Fiction Review: "The Ascent," Ron Rash

This review was originally published at The Hooded Utilitarian on July 14, 2011.

“The Ascent,” a 2009 short story by Ron Rash, is a devastating, incisive treatment of escapism. Initially, he portrays the tendency in its better aspects; he shows how daydreams are borne of a desire for better circumstances, and how they can lead one to formulate strategies—although some are follies—to improve one’s situation. But Rash is also concerned with escapism’s darker side, namely how one can use it to numb oneself to life’s stresses and demands. And he takes his exploration of that darkness the distance: continually fleeing life’s realities can only lead one to the permanence of death. It’s an effort that’s all the more impressive for its combination of social realism and poetic imagery.

Jared, Rash’s protagonist, is a ten years old. He lives with his parents in North Carolina near the Tennessee border just outside the Great Smoky Mountains national park. An item in the news has caught his attention: authorities are searching for a missing small passenger plane that’s believed to have crashed in the area. Jared's parents are poor, and he hates the shabbiness of their home, so on his first day of Christmas vacation, he sets out to find the missing plane.

Rash’s portrayal of the search is, on the first reading, quite charming. Jared is on the cusp of childhood’s end and adolescence’s beginning. He imagines he is searching for the plane with a girl in his class, explaining the animal tracks to her, helping her climb the ridges, and even using his pocketknife to successfully defend them from a bear. His daydreams about the girl are a first step in interest in the opposite sex, and the passages bring a smile to one’s face. It’s certainly not as big as the smile one has while reading the early Tom Sawyer-Becky Thatcher scenes in Mark Twain, but it’s there.

However, the appeal of these moments quickly gives way to dread--a shift in tone Rash seems to effortlessly handle. It isn’t long before Jared finds the plane and the corpses of the couple who were flying it. He doesn’t do what one expects, which is to go back and to return to the plane with the authorities. Instead, he climbs in the back seat, closes the door behind him, and sits for a couple of hours lost in his thoughts. He only thinks of leaving when he notices the sun starting to go down, and he then does something appalling: he takes the woman’s gold-band diamond wedding ring and puts it in his pocket. His only thought is to give it to the girl in his class so she will like him.

It is obvious at this point that Jared is a very disturbed boy, and other details in the narrative begin to assert themselves. One is that he is out looking for the plane alone; he apparently has no friends. The other is the catalyst for his interest in the girl: she told him to his face that his clothes smelled bad. He is obviously withdrawn and ostracized by the kids his age. When he gets home Rash shows the source of his troubles. His parents are junkies who are celebrating the father’s latest paycheck by getting high. This immediately explains the poverty and Jared’s dissociation. It also implies an additional reason for his loneliness. His mother and father are so blatant about their drug use that they have their stash and paraphernalia in open view; if other parents even suspected what is going on, they’d take every step to keep Jared from associating with their children. The pathos of the boy’s circumstances only increases when the father discovers the ring> He immediately takes it to sell and buy more drugs. The mother and father’s addiction has so taken over the three’s lives that it even thwarts Jared’s fantasies of a different life.

The parents’ drug habit may be both the impetus and dead-end for Jared’s daydreams, but Rash clearly intends for the addiction and fantasies to be seen as two sides of the same coin. Both are the place to run when the real world gets to be too much. The problems that led the parents to drugs are never explained, but they’re not hard to imagine. There might have been the financial inability to set up a proper household in which to raise a child, or even being overwhelmed by adult responsibilities in general. In any case, the parents are shown as so far gone that drugs are all that matter to them. Everything else, such as building a home or raising their son, has become a peripheral matter. As for Jared, he wants the edification of the one thing about himself in which he finds confidence: his ability to easily make his way through the woods. He imagines the girl at school to be in awe of his competence;it’s a salve for how she rubbed his nose in his humiliating circumstances. His discovery of the plane is the ultimate proof of his ability. In finding it, he managed what the authorities, with all their resources could not do. The plane becomes to him what the drugs are to his parents: a place to escape that he never wants to leave, and to which he always longs to return.

