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  • Waist Deep
  • Jonathan Liebson (bio)
The Southern Cross, Skip Horack. Foreword by Antonya Nelson. Mariner Books: http://www.houghtonmifflinbooks.com/mariner. 208 pages; paper, $13.95.

In her choice of The Southern Cross as last year's Bread Loaf Writers' Conference Bakeless Prize in fiction, Antonya Nelson praises the author for his "restraint"—what she calls a "simultaneous sense of abundance and tantalizing withholding" in his writing. This difficult duality is apparent throughout Skip Horack's story collection, starting with the opening line of his very first story. In "Caught Fox," a divorced father pays a visit to his mentally challenged son on Easter, and on his drive to meet him, the narrator, running late, begins, "I'm rounding the bend at Johnson's Corner when I see Reverend Lyle has a girl waist deep in the concrete pool behind the church." The sentence ambles along at a hurried clip, quickly compiling information as it goes, yet the reader cannot help slowing down midway through. We're snagged by the sight of the girl "waist deep" in the pool, an image too sensual—and too suggestive—to be overlooked. Christians or Southerners may recognize sooner that this is a baptism, but to them the scene will be no less disorienting. It is thanks to Horack's minimalist details that the description seems so provocative. In kinship with Lucas (the father), the reader feels like a sudden and accidental voyeur: he perceives the religious floating dangerously alongside the sexual, and he naturally wants a closer look.

That seed of sexuality, even down to the girl's submissive posture, prefigures Lucas's own submission later in the story. He allows himself to be wooed by a young cheerleader, and in the process, he leaves his son temporarily unchaperoned, a behavior that exposes him for his poor parenting and that results in his feeling guilty. In these sentiments, he has lots of company. He is like so many of the other protagonists in Horack's book, a collection of luckless ne'er-do-wells whose desire for repentance tends to get watered down by the very impulses that first land them in trouble. It's a diverse group of characters the author has assembled. They include an ex-con, a PhD student, a dockworker, a rabbit seller, and an elderly woman moved into a retirement community, to name just a few. From their individual circumstances, they exhibit a common desire to ponder their life choices—to step back momentarily from themselves and consider how they might attain a higher morality. Morality exists on a sliding scale, of course, and instead of the author overseeing the results, it is the characters themselves who take stock of their own behavior, and of whether they approach or fall short of the virtues they seek.

That a book called The Southern Cross would concern itself with sin and redemption should come as no surprise. Fortunately, where the title offers a more-than-subtle nod to these themes, the stories themselves are much less heavy in their portrayal. Horack succeeds because in serious situations he's able to use religion in a way that's either humorous or playfully askew. Beyond the aforementioned baptism, we see this in such stories as "Chores," where a roadside church sign advertises its weekly sermon by stating, "Our Church Is Prayer Conditioned"; or in "The Final Conner," when the main character's girlfriend points out that the shrimp he uses for bait "aren't kosher…but the trout are"; or in "The Rapture," where a Bible thumper, zealously lecturing a pole dancer about her date with the devil, gets a hard-on.

The title of the above story, along with such titles as "Borderlands" and "The High Place I Go," are representative of the symbolic terrain these characters must pass through—or at least set foot in—in hopes of discovering their better selves. To his credit, Horack consistently and deftly undercuts the gravity of this soul search. Christianity never rises to the same level of transcendence in his book that Flannery O'Connor tries to instill (some may say impose) in so many of her stories. Instead, religion is sprinkled into...

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