Attention Please Now by Matthew Pitt (review)

157 Book Notes wilderness to allow them to avoid confrontation. “We’ve got a way down here of attracting all the heartbroken of the world,” one character notes, and the more we read, the more his assessment appears true. These broken-hearted men share a pain that runs as deep as their mud-soaked rivers, though they never resort to pity. What we’re left with instead are their stories, which continually speed toward perilous trajectories, revealing a world in which punishments never fit crimes, crimes never fit patterns, and the victims are left praying that the following day’s tragedies might manage to strike someone else. Attention Please Now, by Matthew Pitt Autumn House Press, 2010 reviewed by Jennifer Wisner Kelly Kids know how to demand attention. Anyone who has ever driven a school-aged child anywhere has been subjected to incessant demands to Listen! or Look! Not that we adults respond. Not now, honey, we say. Somewhere along the line to maturity, though, most of us finally heed our parents’ advice to wait our turn, to keep quiet, to not draw attention to ourselves. But what is the consequence of all this repressing and ignoring? The eleven humorous and poignant stories in Matthew Pitt’s first collection , Attention Please Now, capture moments in which people who have been unable to demand the attention they desperately need have it arrive from the most unlikely sources. Case in point: Charles Shales, a high school math teacher in “The Mean,” is dying from breast cancer, and his physical pain severs the few human connections he has in the mainstream world. Shales seeks pain-relief from a group of drug-addicted high school drop-outs. What starts as a need for medical marijuana becomes his last grasp for attention and love. “The Tuesday episodes were feeling less like drug transactions and more like holiday reunions with family. Shales gave them updates on his treatment; the others stood and smoked and shot up, rapt, listening to him.” Like Shales, Pitt’s other characters are part of the mainstream , the pinging cogs of society, until ironic and, often, tragic events drive them to isolation. A dog kennel owner acciden- colorado review 158 tally asphyxiates dozens of her charges. A record producer with a passion for music has a profoundly deaf son. A photographer makes a living photographing remote, vacant properties, while his new marriage atrophies back home. We can’t quite decide whether to weep for these sorry souls or laugh at them. This humor gives buoyancy to Pitt’s collection. It carries us across the pain inherent in such lonely, isolated lives. In “The Mean,” the strung-out druggies try to come up with something meaningful to say to dying Shales, only to accidentally wash away their words with water spilled from a bong. The mutually blaming conversation that ensues is hilarious. Other times, the humor is quieter: at a faculty luncheon “Shales imagined that, at the first sign of teachers talking contract negotiations, the superintendent would press some button with his butt warning the governor. . . .” Pitt injects comedy into his fiction with wry observations, absurd situations, memorable personalities, and a sharp ear for dialogue, but the humor never becomes mocking. After all, these characters are simply struggling to get noticed in a busy world, just like us. In the title story, Buddy, an alcoholic at the end of his career as a pa announcer for minor league baseball games, finds kinship in Steve Sprissel, a once-great player, now consigned to the minors through injury and age. Buddy takes to ridiculing Steve when introducing him at the plate, which oddly reinvigorates the old star. Inspired, Buddy insults the whole team and enjoys a late-career popularity boost. As Buddy says about his announcements , “I always worried I’d crossed a line, but the players ate up the attention. . . . What I offered them was a beam of recognition, and they soaked in the rays.” All attention, even negative attention, can carry love. Pitt’s characters may be isolated, but their worlds are not especially quiet. The stories buzz with the modern background noise of television and movies, celebrity and fame, consumerism and competition...