Navigating Performance

America KVKW Navigating Performance Kevin Finucane Public Works Christopher Grimes FC2 http://www.fc2.org 200 pages; paper, $15.95 You enter a strange new land as a tourist. You are instructed how to act. You are warned. You learn about Zsa Zsa Gabor and the blemish she left on this land's proud, industrious people. But despite the queer laws and the idiosyncratic ways of the natives, you wonder ifyou have ever really left home. The culture is bureaucratic and violent, its people prejudiced and paranoid. In Christopher Grimes's collection Public WorL·, "Customs in a Developing Country: A Prefatory Story" serves as an appropriate introduction, because the disturbing and beautiful thing about Grimes's fictional worlds is that they are never fictional enough. Sometimes filled with pain or longing, but mostly isolation and alienation, these stories can make you feel like a stranger in your homeland. Or, using Rilke's words from the story's epigraph, Alas, who is there we can make use of? Not angels, not men; and even the noticing beasts are aware that we don't feel securely at home in this interpreted world. ... green acres is the place to be Interpreting a world already interpreted is what this collection seems to be about. It's tempting to draw parallels in a collection, to make the complete book the work itself rather than its individual parts. But this natural tendency to unify through association (along with making meaning through resolution) is what many of these fictions work against. The table ofcontents divides me book into three sections according to the length of its twenty-six fictions : "Short Fictions," "ANovella," "Very ShortFictions ." To better address the work's more performative elements, I have not followed this division. epiphany-less In "We Stand Here, Swinging Cats," the significance of why Dierdra O'Donnel was struck in the mouth by a dead cat (and how she felt afterward) is a matter ofgreat import. At least it is for her coworkers at the small literary magazine who tell us her story: Dierdra goes to New York City in a huff to confront, at a fundraiser, the editor of a larger publication who regularly rejects her work. Along the way, a woman, also going to the fundraiser, hits her with a dead cat she is trying to dispose of. The incident seems as though it should be dripping with significance, or at least irony. Maybe it's an ellipsis or unexplainable occurrence, like so many others in life that seem to demand meaning—like the feeling of loneliness Dierdre comes to acknowledge—or maybe it's just being hit in the face by a dead cat. Like Dierdra's narrators at the literary magazine, we want to employ narrative, frame the symbols and follow the metaphor. We want to read the signs and connect the dots. But sometimes we encounter dead cats that even irony can't explain away. automobiles In "Farmer, Pointing the Way with a Radish," Paul Scheffis lost. He spends a lot oftime on the road traveling between clients' offices, making sure their ones and zeroes are behaving. When he's bored, he meditates on snippets from his Little Zen Companion. So when he pulls over to ask for directions, he is taken aback when his effort results in a "farmer, pointing the way with a radish" (title of Issa's famous haiku); the coincidence is uncanny. His need to interpret its significance—die haiku, the farmer, the comma—consume him. Orat least they seem to. Because Scheff's final response is to spin his wheels literally in the farmer's face. It's an inexplicable act of defiance. And it fails when he gets stuck in the mud just yards away from the angry farmer. It is not what characters do in the face ofknowledge , but what they do in die face of an utter lack of knowledge and understanding that sets many ofthese fictions apart. In "Moving Vehicles," a psychologist is inspired by the story of the Kirghizes. She describes a tribe who, every year, must leave their sick and elderly behind to die before they walk across the turbulent Irtish river with their...