Being Male Alone

Pinckney Benedict is an interesting literary figure. He is a Christian whose work has been published in Esquire; he is the son of a Republican politician, attended Princeton, and was mentored by Joyce Carol Oates at Iowa, yet his fictional milieu is generally rural-poor, hardscrabble, and violent; he made an auspicious literary debut at the age of twenty-three and at one time was under a two book contract with publishing luminary Nan Talese, yet his new collection came out from the fab-but-very-small Press 53 after Talese dropped his contract in the recent publishing Armageddon. As if all this weren't paradoxical and complex enough, that collection—Miracle Boy and Other Stories—has met with mixed responses from the wildly enthusiastic to the vitriolic. Pulitzer Prize winner Elizabeth Strout calls it "amazing" and "exquisite" on the cover; Bookslut praised it as a collection of "mistakes gone terribly right"; and Dan Wickett's Emerging Writers Network was recently ablaze with criticism of Benedict's overtly Christian themes, with words like "saccharine" flying around the comments board.

Benedict, while not a household name, is a writer whose work resonates deeply with his fans—and those fans are a diverse lot, from aficionados of Southern fiction or surrealism to those who enjoy genre-bending, for while Benedict's work is always literary, he doesn't color exclusively inside those lines but dabbles generously with about every genre at which you could swing a cat, save perhaps "romance." Stories of rural boyhood are pressed up against stories of talking birds, dogs turning into men, astronauts falling from the sky, and aliens learning to drive (and to "roll over in the clover.") It would be fair to say that, turning the pages of Miracle Boy—which Benedict told The Rumpus is his book that most closely reflects how his mind truly works—one is never sure what to expect plot-wise. Such wild divergence can, in the hands of lesser writers, lead to an uneven collection, a "throw everything you've got against the wall and hope something sticks" vibe. The fact that Miracle Boy never has that feel is a testament to Benedict's power as a writer, his immense authority over language and atmosphere, and a coherence and consistency of vision that threads throughout this work despite vast differences in plots.

In fact, reading Miracle Boy, I began to believe that Benedict's experimentation with form and genre, which have been lauded in literary circles, as well as his Christian symbolism, which has sometimes been derided by those same circles, both, in the end, are more a part of these stories' shells than their hearts. Both are devices he uses skillfully and convincingly, but the core of these works seems more about exploring a deep well of male loneliness—for both loneliness and masculinity permeate nearly every line in this book like a heartbeat. The ages, lifestyles, even species may vary, but each character is a solitary island, even when in relationship with others. Sadness is a fundamental ingredient of all interactions, because all Benedict characters seem to understand, if on an unarticulated, unexamined gut level, that connection and even love are...well, "illusory" might be the wrong word (though sometimes the object of love may itself be illusory, such as when one of Benedict's young protagonists encounters a girl on whom he has a crush in the middle of a mountain waterfall), but at the very least transitory and fragile. We live and die alone. For all the Christian imagery, any concept of "God" seems to offer characters little joy or solace. Life is lonely. Life is violence. Life offers the opportunity for awkward, deeply felt tenderness, yes—best exhibited here in the relationships between fathers and sons—but even such tenderness is fraught with misunderstanding and isolation. If redemption-minded Christians and genre enthusiasts are grooving on this book, more power to them, but the core of Miracle Boy is a deeply existential one, powerfully rooted in a literary tradition less concerned...