Shadow Traffic (review)

In "The House," the closing story of Richard Burgin's dark and fine short story collection, Shadow Traffic, the protagonist, Tyler, is lured into the company of two women when they show interest in his book-in-progress on "the hidden function of towns." According to his theory, we live in towns to "fulfill our psychological needs"; the post offices and grocery stores, the neighborhood committees and courthouses and tidy spaces of meaning, serve "our collective denial of death." Though the story explains little more of Tyler's book, early details of his ineffectual character—he is unnerved by a dream of the daughter he let slip away, he is eager to be "listened to and in some way understood"—hint that his ambitions for the project, which he still has not put to paper, will never come to fruition. Sure enough, after a surreal turn of events, Tyler comes to understand that "in his work on towns he began with a thesis about their purpose and proceeded from that so he could always have his thesis confirmed." In other words, the thesis to which he so dearly clung served as his "town," classifying the world around him succinctly enough that he could ignore the haunting facts of his life: his daughter who had spurned him, his career disappointments, his vulnerability to time's undertow. Even when improbably imprisoned in a Berkshires mansion, Tyler continues as he previously had; he "gradually learn[ed] things about the house, without ever grasping its central purpose—much like his earlier life."

The protagonist of "The House," with his loneliness and inhibitions and painful memories, serves as a composite of many central characters in the collection's stories, all of them deftly honed: men plagued by lost loves, by their failures and constraints, by conspiratorial groups, or by their own faint hopes that a conspiring world does exist, and that they are not at fault for their life's disappointments. Though the long history of Burgin's characters defies generalization, the characters in Shadow Traffic fit into a leaner, narrower focus, one that lends the collection an affecting, despairing hold. These are most nearly tales of noir, of loners in towns that have seen better days, of chance encounters in bars and grim lessons learned too late. Though the stories shift from harsh realism to menacing fantasy to something verging on hope, Burgin ensures that his characters remain fully, and even painfully, human, a feat considering the very different worlds of the twelve stories.

It is noteworthy that even the stories in Shadow Traffic that hew closest to the dictums of realism intersect with the logic of dreams. The collection's first story, "Caesar," obeys laws and social norms we recognize as our own, and yet even here, in the ennui of a life alienated from the greater world, hints of nightmare reach to the surface. Catching a taxi through dark St. Louis, Caesar forces himself "to control his thoughts, while looking at the highway or the driver's neck. He'd seen far too many necks lately—in cabs and planes and in theaters and in lines at the bank. It had become a world of necks, they'd taken over almost everything, it seemed." A world without faces is the very stuff of dreams, as is Caesar's later encounter with a man in a hotel room who presents him with photographs of "hooded men in chains doing forbidden things to their master"— and yet, we haven't departed from waking life. What brings about these peeks into nightmare is the character himself, who must "live with all of his secrets weighing him down like a backpack of snow." Burgin employs the nature of desire, just below the surface, in eliciting this dream logic, and pulls it off so nimbly that we readers enter these haunting worlds as though no other alternative could exist. We never once question the boundaries of the worlds that Burgin creates.

The subtle shift into fantasy is most affecting in the collection's pieces that...