On Being seen

Asked why she used the grotesque so prominently in her fiction, Flannery O’Connor famously replied, “you have to make your vision apparent by shock—to the hard of hearing you shout, and for the almost-blind you draw large and startling figures.” In his often-stunning debut story collection The Girl with Two Left Breasts, D. V. Glenn seems driven by the same incentive to shock and startle, thus waking the deficient of hearing and sight, in this case regarding race and identity. Yet linking O’Connor to Glenn is perhaps misleading. O’Connor’s concern was race only some of the time, her deeper fixation individual misfires at redemption via gothic allegories played through the lives of poor white Southern Christians. Glenn’s narrative fixation is nearly always race—or he finds a way to nearly always include it—in lyrical remembrances and grotesquely comic allegories played through the lives of African Americans (and occasional white ones) in our ostensibly post-racial culture. But Glenn has a deeper concern as well. Embedded beneath all the shouting and startling is a lyrically ambitious and versatile voice examining how we perceive ourselves and others—not only via race, but also via (in no particular order or rank) class, gender, sexual desire, addiction, and family (or the family’s absence). Much like O’Connor’s, Glenn’s stories are frequently drawn forward by the tantalizing lure of violence.

The more predictable analogue to Glenn’s work might be Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952). Indeed, Glenn makes the connection for us in “The Relationship Handbook,” wherein Keith, a white college friend of the black protagonist, Dick, wonders how it feels “to be judged a priori, to be foremost seen and so held in thrall by the most superficial of the senses…seen, and not invisible as Ralph Ellison declared…but seen and seen and seen.” Glenn notes through his ironically instructional narrator that Keith’s viewpoint is skewed—whites too can be seen and judged by the other—but the reversal of Ellison’s conceit hangs over these stories like inclement weather not in the forecast (where, perhaps deluded, we expected something fairer). In Glenn’s world, being black makes one extra visible, as much now as ever; whether notable successes or desperate and lost, these characters believe themselves to be, as Dick tells his girlfriend, “watched a bit more closely.”

This watching is often, as it were, in-house, self-imposed, a self-watching fueled by expectations of fathers who achieved unlikely success in less enlightened times, like the black fathers in “Footage” and “The English Teachers Pupil” pressing the sons to find their way. Or the neighbors watching a local son ache over his inadequacy when compared to the sexual prowess of the father, who they mistakenly suspect the father once abused (in “My Father’s Penis,” a comic gem with a toxic punch line). Other characters fester resentfully or coldly from places of sociopathic imbalance—sometimes drawn satirically, sometimes not—as they prepare for or recall acts of aggression, murder, abduction, even self-mutilation (as in nearly half the book).

Half a century ago, Ellison had his nameless narrator occupy, then abandon, an escalating host of subject positions (university toady, factory laborer, Black Nationalist, Marxist, orator, pariah). Glenn does something similar in his work, albeit with the wider, weirder license of the postmodernist; or perhaps he is a post-postmodernist, as a blurb once announced on another debut collection by a similarly audacious author, David Foster Wallace, who, like Glenn, proved a mimic of voice and perspective with peculiar range. Glenn’s prose also echoes admired comic experimentalists of more recent note, white writers who touched on race obliquely, if at all: Wallace, even Barry Hannah, another Southern gothic writer with a taste for extremes (and who used the word “nigger” from another perspective). I have difficulty naming an African American counterpart to Glenn. Ishmael Reed, maybe—a slight echo of Reed here—but that writer is a different...