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  • Never Fully Mended
  • Caleb J. Ross (bio)
Fires of Our Choosing. Eugene Cross. Dzanc Books. http://www.dzancbooks.org. 195 pages; paper, $15.95, eBook, $7.99.

Eugene Cross does something special with Fires of Our Choosing. Despite the collection's downtrodden, yet optimistically domestic rural Pennsylvania veneer, Cross's characters aren't as selfless as such a mask would imply. In fact, there is an underlying selfishness that pervades the lives of our narrators, a willingness to leverage the misfortunes of others to correct, or in some cases, to simply enhance their own lives. These narrators are suturing together a passable family from scrap parts.

These "scrap parts" range in age, gender, and socioeconomic background, but never fail to represent—dare I say—a universal referent; tourist traps that all of us have been tempted by at some point along our own Eerie, Pennsylvania wintery road trip. Monty, the collection's opening child narrator, lures a classmate into a wooded area on the ruse of seeing a dog carcass. Once alone together, Monty beats the child to hospitalization. The remaining story explores the ramifications of the event as Monty becomes an adult. The beaten child, barely named, exists as less a rounded character and more a symbol, a position most of our "scrap parts" adopt throughout the collection. I won't be brash enough to imply that all readers would jump at the chance to beat a coworker, but I do propose that most readers have wished some level of discomfort against another for the sake of minor, visceral satisfaction.

This balance between the protagonist's journey and the periphery characters is where the collection truly shines. We are never pulled far enough away from a story's emotional core—that of the narrator's arc—yet conversely we are never allowed to fully escape the empathetic draw of fleeting "secondary" characters. In this way, we are at times part of a rural Jay Gatsby party, playing the role of The Great Gatsby's Nick Carraway, perhaps the most famous "outsider looking in" in modern literature.

The reader is never meant to hate or even discredit the various narrators—ranging from the aforementioned Monty to a man toying with the idea of helping a stranger cheat on her husband, to multiple instances of men agreeing to employ troubled youths, not as a gesture of good will (where's the story in that?) but as a means to appease girlfriends. Rather, the narrators' skewed motives allow the reader to adopt both a voyeuristic perspective and, in later cases where the stories cover large spans of time, a position of wizened elder, often as the characters themselves reflect similarly. This is another example of the emotional balance Cross is able to achieve so gracefully. So few authors can simultaneously highlight a character's self-absorbed motives while reassuring the reader that ultimately, even if beyond the scope of the written story, this character is not hopeless.

The nature of voyeurism is that one can judge without being judged and therefore can embrace that wizened elder persona without fear. The underlying implication, which Cross plays with beautifully, is that a narrator's willing association with an emotionally damaged person suggests, at some level, similar damage on the part of the narrator. In "Passenger," for example, we explore a past event as told to our narrator by his girlfriend. Already, we are 2 perspectives removed from the situation's impetus, and the reader is forced to begin mining associations between the narrator, his girlfriend, and the occasion for the past event being re-told. The event: an uncle's death and the girlfriend's father's questionable reaction. The narrator, after having his logical questions about the father's reaction dismissed by the girlfriend, exposits in passing: "I know revenge only works for the living." In this one line we are provided with crucial—though perfectly subtle—information that helps us understand the relationship between our narrator and his girlfriend, thus turning this story from one of simple voyeurism to one of empathy.

A noticeable shift halfway through the collection with the story "This Too," which alters the foundation of the book from...

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