Public Works
by Christopher Grimes
Fiction Collective, 2005
Florida State University
(Review by Wynn Yarbrough)
Quirky, engaging, resonant: I seem to find these appropriate qualities for the art I find more compelling these days. To call Chris Grimes’ Public Works compelling is not an understatement, though I did have moments where I felt like the storytelling took me away rather than to the heart of his frequently complex style. Most of the stories are fun, some sad, and all of them worthwhile reading just for the playful style and intricate weaving that Grimes uses in his narratives.
I found “Customs in a Developing Country: A Prefatory Story” a fun story: its rhythm and syntax tumbling in a playful, quirky vein. Where else have you had the chance to buddy up with the postmodernly kitsch, Ms. Zsa Zsa Gabor? But Grimes’ writing isn’t a shallow or slick toss of idiosyncratic vision; he brings the inevitable and, often deeper, clutches around even the zaniest of stories as the narrator reminds us “So many people will have fingered your things with so many different intentions that they will become nearly recognizeable things” (17). “Customs” does present a problem to me in the first person plural narrator employed. In an effort to free us from traditional narratives in a third person vein and the syrupy, slow motioned first person narrator, Grimes (like many others) tells the story from the first person plural narrator that comes to sound like the voice of living historians. The “we” recalls and connects rather than experiences which made me feel as if I could see the strings behind the puppets.
A fascinating story in the collection for me was “The Public Sentence.” Grimes uses one very long sentence to discuss the real problem of sewage (talk about form meeting content). His control of movement and personal history was full of the accumulations of flotsam and jetsam so prevalent in so many short stories that challenge some misarticulated, Hemingwayesque vision that was and is one way (of many) to craft a story. That said, there were moments that were stunningly and dreamily revealed. One of the problems may be in that a story of seven pages the reader rarely feels a break in a single sentence (oh, so much faith in a period). I felt, at times, I was lost on this quick window ride through Indian cities and places with overstylized smells and sights as toppings rather than the meal itself.
A real treat for me was the story “Vivisection” where Grimes uses an invocation from Francis Bacon to connect the idea of the human need for knowing centered around “forms” not the “matter” of details that makes up such forms. This really could be the epigraph for the whole book. The description of the euthanasia of a pet is stunning: so human in the anatomist’s talk and the routinized pettings and attentions to surgical procedures we may all feel the indictment. All the characters perform brilliantly, unexpectedly. The intruding eyes of science and philosophical impetus of science depend upon sacrifice. Grimes gives that sacrifice a voice through a hauntingly real procedure not that different from a sacrifice. I enjoyed the anger of the narrator (isn’t every great art born of anger?) and the voice of the narrator challenging the reader in a fevered, escalating pitch anger over the loss of the animal.
One can see where the overstylized technique can get in the way of a storyteller of Grimes’ ability. “See what I can do” can be dangerous, particularly when it’s sloppy.
We may feel a tug between voice in terms of character’s consciousness, author’s consciousness and story’s consciousness: the psychotherapist’s story in Moving Vehicles seems too acute to be hers as we learn of her reactions and dialogue in the story: she simply doesn’t speak and think this way:
“The old and sick caribou drown during the crossing, their waterlogged bodies swirling in the macabre, slow moving eddies. Such scenes are mesmerizing and life affirming. They tend toward the obsessively long, but still, no matter how long they seem, they are trimmed down for time and our attention span”(71).
To construct such a careful description, then analyze the description, then self-consciously reflect on the art of constructing such a description takes me away from wanting to read further rather than teasing me further into the story.
There are several places in several stories: “Seven Stories to Live By” and “Making Love: A Translation,” for example, where Grimes’ structure and course of telling matches his formidable attention to detail. I enjoyed “Seven Stories to Live By,” particularly where the narrative structure begins with voices supposedly from a tape recorded session. I was convinced by the character’s narration and recall but less so with the italicized narrator’s contributions. And what a twist in the ghost story. Magic in American stories is so desperately needed to break apart our myth of independence and rationality as it has wreaked havoc on this country, particularly on masculinity.
