Greetings from Below (review)

In his strong and often startling debut, Greetings from Below, David Philip Mullins follows Nick Danze from adolescence and the death of his father to the disintegration of his marriage at the edge of middle age, chronicling Nick's sexual and emotional depths along the way. The collection of linked stories, set mostly in Las Vegas, is pocked by minefields of shame, obligation, and addiction—and there's a restrained edge to these stories that speaks to these themes. The stories in Greetings from Below do not maximize their shock value with gross-out sex scenes and morning-after misery. These aren't insider stories about sex addiction and the flesh trade —they aren't meant to be. The focus is on Nick's longing and loneliness. It isn't all about the sex for Nick—these things he does, singly and in groups —and the writing doesn't dwell on the sticky details longer than Nick would himself. He tries to escape, or at least minimize, the effects of his addiction. It's just that he can't.

In the opening story, "Arboretum," we're introduced to Nick in his early teens. He's an awkward kid who finds himself at the crux of two monumental transformations. First, his father is diagnosed with a rare lung disease, a fibrosis, which he will all but certainly die from. Second, Nick has fallen in love with his best friend, a boy named Kilburg who "would do almost anything for attention" and is "perhaps incapable of honesty." Kilburg also has a prosthetic leg the two drink whiskey from, having sneaked into the desert in the middle of the night to hide in a fort they built. Nick wants to escape his home life, and Kilburg's oddity provides him with ample opportunity. Initially, the two teenage boys meet at the fort to get drunk and tell inflated stories and outright lies, "tales of seduction and conquest." They also steal dozens of saplings from the "neat rows" of a subdivision street in the hopes of creating a desert oasis. Later, as their relationship grows, it becomes sexual. It's obvious where this is headed, and, in fact, they nearly do have intercourse in the desert fort, if it weren't for Nick kissing Kilburg's exposed stump at a crucial moment, ruining their homoerotic play by becoming too intimate with the person Kilburg really is, rather than the fantasy he espouses.

By the end of the story, when Nick's father dies, mostly off the page, the fifteen saplings Nick and Kilburg stole and planted in the desert have all withered and died, as has the friendship. "Arboretum" is a story of inaction and incapability, a story about adolescent nothingness. Nick's father is dying throughout, but he does nothing to save himself. Likewise, Nick is in love, but he can't say anything about it to anyone. His relationship with Kilburg is sexual, but there is no intercourse, no consummation. They grow an arboretum without leaves.

In "A Familiar Place," another of the standout stories, we find Nick, now in his twenties, returning home to Las Vegas to care for his widowed mother. Nick has not yet been consumed by his addiction, but his mother's are on full display. She's a shopaholic, a compulsive gambler, a chain-smoker. At the root of these problems, Nick believes, is her inability to cope with the death of her husband, now nearly a decade past. Of course, Nick is unable to cope either. "My mother and I each have our own, tacit ways of not letting go," Nick tells us. "I was the one who wanted to drive my father's old Buick, lime-green with a rusted grille, to the mall today, but it's my mother who has it washed and vacuumed once a month." It's Mullins's carefully tended lyricism of remembrance, of returning home and being clobbered by a dozen memories at once, that drives this story and others. Nick tries to solve the mystery of his youth by...