Rash emphasizes this last point with a key trope. He creates a metonymy for Jared’s pride in having found the plane: the blueness of the sky when the discovery was made. That blueness is as representative of Jared’s high as his parents’ glazed eyes are of theirs. The equivalency of the two is made clear in a key passage from the morning after Jared finds the plane and his father takes the ring:

Jared ate as his parents sat in the front room passing the pipe back and forth. He looked out the window and saw the sky held nothing but blue, not even a few white clouds. He wanted to go back to the plane […]

The parents have their escape, and all Jared can think of is returning to his.

Most hauntingly, Rash uses the sky trope to signify the downward spiral of both Jared and his parents. The parents go on a binge with the money they get from the sale of the ring, and the comedown (or hangover or whatever it’s called for drug users) is rough going. It’s difficult for Jared to react to, and the high of discovering the plane is no longer a high; it’s now his only means of escape. His desperation is reflected in the changed appearance of the sky, which Rash describes as “gray, darker clouds farther west.” And Jared is all alone, even in his fantasies; he now sees himself on a mission too dangerous for the girl from his school to accompany him. He then does something to enable his parents’ drug habit even further. It's only fitting; they pushed him into the escape of daydreams, and now he allows them to escape their comedown/hangover with even more drugs.

The sky when Jared returns to the plane a third time at the story’s end is all snow. Rash strongly suggests that the parents are heading towards a fatal overdose, and, in a remarkably poetic passage, he indicates that Jared is equally doomed in treating the plane as his relief. The snow--which may also serve as a metaphor for drugs--overwhelms everything until one can no longer feel the cold. The only consolation is that everyone is numb inside the vehicles of their escape.

The dynamic between the social-realist milieu and the poetic imagery used to develop the story is what gives “The Ascent” a good deal of its power. Rash not only has to dramatize the tragic descent into an escapist mindset, he has to keep the reader at enough of a distance so one fully understands what is going on. The images--the sky and the snow, the plane, the parents’ drug pipe--all exist for literal purposes and as tropes for Jared’s thoughts. The changes in those tropes are used to signify the changes in his thinking, particularly his need to indulge in the narcotic of his own. The development of the imagery has a distinct dramatic momentum. Rash not only draws a sharp equivalency between daydreams and intoxicants--both can be fatal if one goes too far with them--he also takes one inside the pathos of falling in such a way. The story’s effect is rather ironic; Rash shows characters imprisoning and destroying themselves in numbness, yet it is that numbness that moves the reader to pity and even tears.

”The Ascent” was originally published in Tin House 39. It is also included in Ron Rash’s short-story collection Burning Bright, as well as The Best American Short Stories 2010, edited by Richard Russo and Heidi Pitlor.

Fiction Review: "Your Fate Hurtles Down at You," Jim Shepard

This review was originally published on Pol Culture.

Jim Shepard combines metaphor, philosophical insight, and character study in a masterful piece of short fiction.

"Your Fate Hurtles Down at You," by Jim Shepard, was originally published in Electric Literature 1 (July 30, 2009). It is featured in his 2011 collection, You Think That's Bad. One can also find it among the selections in The PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories 2011, edited by Laura Furman.

Jim Shepard’s “Your Fate Hurtles Down at You” is a marvelous short story. It uses a single encompassing metaphor for its philosophical foundation, from which it builds a narrative that functions as an analogue in microcosm. The metaphor’s vehicle is also incorporated as a literal element. And from there it creates an extremely poignant character study. One is both moved by the story’s meanings and electrified by Shepard’s skill in putting it together. Who knew a story about studying avalanches could be so affecting?

The story’s present tense is 1939, set in and around Davos, Switzerland. Eckel, the narrator, is a member of a team that is studying the phenomena of avalanches on the slopes of the Weissfluhjoch summit. The team is there at the behest of the Swiss government, which is looking to develop avalanche defense measures. Eckel is the only team member who isn’t a scientist or engineer. He describes himself as “the touchingly passionate amateur,” and his interest in avalanches is a highly personal one.