In “Making Love: A Translation,” Grimes’ narrator recalls the stunning simplicity and complexity of attraction (really infatuation) gone or lost:
“So I knew she felt it took this embarrassment, the impossibility of denying the simple facts before the two of us now: the toxicity of each other’s bodies, irrepressible gas, boogers in the nose, cellulite dimples, double chins, loss of bladder control, the inability to excuse one’s self, then death”(105).
This story illustrated an acoustic sense that makes many of Grimes’ sentences worth reading out loud. Yuri, a student in the Paralegal English class, wears a
“blue suit-coat like a bear in the Moscow Circus. Unrolls himself like a mollusk. Adjusts his cuffs as he approaches me, his face the color and texture of boiled sweet breads pepper-corned with pimple scars. Stinks of garlic and detergent”(97).
I couldn’t help but think of the nature of stories in an urban environment: where people generate the nature as often as ecological and environmental forces do in stories with more rural settings.
I was enamored with how Grimes write with such attention to detail and is, in so many ways, a real stylist. In “Examination of Afflicted Man,” the attention to detail, to processes, whether doing the Mountain pose and breathing exercises in a yoga class or having one’s prostate examined, is compelling. Really, I hear so often of talk about structure (even the back flap of the book talks about Grimes’ “formal defiance of the tyranny of traditional narrative”) that I think we can forget that the “devil is in the details,” that language used in startling ways seems to trump the the “three paragraph quickie” at the end of a story where we may not be as challenged.
The novella in the novel, “The Inspection,” points to one of the common themes in Grimes’ work: the appropriation of public sites of interaction (first person plural narrators, public sewage systems as a setting/thematic device, bureaucracies and their legacies). In this novella where we dwell is nothing more than a shell where we hide our fears and disappointments. Condensed storytelling certainly has its value in the Attention Deficit age, but I felt like the story scaled over the quotidian in search of voice and effect. The use of footnotes with the public ordinances reminded me of Jen Boully (where I feel rewarded) and Dave Eggers (where I feel annoyed). Here, I felt like they helped establish character (thematically, we may say they are truly interwoven with dialogue and plot). I mention this because Grimes isn’t a wily-nily postmodernist writer (whatever that is): his art is more calculated and more rewarding in many ways than other writers who appropriate forms for effect (singular and lacking resonance).
The last section of the book was a collection of shorter works. Some read like prose poems (“The Complete, Unabridged History of Parenthood”) while the others are more short/shorts (“Curtains” or “Hired Help”). In fact, come to think of it, Grimes’ work in this section could provide some lessons into the differences between the two. Situated between the stories is the five part “Installment of an Interview with Nobel Candidate Sylvia Solas.” The interviewer was funny and wry, reminiscent of Calvino’s interview stories. To say that Calvino, Borges and Cortazar are smiling at one of their progeny with Chris Grimes is to make an understatement. But whereas the fantastical seems to be laced with the mythological so often in their work (more so with Borges and Cortazar, in my opinion), Grimes invests situations and conflicts with the malaise that haunts our age: emotional paralysis, ennui, and denial. For example, in “Shrunk”, the slush and snow of the plains on a night drive parallels the mental landscape of two brothers who attempt to reconcile after one confesses to therapy in their car conversation: barren, dark, and full of unrecognizable forms.
Voice could be one of the major assets of this collection. And Grimes couldn’t be more topical for me. In “Hired Help,” the three characters arguing over the death of John Kennedy Jr. reminded me of the Anna Nicole Smith and Britney Spears combo in the news presently. How can animals capable of reason and supposed higher intellectual powers sit in front of a TV and comment to and at each other as if they have a stake? While we are amusing ourselves to death, Grimes calls attention to our sense of powerlessness and how we avoid our own reflections night after night in such broadcasts.
These short stories, for me, were the most enjoyable parts to the book (though I am still telling friends about Vivisection, truly one of the most resonant short stories for me that I’ve read in a while). If you are a reader looking for technique and torque filtering through the work (compelling sentences, well crafted turns and leaps) then Public Works will give you plenty of return on your money. Grimes manages to hold you as a reader for moments, if not the whole time. But even his moments are gratifying and will send you back for rereading.