Capital C

Midway through Gabe Durham’s novel-in-pieces, Fun Camp, an overzealous camp counselor outlines the practice of withholding portions of meals from unruly campers to a quirky chef. “We can rebuild them,” she says of the hunger-weak children, “in our own image—hilarious, kooky, deferential.” Durham performs a similar manipulation, breaking apart the traditional summer camp narrative, stripping it down to essentials and refashioning the pieces into a funny, slightly creepy yet wholly American package.

Split into seven sections, Fun Camp details a week at an unnamed summer camp, its perspective slipping in and out of various psyches—a pair of too-eager counselors, an utterly bizarre chef named Grogg, and letter-writing Billy are just a few. The fracturing of Durham’s narrative allows readers to map out the dynamic between campers and staff, between popular campers and more introverted ones, bringing to the forefront Fun Camp’s central conflict—the battle between introversion and extroversion.

Reading Durham’s book I was reminded of my stint as a tutor for a high school summer program, the lone (gay) agnostic on a staff of evangelical Christians. While the program’s focus was educational, we did make a weekend field trip to a ranch in southern Oregon. The ranch’s owners introduced themselves with a speech about how to enjoy the wonders of Creation, sweeping their arms toward the trees in wide semi-circles to better convey that capital C.

The specter of Christianity looms over Durham’s camp in the form of anonymous Lutheran founders whose breath the campers feel “cold on [their] necks.” Like Durham’s counselors, we too were forced to draw the quiet kids out of their shells and into group activities, into a manufactured bonding ritual, all in the name of fun.

References to Lutheran founders aside, the true religious force in Fun Camp is fun itself, specifically an extroverted, prank-heavy type of fun. In the world Durham presents, skit night is transcendent. Craft time, too: homemade puppets offer the chance to “disappear in all the ways you always planned.” At one point, the “Jesus” in the phrase “come to Jesus” is, literally, replaced with “Fun Camp.”

While fun and group participation are worshipped, we also see the consequences of camp culture, of forcing the introverted into extroversion. While campers are urged to “tap into the you that already loves all this,” to “let the bones of [the] spirit break free,” it often comes at a price. In “Withdrawal,” the narrator struggles with separation from “the most fun person [s/he] knows”—the television. “[S]oon I won’t even miss the ole boob tube,” the narrator says, “[a]s if that’s not the ultimate tragedy.” Induction into the cult of fun is often hard work, as the narrator of “Suggestion” tells us, begging, “some rule where everybody has to be nice and talk to you…because it is hard and I am trying.” Even the surrounding landscape is affected. Of the woods near camp, Durham says, “Half a forest got burned down for you to live it up.” For both camper and nature, the natural must be destroyed to make room for the unnatural, the contrived, the fun.

Though it’s often hilarious, situated at the core of Fun Camp is a profound tragedy—the murder of the introvert. There’s only one way to be at Fun Camp, and that is outgoing, goofy, and prank-happy. Those who fail to conform are labeled “boring” or “bland,” and counselors fantasize about excommunicating them, Survivor-style, from the camp. Like America itself, the camp is a culture of winners and losers; those who pull pranks and those who have pranks pulled upon them; those who can throw together an entertaining skit and those who can’t. Woe unto them whose skits do not warrant a standing ovation.

All of this isn’t to imply that Fun Camp isn’t without its tender moments, its “warm fuzzies” as the campers call them. A list of emergency procedures ends with the instruction “in a...