In an extended flashback, the reader learns why. When Eckel was sixteen, he and his twin brother Willi had gone on a weeklong school ski outing. Their class had left the hotel just before a warning of avalanche conditions had arrived. Willi and most of their group had been caught in an avalanche as Eckel watched from above. Willi was one of those rescued, but he died a few days later. A sense of guilt haunts Eckel afterward; a cut from one of his skis is what triggered the avalanche. He and his mother become obsessed with the phenomena in the years that follow, and the erudition of his mother’s research journals get him selected for the Weissflujoch study team.

It becomes quickly apparent that Shepard intends the avalanche as a metaphor for life’s randomness, and how that randomness can overwhelm one. Sometimes things just happen; they come out of nowhere, and there’s no rhyme or reason to them. As one of Eckel’s fellow team members says near the story’s end, “an avalanche’s release depends on a system of factors so complicated that prediction involves as much divination as science.” Life is like that, too; it's a pithy analogy to make. Hindsight is 20/20, but one can never truly anticipate what will happen. Something as innocent as shoveling snow from a roof can start an avalanche that destroys a local church. And, as in Eckel’s case, an avalanche can change the direction of one’s life. People can try to assign blame, such as when the parents of Eckel’s classmates blame the wholly innocent teacher for their children’s deaths, but such reactions are folly. In life, one never knows what to expect.

Eckel is overcome by another avalanche of sorts on a supply trip to Davos. Shepard amusingly dresses this up in another metaphor--here it is slipping on the ice and falling down the steps--but this is an avalanche just the same. Eckel encounters Ruth, a female classmate that he and his brother were both infatuated with, and who was standing with him when the catastrophe occurred. She left to visit her grandparents shortly afterward and never returned. She’s now a schoolteacher in Davos, and over coffee, she confesses what happened. During a camping trip with some classmates about a month before Willi’s death, she and Willi had slept together. She had become pregnant. Eckel doesn’t know how to deal with the emotions this stirs up. His predicament is compounded by Ruth’s tentative signals that she’s now interested in a relationship with him.

It’s at this point that the story makes its full transition into character study. Eckel becomes fixated on Ruth, and his fixation is borne of the fact that the feelings she stirs are unpleasant and, as feelings invariably are, beyond his control. He’s hurt by the knowledge that she passed him over in favor of his brother. That pain is also implicitly caught up in the jealousy he feels towards Willi, as well as the guilt he feels as a result. His anxiety over her apparent present interest in him only escalates things. He responds by trying to dominate her. He insists they meet when he wishes, and then on a moment’s notice. He demands she tell him more about the pregnancy and whatnot, and then often answers for her before she can respond. Inside he’s belittling himself, running away from the prospect of building something with her now.

The pathos of this is made all the more moving by the reader’s recognition that Eckel responded to the avalanche that killed his brother in almost exactly the same way. His interest in the phenomena isn’t the result of curiosity so much as it is the consequence of wanting to control a circumstance that has affected his life so profoundly. He wants knowledge of avalanches in order to defeat them. Deep down, he wants to ensure one never has the power to upend his life in that manner again. Ironically, he has only given the avalanche the control that he sought to undermine with his pursuits.

Shepard resolves the story on something of an upbeat note: Eckel and his team rescue a pair of Germans who are trapped on a slope. They do so with equipment and procedures that have been developed from their studies of snow and avalanches. It’s heartening to know that knowledge is possible, and that challenges can be confronted and possibly mastered. But at the same time, Shepard remains true to the story’s guiding insight: one can be overwhelmed by circumstances without notice, and nothing one can do can prevent it. The characters aren’t allowed to forget this, either; one of the team members sets off an avalanche by a step in the wrong place. No one is harmed, but the story concludes with Eckel imagining both surviving an avalanche and dying in one. The way he sees himself in both situations are apt tropes for his character. These also provide a stirring epiphany for the reader: perhaps self-knowledge is the most that can be hoped for.

