The Name of the Nearest River by Alex Taylor (review)

155 BOOK NOTES The Name of the Nearest River, by Alex Taylor Sarabande Books, 2010 reviewed by B. J. Hollars The stories in Alex Taylor’s debut collection, The Name of the Nearest River, are doused in moonshine, drowned in lakes, and recounted by narrators whose mouths are filled with halfchewed plugs of tobacco. The “bastard lands” in which his stories are set—terrains built exclusively of “ground and dirt, trees and sky”—offer readers glimpses into a cruel, blue-collared America in the tradition of Tom Franklin, William Gay, and Bonnie Jo Campbell. His is a world in which one person’s tragedy is another’s entertainment, where car crashes and fistfights draw far greater crowds than any half-priced matinée. Taylor’s gritty prose is often accompanied by banjo twangs, his characters ’ sour breath exhaling over the tops of brown jugs revealing a land where no one wants to be called a local. While Taylor’s writing is far from formulaic, throughout his stories, revenge continues to emerge as a central theme. In the title story, two friends drift downriver in search of a drowned man, not to pay their respects, but to exact the strangest brand of retribution imaginable. Likewise, in “The Coal Thief,” revenge of another sort is sought after a young man and his twelve-yearold apprentice hop a train to steal coal, only to be held captive by a gun-wielding enforcer. In “Equator Joe’s Famous Nuclear Meltdown Chili,” a drive-in proprietor wages war against a chili-selling squatter, though when the proprietor’s “muscle” enters the fray, he’s given a dose of his own habanero-laced medicine. And finally, in “This Device Must Start on Zero,” we watch grizzled men meet in the dead of night to engage in crash derby combat, though the rules change when a vengeful woman volunteers her husband’s pristine Mustang as a sacrifice. Throughout all these stories, we watch helplessly as Taylor’s colorado review 156 characters’ self-destruction spares no one, leaving the victims searching for truths in the wreckage. While at the collection’s start we question why men might play fiddles atop fallen friends, or why a husband might punch his wife on their wedding day, by the end, these bizarre displays of comeuppance seem somehow natural, even expected from these perilous creatures with whom we share the pages. But perhaps most impressive of all are not the stories Taylor tells, but the manner in which they emerge—growing like a headache, the slight throb transforming to blind numbness. Taylor lulls us with a strange vocabulary in which nouns and verbs are painstakingly selected, the author never settling for the second-rate sentence, much preferring ones in which “Donny follows the road, an old logging trace, over berms and ruts” and “a world stiff and still” reveals “the bank of gravel ballast just beyond the trees. . . .” The words read as if they were artifacts discovered deep within caves and skimmed from the murkiest swamps. We wonder: Where did these words come from and where have they been hiding? But beyond the pitch-perfect diction is an even greater stylistic achievement—Taylor’s deep and seemingly endless supply of fresh metaphor. He describes women as “sliver[s] of glass dipped in wine” and later compares one woman’s beauty to a “rummage sale.” Later, he depicts fishing lines hissing though the air as “water falling onto hot stones,” making it clear that he demands a precision in which one sentence drives the next with the same force as the freshly tuned engines of the characters ’ derby racers. His prose exudes authenticity, and we cannot doubt a narrator who rattles on about “regrinding the pistons and tightening the flywheel.” While we humble readers might not know the difference between an axle nip and epoxy putty, it’s always clear the characters do. Midway through the collection, one character notes that it’s certain some people in the world are “eager to live for trouble.” Yet it’s never quite clear whether these people actually do, or, if due to their own misfortune, trouble simply seeks them out. What is made clear, however...