Episode (review)

In Making Shapely Fiction, Jerome Stern states, "American comic fiction tends to be serious, satiric, and, often, a bit grotesque." It takes a master stylist to pull all this off, Stern emphasizes, and certainly Robert Garner McBrearty, winner of the 2007 Sherwood Anderson Foundation Fiction Award, is one such master stylist in Episode. As in his first collection, A Night at the Y, McBrearty's Episode is peopled with antiheroes slogging through life the best they know how, sometimes mounting a valiant struggle, at other times pretty well petered out, engulfed by a kind of Carveresque bleakness. Whatever the mood or tone of his story, McBrearty is a very serious writer, zany in his seriousness, brewing up a compelling mix of the quirky, absurd, ridiculous, and improbable. The major emphasis in McBrearty's fiction tends to be on the alienated self pursuing some sort of meaning, importance, victory, or basic human happiness. How can life be more bearable, more livable?—this is the central question in a McBrearty story.

McBrearty's light stories tend to be Thurberesque, cartoonish almost, but they represent only a small portion of this collection. Most of the stories drift toward the dark, dealing with characters who have failed themselves or are experiencing life somehow failing them. Things are deteriorating, decaying. If in the lighter stories comedy functions to intensify our amusement at the outrageous and zany, in the darker pieces it works to color our sense of the lived experience as often laughable yet paradoxically, at times, eerily sinister. McBrearty's out-and-out farces (which all of his work seems to hover on) are allegory at its best, sheer comedic performances that zero in on psychological and social phenomena in ways not accessible through straight realism.

"The Real World," a story light in mood and tone, has a compelling Chaplinesque quality to it, calling to mind the bizarre victimization of the hero of Modern Times. Here, as in other stories in this collection, McBrearty's protagonists find themselves in the midst of a world they can't quite handle, one without a suitable place for them. Jim, the beleaguered protagonist in this story, lives in some friends' garage, and when winter comes he faces the prospect of sharing his already cramped space with their car. "It was a small car, though, and I was hoping I could adjust." This kind of outrageous setup, with the protagonist's deadpan response, is typical of a McBrearty story, in which the limits of ordinary, experienced reality are stretched. Needing work, Jim accepts a friend's offer to try out the plumbing business, a vocation his friend glorifies and even gets him to glorify, against all evidence to the contrary: "Sewer and drain cleaners really were lonely saints of the underworld, engaged in a noble battle." The use of mock epic, a typical McBrearty device, serves here to deride any touted wonders of achieving success in the "real world." There's certainly no glory in the plumbing business for Jim; with savage irony, McBrearty's protagonist wishes at the end to return to his "humble garage."

Unlike "The Real World," "Transformations," though in many ways comic, is a rather dark, disturbing story. The story tests out a central tenet of fiction writing: character change. As fiction writers, editors, and readers, we say we must have it, but does life really work that way?—do characters actually improve, get better? The narrator declares himself a skeptic. McBrearty's protagonist, Paul, begins the narrative (the so-called fictional equilibrium) as "a hard thug of a guy who's drinking in a bar with some of the boys," a bar where those who are not watching the television are "puking, fighting, or engaging in sex acts in dark corners." In the midst of this freakish mayhem, Paul is about to have his first glimpse of meaningful transformation: he suddenly notices a woman on the TV, who is "saying something nice to a young man who is distressed." She is stroking "his hair in a gentle sort of way." Reminded of a nice girl...