Oedipal Road Trip

Barry Graham's Nothing or Next to Nothing is an Oedipal road trip that begins with the narrator, Derek, returning home to find his nearly naked mother dead, face down in a bowl of oatmeal. His sister returns home shortly after and accuses him of killing his mother, then immediately adopts the caretaking role. His mother/sister becomes the epicenter of his life and the definition of love.

The narrative itself, conveyed in a heart-breakingly blunt first person, is a love letter rife with suffocating emotions: Derek is only able to grapple with his emotions by angling at them sideways, through a studied avoidance of anything that could be construed as commonplace tenderness or vulnerability.

The bluntness of narrative and avoidance of emotion steeps every scene in the novel, and those scenes are repetitious narratives revolving around drugs, casual sex, fast food, bodily functions, betrayal, and incest—scenes that layer themselves without any sense of culminating direction. All of this is risky: it can be easy for a reader to write the narrator off, both his action and his voice, as shallow, unsympathetic, and/or unintentional.

Luckily, Graham sidesteps these potential pitfalls adeptly, and addresses them with expert craft from the beginning. The novella opens with a prlogue narrated by Derek's sister, Daisy, that features vivid and sentimental imagery. The second paragraph in the prologue borders on idyllic:

It was a little yellow pop up tent made for two. We built fires and roasted frogs and crawfish and waded knee deep in Dowagiac Creek hunting carp with sticks carved into spears then took turns cutting leeches from our bare skin when we made it back to camp. At night we slept side by side, sweating into each others pores and counting stars and watching them fall while we made wishes that wouldn't come true.

The opening of chapter 1, with Derek as narrator, contains none of that emotionally wrought sentimentality:

I was picking my nose and rolling the boogers into little balls and listening to whatever stupid shit was on the radio. It was Crazy or Amazing or some other Aerosmith song that nobody knows any of the words to except for the chorus. The rain was slowing and my wiper blades were screeching across the windshield, so I turned them off, along with the radio, and hoped for the best. The night was quiet and it smelled quiet and I almost forgot where I was headed.

By contrasting these voices so sharply, and by gifting these intimate portraits to the reader at the outset, the characters, and the novella itself, are planted in a solid foundation that resounds through every line, every scene, that is to come. And the opening doesn't just cue us to the division of characters; we also learn that in every instance of this narrator's life, and in every instance of his sister's life (which is inextricably woven with his own), tenderness is something that is put forward only for the briefest second before that tenderness is undermined:

We left Louisville two weeks after Daddy died and spent all summer digging for dinosaur bones at the bottom of a dried up creek in the backwoods of Dowagiac. Dirt and rock and large picks and small picks and trowels and measuring tape and bruised skin and bloody bandages and blisters. There were never any fucking bones. She was such a stupid bitch, Sherry was, I wanted to tell her that there were no dinosaur bones in Michigan, that people would dig and sift for a hundred more years but nobody would ever find them, that the movement of glaciers back and forth scraped away the layers of rock that contained all their remains. And erosion you stupid whore, what about erosion? But I loved her then, or maybe I just didn't know shit about paleontology, so I kept digging.

This taste of ripped-open tenderness coats everything that follows: it is impossible to put aside, and it shades every...