Dropping the Veil

Strategies Against Extinction seems the perfect title for these finely nuanced character studies, though it’s sometimes hard to say if Michael Nye’s people are plotting for or against it. Their most favored strategy is to imagine a world of past glory or future conquest outside and away from the present complication, usually a scenario where extinction seems near (the death of career or marriage or family, places where centers cannot hold). Of course, imagination and memory can act as harbors of self-protection, even freedom; they are also, potentially, hothouses of delusion. In this sense, Nye’s characters always come to. The veil drops, if only fleetingly, and the so-to-speak truth of the world is exposed.

Nye often features a lost soul doggedly striving, rich or poor or once-poor-now-rich or somewhere in the middle and likely sinking. Three stories in, we get a kind of mission statement via “A Fully Imagined World,” where Kyle, a laid-off lawyer condemned to stay-at-home dad, chances on a long-gone lover at Cincinnati’s Natural History Museum. When she doesn’t remember him—they’d slept together just once, never spoke again, a college age memory he’d clung to—Kyle is crushed by it, enough to space out in a tragic way and lose track of his two-year-old in the vast museum. That trouble is eventually resolved yet only deepens Kyle’s despair. Later, before he is confronted by his wife (“whatever existential crisis you’re going through needs to stop. Right now”), Kyle succumbs to nostalgic yearning for his days as a high school quarterback. He longs for “the certainty of football’s controlled aggression,” for “this glory, this purpose.” Certainty and purpose are what these characters pine for but can’t quite find. They seek meaning from an indifferent universe that answers with little to none. Still, despite whatever they’ve lost (or might soon lose), most of Nye’s characters accept their lot. Acceptance of one’s reality, however grim or vulnerable, is a winning strategy here as well.

This is in fact the definition of wisdom: the destruction of the Ideal (or so say the Eastern mystics). Nye examines, even endorses, this sort of notion without telegraphing the punch. His work is rich with symbolic suggestion, often involving museums or statues or static landmarks. There is the giant artificial glacier across which Kyle spots his onetime lover: on the other side of the fake freeze is the living version of his artificial ideal (also frozen, as it were, in his mind). There is the pristine miniature replica of Cincinnati, seventy feet long, that entrances the narrator in “Union Terminal.” It stands in marked contrast to the actual “city now in decay.” In “Projection,” the small-town water tower (Ashland County) becomes a secret blight of identity for a girl home from college for one last summer. The water tower, she tells her emerging boyfriend, “makes me feel branded. Like the tower is a scar or a deformity everyone can see when I’m walking around campus.” She is surprised to find that her boyfriend-to-be, this odd bird from a wealthy family, can see it from his house as well, as if water towers—and small town malaise—could only infect the working poor.

The concerns of class and money and power hang over these stories like a steady cloud. It is in her summer job as a projectionist at the Findlay Omniplex that Monica first spots the fortunate son who will become her summer’s lover. This son of wealth with no summer job turns out to be a touch unhinged, having taken too literally their drugged pledge to “nuke” the water tower and escape Ashland County. The daughter of the factory worker who wants to be a filmmaker proves to be the stable, sensible one. In this regard, Nye occupies multiple perspectives—he skips in and out of strata with relative ease—though college-age lovers are...