches him and flies away. Clearly this story draws on embedded Cross Riverian lore, but precisely what we are to make of the enactment of this particular rite—not to mention the phantasmic event at its climax—is surely subject to disparate conclusions.
Even in the stories less reliant on outright fantasy devices, our intended responses to the characters and situations aren’t insistently signaled. The dominant character type in The World Doesn’t Require You is the seeker—after knowledge, after success, after self-enlightenment. Some of these seekers are sincere in their efforts, but others are more self-serving, some outright frauds. A prominent source of the literal pursuit of transcendent insight is again to be found in the Wildlands, specifically in “a kind of forbidden zone they called the Ruins, a succession of abandoned plantations, many taken over by squatters claiming divine right to save the soul of the land.” Here, in “The Temple of the Practical Arts,” a group of people (including the narrator) follow “Dave the Deity” (introduced to us in the book’s first story, “David Sherman, the Last Son of God”) in his farmhouse turned temple. In this story, the aspirations of the faithful come to a literally fiery end, as the police burn down the temple in an action reminiscent of that taken by the Philadelphia police against the Move liberation group. The story depicts the narrator, Slim, grappling with his own darker impulses, even as he recalls the Temple’s beginning as the product of a “beautiful” vision, but a follow-up story, “Slim in Hell,” finds him succumbing to those impulses in the aftermath of the Temple’s demise.
Dave the Deity is not entirely a charlatan, nor is Slim merely an angry failure. Both have been deprived of their dreams (they are musicians), and both of them are forced to compensate for their disillusionment—in David Sherman’s case, his behavior might just seem eccentric, but it also courts danger, a danger that Slim, at least, believes was caused by Dave’s own bad judgment. (Dave brought into the Temple an aspirant named “The Kid,” who Slim believes is concerned about himself, not the ideals of the Temple. In “Slim in Hell,” it is the Kid’s musical success with the local “Riverbeat” sound that finally sends Slim over the edge.) Slim professes to believe in the mission of the Temple—even more than Dave himself—but “Slim in Hell” makes it clear enough that his personal envy is as large a factor in driving him to the destructive act that concludes the story as the existential despair produced by the burning of the Temple—although that existential despair is also real.
In their mixed motives and internal complexity, Slim and David Sherman are typical of most of the characters in The World Doesn’t Require You, although some characters and their actions are more morally ambiguous than others. Few of the characters could be called conventionally “sympathetic,” but neither do the stories seek to expose them to the reader’s disapproval. In some ways, Scott’s almost exclusive focus on this self-enclosed black community has the effect of making us even more aware of the overarching white world outside it, but our view of the people of Cross River is not dependent on their relation to that external world (the pernicious effects of which remain implicit—although this world occasionally encroaches in the form of neighboring Port Yooga, Virginia). The characters are presented in all their human complications, however much historical circumstances have inevitably conditioned their tangible expression.
The characters whose motives are arguably the most opaque are the two lead characters in “Special Topics in Loneliness Studies” (Scott’s longest published work to date). It is composed of a journal of sorts written by Dr. Simon Reece, an enigmatic figure who seems more ghostly than real. Reece tells us of the downfall of his quasi-colleague, Dr. Reginald S. Chambers, an English professor at Freedman’s University, an account supplemented by various inserted documents—emails, syllabi, student essays, writing by both Chambers and Reece. Reece appears to be an instructor himself, but his status seems nebulous at best: “Somehow I always had students,” he writes, “although my courses weren’t officially offered by the university. No idea where they came from. I just set up shop every semester in an empty classroom and start teaching.” Reece lives in the basement of a classroom building, which “had once been the morgue when the building was the school’s teaching hospital.” He reveals he had once been a low-paid adjunct at Freedman’s, so low-paid his family had been evicted, and it is as if he is now a revenging spirit eager to expose academe “for the dystopian wasteland it truly is.”
This he does not merely by witnessing the ruin of Chambers but actively participating in its progress. Whether Reece actually intends this to be the consequences of his actions is finally uncertain. What Reece’s narrative really discloses is that he himself is far from free of the narcissism and moral degradation he attributes to modern academia. Dr. Chambers’s most serious offense turns out to be his esteem for Roland Hudson, a Cross River poet known for his autobiographical poems about scorned love. When Chambers (with Reece’s encouragement makes Hudson the centerpiece of the course that gives the novella its title, the divergence of opinion about the value of Hudson and his work between Chambers and a colleague invited as a guest lecturer leads ultimately to a grievance filed by a student (ironically the only student to find value in the course to begin with) when Dr. Chambers doesn’t take kindly to his colleague’s influence on the student’s term paper ( a feminist critique of Hudson’s “erasure” of the real-life woman who scorned him) and begins to unravel. Perhaps in the end Chambers’s ordeal (which includes the enmity of his dean and a final humiliation before the faculty) does indeed confirm Reece’s view of the malevolence of academe—not malevolent enough to prevent Reece from accepting a position as Chambers’s replacement—but Reece himself has worked diligently to propel the version of it that defeats Reginald Chambers.
Looked at one way, “Special Topics in Loneliness Studies” could be regarded as an academic satire, but this, like calling “Mercury in Retrograde” science fiction or “The Loudness of Screechers” a horror story, is only a superficial characterization. These works both draw on specific actions or images generally associated with such generic forms and have a larger role to play in evoking the imagined reality of Cross River. In this way all of the stories in both Insurrections and The World Doesn’t Require You seem part of the same work, a project that could be extended indefinitely as a comprehensive creation equally allowing for formal exploration and an underlying continuity of purpose. Scott has indicated that a Cross River novel may be forthcoming, at the least a sign that there is indeed more to be known about this deftly realized place.
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