Fiction Review: "Painted Ocean, Painted Ship," Rebecca Makkai

This review was originally published on Pol Culture.

This superbly written short story is a hilarious and moving tale of bad luck run amok in a young English professor's life

Rebecca Makkai’s “Painted Ocean, Painted Ship” is a sleekly written and beautifully developed short story. It’s part comedy-of-errors tale, and part character study. The protagonist, a young English professor named Alex Moore, suffers one mishap after another--most of it the fault of her own insecurities--until it seems her life is an irredeemable shambles. The experience, though, forces her to reassess everything about herself: her attitudes, her relationships, even her views of her scholarly project. She comes out the other end wiser--more aware of her own faults and what’s worth holding onto in her life. As luck would have it, her misfortune sets the stage for a more professionally and personally fulfilling life. Makkai catches the reader up in the rather farcical runaway train of Alex's travails, and most impressively, she manages the happy ending of pulling that train safely into the station without it feeling contrived.

The story opens with an article in a campus alumni magazine about Alex’s misadventure over the summer. While duck-hunting with her half-brother in Australia, she accidentally shot and killed an albatross. It’s a misadventure with special meaning to a professor who teaches English-lit survey courses. As all readers of Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner know, such a deed is a harbinger of misfortune. And Alex gets hit with it right off the bat: the albatross is a protected bird, and she has to spend a good deal of her vacation time dealing with the Australian authorities. She ends up having to pay a hefty fine. Her troubles are only beginning, too. A thoughtless remark in which she mistakes a fifth-generation Chinese-American woman for a Korean exchange student turns into a full-blown campus scandal. To add to that, her doubts about her impending marriage overwhelm her, leading her to put her engagement in jeopardy. The life one can spend years building for oneself is a fragile thing, and Alex’s is splintering and shattering. Like Coleridge’s mariner, she’s got the albatross around her neck, and the reader can’t help but wonder how she’ll ever get it off.

What pushes the narrative beyond rather dark farce and into the realm of character study is that Makkai treats these mishaps and other aspects of Alex’s life as consequences of a weakness in Alex’s personality. She’s a control freak, determined to impose her perceptions and attitudes on everyone and everything around her. The remark to the Korean exchange student is prompted by her frustration with the young woman, a student who will not speak up even when Alex demands it in an after-class meeting. Alex is both rationalizing the student’s behavior, and using that rationale to browbeat the woman into doing what she wants. Alex jeopardizes her engagement largely because her fiancé can’t be bothered to reinforce her vanity about her looks. She can’t even read the alumni magazine article without complaining that the punctuation in her quotes is inappropriate and doesn’t reflect her intended tone. Makkai doesn’t have Alex whine about why-oh-why couldn’t that albatross have been the goose she thought it was when she shot it, but there would have been no surprise if it had been included.

Makkai weaves everything together with an outstanding sense of both construction and pace. She breaks the story down into a collection of succinctly written episodes, all of which are crafted to end on a note of epiphany, irony, portent, or even shock. The story’s momentum comes from the rollercoaster-ride structure created by the use of the latter three, but the use of epiphany is what gives it resonance. I was especially struck by the meditation on the relationship between poet-painter Dante Gabriel Rossetti and his model/muse Jane Morris. (In the story, this is the subject of Alex’s dissertation, and a focus of the seminar she teaches on the Pre-Raphaelites.) Alex contemplates the discrepancy between Morris’s actual appearance and Rossetti’s idealized portraits, and she wonders if confidence and happiness is found in acceptance of another’s idiosyncratic views of oneself. This ties into Alex’s thoughts in the story’s coda, when she looks back on all that happened and concludes that the moral is not to jump to conclusions. She senses that this isn’t adequate, and the Rossetti meditation highlights what’s she’s missing. The point to be gleaned is to just accept things, whether it’s the irritating behavior of a taciturn student, or happiness from the attention of a lover who sees you as more beautiful than you feel you are. It’s what gets one through the rough spots, including the hassles that come from killing a protected animal. Accepting things is necessary for them to fall into place, and it’s Alex’s ultimate embrace of this that gets the albatross off her neck and allows her luck to turn.

