Cataclysm Baby by Matt Bell (review)

colorado review 182 cades, of Hartford’s citizens—its immigrants; its wealthy; its men, women, and children—and drills deep inside his characters’ thought processes, self-analyses, and epiphanies. Downs resists easy answers to complex human questions, but gives enough resolution in each story to satisfy. The Greatest Show gorgeously captures the sweep of ordinary lives made remarkable by a tragic twist of fate. Cataclysm Baby, by Matt Bell Mud Luscious Press, 2012 reviewed by Peter Kispert Accessible, compelling, and imaginative, the twenty-six vignettes in Matt Bell’s novella Cataclysm Baby serve as portals into a mythic sense of fatherhood. Bell’s tales are comprehensive yet concise forays into worlds of boundless strangeness. The stories that compose the novella exist as permutations, their breath carried from one to the next, though not through typically linear means. Their titles each contain three names— the first, for example, is “Abelard, Abraham, Absalom”—and move through the alphabet. Much of Cataclysm Baby’s genius and innovation can be found in its ability to navigate these permutations , raising tension without ever remaining within a single narrative. Bell takes care to orient readers to the unfamiliar territory of his worlds. Within a few sentences, each of these worlds blooms with bruise and nuance and sensation, contributing to the larger sense of a fully realized dystopia. Many of the stories appear to fuse the mechanics of the fairy tale with a certain calculated dystopian anguish. The fathers, as they appear in the stories, are often tasked with immensely difficult, even dire,decisions. The opening of “Virgil, Virotte, Vitalis” serves as a prime example of these arduous trials: Starting from the middle of the country, we follow the rumors, the talk that there are no more women, no more mothers or daughters, none remaining to bear our future forth except those afloat beyond the last lands of the west, collected aboard a ship, some tanker meant to carry them away, to keep them safe. 183 Book Notes What I know, despite those rumors: There are no women left, except the one beside me, this daughter disguised as a son, who I must somehow see aboard that ship. For these fathers the stakes are both immediate and incredibly high; each takes great pains to make decisions in their precarious and often violent circumstances. We are granted access to the hearts and minds of these fathers, characters whose true pain never fails to surface—all this in a few calculated pages. This sort of compression—of story, setting, and character—results in an undeniably distinct literary voice, a voice Bell has seasoned with lyricism and lamentation. The bent and splinter of language in these pages extends from structure to paragraph to sentence, framing these stories within a certain experimental vernacular. The fierceness of Bell’s language is matched only by his worlds’ inhabitants, by the soot and murk of their existence. These tales of post-apocalyptic sacrifice—populated by uncertain suns and crematorium chimneys—ring of visceral urgency. Fathers risk losing what few connections they have left: daughters, sons, wives. But even these last vestiges of human connection often appear as dystopian figures: daughters with flippers and oily fur; enormous, plow-driving sons. The novella is madly imaginative in a bold and dark way that typically belies the term; the bleak worlds Bell creates are born from an imagination without softness. This imagination permeates structure, content, and language in ways few other works with similar stylistic aims manage to successfully accomplish. This can perhaps be best seen in “Kidd, Kier, Kimball”: Another new rain falls, dumped from the complicated sky, its acid-heavy droplets pelting our shoulders as we run from awning to awning, from collapsing home porch to crumbling chapel steps. Along our way, we see every kind of bird upon the ground, all heavy with forgotten flying, and around them their mud-left eggs, as thin-walled as my wife’s uterus, that tender space slung inside her unsteady body. colorado review 184 Though the prose is often highly detailed, one never comes upon moments where this imaginative energy obscures clarity or ease of reading. Instead, time is collapsed at just the right moments and expanded...