Realities Recorded

The angels of Aimee Parkison’s The Innocent Party are of the substantial, practical variety. In “Paints and Papers,” the first story in the collection, angels watch over a group of id-driven, imbibing “children” frolicking on a beach. The celestial beings dig in the sand and dispose of old wine bottles. One gets the sense that, under the purview of Parkison’s teeming, thick language, they could not float up to heaven even if they wanted to. And wings abound: in other stories, insects—locusts, spotted hoppers, damselflies—are forever banging against the sides of jars.

In The Innocent Party, frustration manifests itself physically. Minor incidents are compounded and compounded until they are dreadful and ugly. “Locked Doors” is narrated by a man whose sister is surprised by her first period. (The incident occurs as a memory.) The family’s reaction falls outside of what’s approved by family psychologists. The father states his intention to burn the girl’s bloodied dress; the mother slaps her daughter full across the face. Then comes the true disfunction. The sister is schizophrenic, and suffers from seizures and alcoholism. Her father faithfully attends her strip-shows, and her brother engages her in an incestuous relationship (it’s emotionally consummated, if not physically).

“Locked Doors” is a linguistic dog pile. It’s so intense, so plodding in its intensity, that it’s reminiscent of a bloodhound on a scent. And in this collection, there is always the scent of blood to be found. In the story, the brother is a violent ex-convict employed as a night janitor, but in the role of narrator, he speaks in heavy-handed authorial tones: “The clouds above her far-away house loomed darkened gold in the greenish haze of trash fires…. Her long hair looked lavender like an evening lake in orange light descending.” One can’t help but think—if we’re being immersed in a world of a tortured ex-convict, then yank us around with sloppy and difficult language! Why filter this dirty, onerous world through glossy phrasing?

Onerousness—the farcical breed of it—is at the forefront of “Allison’s Idea,” a story in which five women murder their way through a series of pets. The first to die are the plants: As one of the characters puts it, “They bored us so much they let them die.” The fish are next: “‘Rachel thought the fish were stupid—always still, never dancing.’” As the pets are picked off one by one, the story is darkly comical. Then the women adopt two children who have been billed as “dog-children.” As soon as the children are adopted, their fate is sealed by the fates of their predecessors: we as the readers know that blood is coming. When the male “dog-child” sinks his teeth into the narrator’s arm, it’s written as an inevitability.

The text is littered with beautifully written moments, such as the one in which a young girl declares she wants to be named Loggerhead Shrike because “Loggerhead was the name of a girl who no one would ever want to rub the wrong way.” The narrators have time to dwell on delicate moments and turn them into linguistic performances because these narrators sit on the periphery of their own worlds. They’re the skillfully verbose Greek chorus as evil and darkness rampage around them—a posture that the title, The Innocent Party, alludes to.

But does playing the role of the bystander allow one to cling to a claim of innocence? In “Chains,” a pregnant woman regards (or, perhaps better stated, she is an onlooker to) her murderer of a father; her regarding composes the near-entirety of the story. The narrator’s passivity is so blatant that the invocation of a doll as a metaphorical device that the father “nurtures” is largely unnecessary: “Meg watched in silence. The way he caressed the doll with tenderness and pure, undisguised joy—wonder, even—made Meg shiver...[i]t hurt her that her father seemed to love the...