David Ryan, the author of a short story collection, Animals in Motion (Roundabout Press), will be on Healing Wisdom this week. His stories have appeared "in Esquire, BOMB, Tin House, Fence, Hayden's Ferry Review, failbetter.com, The Encyclopedia Project, Booth, Denver Quarterly, Alaska Quarterly Review, New Orleans Review, Cimarron Review, several Mississippi Review Prize issues, Nerve, Hobart, and Salt Hill, among others. His fiction has been anthologized in WW Norton's Flash Fiction Forward, The Mississippi Review: 30, and Akashic Book's Boston Noir 2: The Classics. His essays, reviews and interviews have appeared in The Paris Review, The Oxford Encyclopedia of American Literature, Tin House, BookForum, and elsewhere. A recipient of a Connecticut state arts grant and a Macdowell fellowship, he currently teaches in the writing program at Sarah Lawrence College."
His latest work, Animals in Motion, leaves you feeling restless and uneasy in your own skin, vaguely uncomfortable with humanity, strangely satisfied and piteous of the foibles and shortcomings of characters which seem all at once painfully self-conscious and completely unaware. You want to comfort the long shadows his tin, hapless and often mournful cavernous characters leave behind in their wake, but like naive children who are longingly lonely and yet too thorny and self-absorbed to touch. So you resign to appreciate their sorrows and blunderings at a safe distance. In the same tradition as Raymond Carver, William Faulkner and his ilk, Ryan has chosen to bring the reader into the world of characters we feel awkward and relieved to find sympathy toward.
Books are remarkable places to find private commiseration in darkened mental landscapes. Your compassion for the underdog can't take you down a notch here. Your reactions toward the secrets hidden and the mysteries unraveling are completely unknowable to the outside world. Your morality, your ethics, your sexual desire, nothing is under the microscope. You should be able to read things you don't want your shrink or your diary to know about. You get a free pass to a private non-corporeal experience, no paper trail necessary. The relationship is on your terms, you either keep reading or stop. Sometimes it seems that the longer an author forces you to excavate the wreckage, the more it becomes hard to decipher the contents. More revelations lead to more questions than answers. And sometimes, whispering between the third person and first person narratives, the author, like an imaginary friend who faintly haunts the hours through his darkened corridors seems to be an amalgamation of his characters and your subconscious mind. A companion, a path finder, ever present, yet invisible, and silent in the music of words like notes, and characters like melodies.
Ryan's book explores layers, sometimes peeling inflamed scars back like raw flesh, sometimes plinging you like a pinball into someone's head, sometimes putting a character like a breast between two pieces of glass like a painful mammogram, and at times it's very cinematic. In the tradition of southern short story writers, characters can be downright unlikable, unknowingly unethical, emotionally galvanized, and haunted by former love but exhibiting an admirable matter-of-factness and lack of self-pity. Perhaps Ryan and authors like him are helping readers to expand our minds, wonder about the back stories of strangers, the way adolescents do, before their world becomes a tunnel vision - focused on their daily minutia, insurance, loans. Before their futures become maps, like high-tech weather forecasts of tornado trips to Disneyworld and Legoland and ATMS.
Gotta love books that allow you to be a mute witness to accidents waiting to happen, like an angel in the afterlife, you await the return of the crushed souls, who somehow exhibit a triumphant surrender to the powerful absurdity and orchestrated chaos the universe seems to have foisted upon them.
No comments:
Post a Comment