The Big Easy Beat

Page 22 American Book Review Domini continued from previous page of a salad bar: “They pave the outer, middle and inner baileys with romaine and spinach, build a great hall of broccoli, a pantry and buttery and kitchen of feta, a garderobe of tortilla chips….” All Over, indeed. These nineteen stories range in style from down-home to Euro-coco, in size from the angelic “Girls,” dancing on the head of a pin, to the sprawling “Wait,” an epic set at an airport gate. Stephen King corralled the latter mooncalf as one of his Best American herd for ’07, and “Wait” indeed emerges as a showpiece, seductive and ingenious. It’s a picaresque that goes nowhere, an apocalypse full of hilarity (though a scene about burnt toes can fetch tears), and a transgressive romance, bashing across borders of race and more, in which the marriage is also, in its way, one of convenience. “Fontanel” offers another case in point, a gem of some heft. The piece functions through a kind of narrator, part photographer, part artist, and part—why fudge the issue?—God, who’s put together “a separate collage for each and every birth.” The Olympian description works through one cycle of photos, from the couple’s preparations for the hospital to a tragic thundercloud that’s still gathering at the final snapshot , with a wry detachment that make the events all the more hair-raising. Postmodern fiction, experimental fiction: if such weary catchalls mean anything, anymore, they mean books like All Over. But besides displaying yet another color for Kesey’s chameleonic sentences, “Fontanel” also suggests a dramatic source for this author’s power. At least, it suggests the arrangement that works best: “clockwise and spiraling inward, yes.” Centripetal force like that develops in the best pieces here, and I’m not talking narrative theory; I’m talking emotion . Most moving are the three marriage pieces, “Fontanel” at the book’s center, “Follow the Money” at the end, and the bravura opening honeymoon fantasia, “Invunche y voladora” (an ’04 Robert Olen Butler prizewinner). Each of these stitches together a crazy quilt of the extreme and the drab. Lovers’ quarrels, quite ordinary, punctuate “Invunche.” The stitching, at its most adroit, threads unexpectedly through heart and nerves. Less satisfying, slightly, are the stories that emphasize a bizarre framework and imaginative leaps over humbler connections. “Blazonry,” for instance, never gets much beyond the nutty mashup of its opening: “1. Shield: Argent, three Garden Gnomes rampant Sable.” You laugh, yes, but you can also foresee, too clearly, how such stuff will get yoked into dissertations on the postmodern. Postmodern fiction, experimental fiction: if such weary catchalls mean anything, anymore, they mean books like All Over. In a reading available online at guthagogo.com, the author offers a modest homage to Donald Barthelme, that pomo touchstone, and both the materials from the publisher (Dzanc Books, out of Dan Wickett’s Emerging Writers Network ) and the Maud Newton blog also drop the same glittering name. They’ll hardly be the last to do so, as the mad scientists of our literature continue their efforts to create a replicant Don B., a project that’s occupied them for a couple of decades now. Such lab work anticipates Kesey’s efforts, to be sure. I see, for instance, how “Pizza Hut” does its twentyfirst -century job, shattering its metanarrative—yet I won’t reveal how. I prefer to allow the mystery, and the satisfaction, to wait for the next reader. The encounter with this author, in other words, should bring to life no Franken-Barthelme, but rather the metaphor from John Barth’s “Literature of Replenishment” (1979), namely, that theory trails the artist “like an ocean liner trailing seagulls.” In All Over, the braiding of imagination and syntax comes together, at its best, in sequences that seem entirely natural and fitting. After all, Kesey’s ’06 novella Nothing in the World worked in yet another key. That book sketched the horrors of the Balkan conflict in fabulist terms. The new work, on the other hand, delivers one denouement via the risky adjective “gorgeous”—I mean, it works—and in “Wait,” it brings off an even more...