Tying her ending to the realization that one should deal with things through acceptance is what helps Makkai contrive a happy ending that doesn’t feel contrived. Another aspect of what makes the ending work is that it isn’t entirely happy. More specifically, Makkai includes discords. Alex’s confusion over how to make sense of what happens during the course of the story is one example; the recalled suicide of a sympathetic supporting character is another. (Alex doesn’t understand why it happened, but a reasonably attentive reader won’t be.) The ending emphasizes that life is chaotic and organic, and I rather enjoy the irony that Makkai’s extraordinary craft and control are what make it so vivid.

"Painted Ocean, Painted Ship," by Rebecca Makkai, was originally published in the Winter 2009/2010 issue of Ploughshares. It is featured in The Best American Short Stories 2010, edited by Richard Russo and Heidi Pitlor.

Fiction Review: "World of Gas," Bonnie Jo Campbell

This review was originally published on Pol Culture.

This selection from Bonnie Jo Campbell’s celebrated American Salvage collection tells of a single working mother taking all comers. Along the way, it also offers a tartly funny view of Y2K silliness and masculine folly, all grounded in the universals of everyday adult dilemmas.

One could easily denounce Bonnie Jo Campbell’s short story “World of Gas” as misandrist, but doing so would only betray one's humorlessness. Campbell’s stunning eye for social and character detail are on fine display: the story’s sketches of men as irresponsible and folly-minded ring unerringly true. It’s outright male-bashing, but it had me laughing from one end of the story to the other. The laughter Campbell prompts is one of recognition; I challenge any male reader to go through this story and not see shades of the dumbassery on display in himself. But one will also find an identification that goes beyond gender humor and into the universal.

“World of Gas” is told through the eyes of Susan, a single mother of three, probably about 40, who manages a propane supply company in rural Michigan. (I see Frozen River’s Melissa Leo playing her in the movie version.) The time is the latter months of 1999, and the company is getting a good deal of business from Y2K freaks--people who saw the alleged possibility of a worldwide mass computer crash on January 1, 2000 as an impetus to begin living out their apocalyptic survivalist fantasies. Susan is beleaguered on all ends. Not only does she have to manage the installation and maintenance issues for a bunch of yahoos who are likely to blow themselves up, she also has to deal with issues on the home front. Her ex-husband has effectively abandoned their three sons, which leaves it to her to contend with the eldest’s growing incorrigibility. The story is a day-in-the-life portrait, so her problems aren't resolved, but Campbell effectively builds the material to an ironic epiphany. About it, I’ll just say the Y2K calamity might have had its benefits.

Along the way, the reader is treated to one moment after another of hilariously rude rejoinders. Susan has thoughts of retaliation against the unhelpful vice-principal of her eldest son’s high school. She mockingly berates the militia-member buyer of a massive fuel tank (“Try not to let any of your drunk buddies drive into it”), while feeling sorry for his wife (“now that he was preparing for Y2K, Mack had gotten hold of a 550-gallon diesel tank that lay like a big yellow turd under Holly’s clotheslines”). When she finds her 15-year-old in bed with his girlfriend, she gets hit with the but-I-love-her defense. She responds with the stock If-you-love-her-why risk-getting-her-pregnant, but her aside to herself is a beauty: “if this girl means so much to you, then why don’t you turn off the damned TV when you’re in bed with her?” And Susan’s thoughts on the survivalist Y2K nonsense are priceless:

It occurred to Susan that men were always waiting for something cataclysmic—-ove or war or a giant asteroid. Every man wanted to be a hot-headed Bruce Willis character, fighting against the evil foreign army while despising the domestic bureaucracy. Men wanted to focus on just one big thing, leaving the thousands of smaller messes for the women around them to clean up.

