daniel prazer

This morning, I heard a flock of geese flying north, and it made me think of the first short story that truly got me thinking about what a story truly should be in terms of plot arc: Isaac Babel‘s “My First Goose.”

I read it first in Dave Kajganich’s Intermediate Fiction class at Miami University, and we broke down the plot into a graph. The push and pull of Isaac Babel’s narrator created a jagged line up to the point where he skewers the goose on his sabre and orders an old woman to cook it for him.

But that’s when translated literature began to suffer. The stories of Red Cavalry amazed me, and I read a collection I got from the library. When Babel’s narrator walks up to the old woman and tells him he needs to eat, she said, “Comrade, I want to hang myself.” I remember it being horrendously out of place, bumping me out of the story.

When I presented Red Cavalry for a Critical Reading and Writing: Novel-in-Stories class taught by Antonia Logue, I went out and bought The Complete Works of Isaac Babel, which is edited by his daughter and translated by Peter Constantine. The woman’s reaction to Babel’s narrator demanding food—and trying to impress the soldiers with whom he was embedded—was completely different.

“Mistress,” I said, “I need some grub.”
The old woman raised the dripping whites of her half-blind eyes and lowered them again.
“Comrade,” she said after a short silence. “All of this makes me want to hang myself.”

And there it is. Character motivation. An old Polish woman, imposed upon by the Sixth Division of the Red Army, has a reason for her utterance of suicide. Of course, Babel the character—let’s not confuse the writer with the storyteller—must, above all, become one of the men to whom he was assigned. “‘Goddammit!’ I muttered in frustration, shoving her back with my hand. ‘I’m in no mood to start debating with you!’”

I thought of this story much over the past few months. Last fall, while in Ohio for the holidays, I took a couple short trips out to public land to hunt geese. I had no idea what I was doing, and I didn’t bag any, probably because I had no calls, no blind, no decoys, and, well, the water was already frozen—they’d already moved south. I fired one shot at some flying over, but they were plenty out of range. And so is Babel’s storytelling ability. He’s a true master; when the Soviet Union disappears you, you’re doing something right with your writing.

The first two-thirds of this book are riveting, and there are some GREAT scenes on the moon. But walking on the moon and returning safely to home was the easy part. Buzz’s real struggle started when he got back—where do you go once you’ve walked on another celestial body?

For Buzz, it was the bottle— combined with crushing depression and his mother and grandfather committing suicide—that easily could have led him to taking his own life. It did for my father.

But Buzz took the hard road. Especially in the ’70s, seeking treatment for mental illness killed careers, more so in the military/NASA than any other industry, where astronauts were supposed to be supermen. It’s a page-turner, sad and light-hearted at once. But once Buzz the character dried out, so did the narrative.

The last third of Magnificent Desolation turned into a 100-page pitch for Buzz’s entrepreneurial endeavors. I slammed through it, but wish it had ended earlier. Still, a damn worthy read for anybody who’s had close contact with depression or alcoholism—and anymore, that’s everybody.

Some footprints last for thousands of years. Some only a few minutes.

Knockemstiff
by Donald Ray Pollock. Doubleday, $22.95. In paperback March 10.
**** out of *****

Sometimes it’s hard to feel sorry for people who end up living awful existences when they repeatedly make awful choices. But there’s no hemming and hawing among the characters in Knockemstiff, Donald Ray Pollock’s debut collection of stories.

A fictional representation of Pollock’s real-life hometown (named for a nasty fight outside the church), the easy out would be to call it a gritty, redneck Winesburg, Ohio.

But there is no easy out in a town like Knockemstiff.

Most everybody has designs to leave, but they all end up back in the holler. Over and over, Pollock puts their backs up against the wall. It’s eighteen stories span thirty years of the town, who’s characters are seldom, if ever, upstanding people. In “Real Life,” a father pummels a man in a drive-in restroom so viciously his teeth punch through his cheek, then makes his 7-year-old son beat the hell out of his victim’s boy. In “Blessed,” the narrator falls off a roof during a burglary and can’t feel his legs, and his partner kicks him onto the hospital parking lot, where his painkiller addiction starts. In “Lard,” teenagers give the fattest kid in Knockemstiff bong hits in exchange for letting them throw darts at his stomach.

The characters may not be upstanding, but they certainly are people, and Pollock puts us in their shoes; reading story after story involving drug use and violence and abject poverty leaves you with a visceral feeling of being trapped. That’s no small feat. You may not like the characters in the book, and you may not want to spend time with them, but among the depravity, they become real. Pollock writes with prose so authentic, so tight and engaging that you root for them even when they’re despicable, and that’s what keeps the pages turning.