The Hedonism Will Be Televised

At a time when America is willfully closing its eyes to the realities of climate change and building racial tensions, Timmy Waldon's new short story collection seems particularly well timed. In this meditation on self-destructive escapism, titled Stories For People Who Watch TV, Waldron is a wry observer of partying millennials, new parents, and failing marriages. Frequently, his stories begin in media res, depicting scenes of drunken mayhem. Although parties, nightclubs, and bars are a favored backdrop, Waldron's world is one of hedonism but little joy. These drunken escapades are always followed by an unflinching look at the aftermath of the night before: characters wake up "covered in their own shit" find they have had their life savings stolen by a prostitute, or realize that their drunken impulses have left their friendships in ruins. However, these are not stories of repentance or baffled regret. These characters navigate their guilty consciences by lying to one another and most of all to themselves; upon waking, they begin "the process of mentally erasing" all that has happened.

Waldron is best when exploring this kind of mental dissonance; even with the intimacy afforded by first-person narration, he expertly creates a sense of things left unsaid and thoughts that are too painful to acknowledge. Although his characters may not be particularly self-reflective, he also deftly uses the reactions of periphery characters to reveal the way self-deception functions. For example, in "Some Other Kind of Apocalypse" a man recounts the days leading up to his decision to tell his wife that he has decided to leave her and their young son. Among the drunken scenes and hangovers of which Waldron is so fond off, the man's first-person narration also makes a few references to a younger female colleague. The final scene sees him excitedly telling her about his decision to end the marriage. Her reaction—"she shook her head no. No, no, no, no, no she seemed to say with every bit of her body. No."—tells the reader all they need to know about the man's absent but subtly implied desires and hopes. His unreciprocated desire for her and an unspoken fantasy that they will be together after he has left his wife subtly emerge as the motivating force of his actions.

Elsewhere, in "Pinball Way," Waldron adopts an unconventional, drifting perspective. A young, carefree man pick up a woman in a bar. He walks past another girl who he has previously slept with. Unusually, the perspective suddenly shifts to her point of view and she begins crying. Without a moralizing tone, Waldron depicts the way our actions ripple out in ways unbeknownst to us and the pain we cause one another when we choose to willfully forget to be sympathetic. This idea of seeing ourselves from different angles is important to Waldron. His great skill is to make his reader guilty of the same one-sided thinking as his characters, who often suddenly reveal themselves to be different to what we were expecting. For example, in "Ouroboros" a drug dealer whose loud music keeps a new mother awake is unexpectedly welcoming and kind. Elsewhere, "High-Test" concludes with a surprisingly tender moment, as the narrative's thief is seen cradling her pregnant stomach.

In spite of its bleak suggestion that humans continually misunderstand both themselves and each other, dark humor runs throughout Stories For People Who Watch TV. In one such example, a bored young mother gleefully creates a fictional post on a parenting forum which reads, "I found bestiality videos on my husband's laptop and now the dog is acting strange. I'm not sure what to do." For Waldron, the impulse to lie to other people is not always born from pain but often from sheer boredom, with humorous consequences.

Waldron is certainly a skilled writer and his writing possesses the essential qualities of the most successful short stories: observation, pacing, surprise, and economy. However, the...