Unexpected Territory

The six long stories in Stephen-Paul Martin's outstanding Changing the Subject subtly challenge the conventions of the short story through seemingly simple prose that, in strange, often hilarious digressions, knots into a fascinating, surreal, and masterful collection. In the first story in the collection, "Safety Somewhere Else," the first-person narrator begins, "The greatest mistake of all time took place thousands of years ago, when God let Noah's family survive the flood," and for the first two pages, the story feels essayistic, like the beginning of a polemic against animal cruelty before introducing the first of the short story collection's many dogs. After telling the story of the narrator and his friends' avenging the dog's death, the plot of the story shifts from one digression to the next, ending in an unexpected, hallucinatory ending. With this first story, Martin allows for the possibility (and creates the expectation) that anything can happen, that despite the seemingly realistic veneer, the world in which the stories in Changing the Subject are set straddles the line between reality and fantasy. For example, one of the reoccurring motifs in the collection is the bizarre death of George W. Bush. While Bush's death in the stories feels like wish fulfillment, it's also perfectly at home here as another hilarious and unexpected element of the fantastic encroaching on the "normal" world.

One of the many impressive characteristics of the collection is how Martin subtly plays with readers' expectations; while most of the stories don't feel particularly experimental or innovative at the start, each shifts in unexpected ways that, in the end, result in stories that wrench, or in some cases, completely upend, the form of the short story. The stories begin in safe, well-lighted rooms, but by their end, we find ourselves in strange, darkened corners. For example, "Cell" begins with a narrator frustrated by the invasive nature of technology, specifically cell phones. By this point in the collection, we know that when the narrator says "So I took my dog and drove out into the desert, planning to stay away as long as I could," strange things are about to unfold. Where we end up is strange, yes, but also philosophically rich, absurd, and delightfully frustrating in its dream logic. Despite the expectation of surreality, the reader is still surprised not only by the end of the story, but by the route Martin takes us to get there. Such is the power of imagination on display in Changing the Subject that even as a reader has been trained to expect the unexpected, the book still manages to move in consistently surprising directions. It is Martin's ability to lead us into unexpected territory without realizing it until we're there that makes these stories work so well, and so transgressive; we barely notice as Martin torques his stories, gently twisting them into something that at first appears to be working within a tradition but is in fact doing something completely new.

Each of the stories contains the phrase "changing the subject," which at least suggests the presence of a connective tissue through each story without completely binding them. While certain elements repeat, such as deserts, dogs, George Bush's death, hamburger eating, and with a few exceptions, the narrative voice is steady. The idea of "changing the subject" is enacted through digression; Martin's stories are mimetic of the way in which we tell stories as well as the way we absorb information in that while not explicitly "changing the subject," we tend to follow threads as they arise: we converse, the phone rings, the channel changes. Here, "the subject" changes more organically, as much of the time, Martin's forking paths emerge directly from the narrator; the shifts are not shifts in story, but shifts in storytelling. That's one of the reasons Martin's stories seem so real, despite the presence of the surreal and the absurd. The stories unfold in the way that life often does.

"Food" is the most obviously formally...