Susan highlights the bull in all the nonsense that crosses her path; it’s both bracing and bracingly funny.

The story, though, is more than just a collection of wryly funny responses to the aggravations of masculine idiocy. Besides being a dead-on portrait of its time and place, it also captures the frustrations of someone doing his or her best to be competent and responsible, only to feel surrounded by fools. There is also its evocation of being stuck with the sense that cooperation and respect for one’s efforts are nowhere to be found. It’s a situation that confronts people of both genders. That universality may also contribute to why the story’s anti-male broadsides aren’t off-putting. Campbell’s caricatures have their smaller harmonies, but their discords are no match for the more profound harmony that lies beneath.

Fiction Review: "The Trespasser," Bonnie Jo Campbell

This review was originally published on Pol Culture.

Bonnie Jo Campbell's treatment of a break-in's aftermath is a frightening little story about the most fragile of victims: one's sense of security, well-being, and identity.

“The Trespasser,” the opening tale in Bonnie Jo Campbell’s short-story collection American Salvage, is a chilling piece of work. The story begins with a shocking moment for the family at its center: they arrive at their vacation cottage, only to find that it has been broken into. The trespassers used it as a squat and a meth lab. The situation isn’t exploited for melodramatic suspense. All but one of the trespassers is long gone, and the one who stayed behind immediately flees the house. She never comes into contact with the family. Campbell instead uses the story’s circumstances to take the reader inside the sense of violation the family feels. Her rendering of those feelings isn’t superficial--she doesn’t mine the scenario for reactionary anger. Campbell gets at something deeper; the story dramatizes how people use the objects that surround them to define their identities. The family's life finds expression in their possessions, photographs, and diaries. It turns out the last trespasser has used their belongings as a focus for her thoughts and feelings as well.

Using a break-in to evoke feelings of anger and disgust in the reader is a simple thing for a storyteller to do. Campbell, though, doesn’t take the easy way out. She mitigates those feelings by making the sole remaining trespasser a figure of pity. The trespasser is 16, she’s suffered through years of physical and sexual abuse, and she’s now caught in the downward spiral of drug addiction. One can’t judge her harshly for the drugs. It’s obvious she doesn’t take them to get high so much as to make herself numb. The pathos of her life is powerfully rendered by her appropriation of the family’s things. She uses them to imagine the life for herself that she was never given the opportunity to have.

Campbell intensifies the reader’s sympathies for the trespasser by juxtaposing her life with that of the family’s 13-year-old daughter. The younger girl is the model of a well-adjusted suburban teenager. Everything she has becomes everything the trespasser never knew but wished for, and everything the trespasser has suffered is the brutality the other girl has been protected from. The feeling of oh my God, this trespasser could have been my daughter/niece/what-have-you is slammed into the reader's consciousness near the story's end, when the girl's parents discover that the trespasser had been used as a whore by the men cooking the meth. One thinks back on the trespasser's odd celebrations of the daughter's athletic trophies, or the rearrangement of the furniture into a conversation nook for her non-existent family, and one wants to cry at the meaning those objects have for her.

But the pathos of the trespasser's actions is accompanied by the reader's horror at the deeper implications of what she's done. She's infused things that are not hers with an emotional meaning that cannot be dismissed. One cannot deny her the right to her feelings, but those objects also hold meaning for the daughter, and that cannot be denied, either. The horror comes from the realization that the meaning of those objects--those expressions of ourselves--is relative. Others can appropriate those objects as expressions of their own identities, and even after everything is reclaimed, the awareness of that appropriation is still there. One has to wonder, do those objects really still belong to me? And if these totems of my life can be taken, can someone take my life as their own as well? Security is rooted in the sense of ownership over one’s life. Once that’s gone, what is there? "The Trespasser" is a devastatingly effective piece of work.

"The Trespasser" is featured in Bonnie Jo Campbell's short-story collection American Salvage, a nominee for both the National Book Award and National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction.