William Giraldi

Next Stop Abbottland: The Stories of Lee K. Abbott

he best fiction writers and dramatists construct worlds with such expertise T of purpose and innovation that it’s impossible to confuse those worlds with any others. Samuel Beckett’s environment might resemble no place on earth, but we return to it again and again because it matches precisely our interior landscape. What makes Beckett—and others such as William Faulkner and Flannery O’Connor—impossible to confuse with another writer is original- ity of purpose, or vision. A fiction writer’s purpose does not lie in his theme, since the only theme available to him is the plight of Homo sapiens; this is what Henry Fielding meant when he wrote in Tom Jones that man, not God, “is the highest subject.” Whether the plight of our species is viewed through the colored glass of class, race, sex, or religion is really beside the point, because all literature is about either the defeat or the triumph of the human spirit. A writer’s particular purpose reveals itself through the manner in which he or she processes those opposites and lays bare the heart in conflict. Since pur- pose cannot be revealed through theme, it must be revealed through style—a condition the poets share. Syntax and diction, and how they contribute to characterization, are the marks of a story writer’s purpose. Whereas a poet’s mode is in most cases primarily lyrical, a fiction writ- er’s is narrative: he has a story to tell, a story about men and women strug- gling against the grate of existence, against all things known and unknown. No struggle, no story; we are not interested in hearing about a purely happy day. Our American writers practice a form perfectly suited to this struggle: most of our lives are not perennial travesties but rather an accumula- tion of a hundred separate events marked by bliss and pain. These episodes may

[ 69 ] 70 the georgia review last an hour, a day, a week, a month—or twenty pages for the story writer. A novelist concerns himself with a life, a story writer with the most meaningful chapters from that life.

When Lee K. Abbott arrived on the scene in 1980 with his story collection The Heart Never Fits Its Wanting, American short fiction was about to get a makeover courtesy of the so-called minimalists: early via Gordon Lish, the scoured sentences of Richard Bausch, and the of Rock Springs. Later, and Frederick Barthelme would carry on the mode of , which Hempel preferred to call miniaturist. I have no quarrel with the term minimalist because it was always meant to denote style instead of substance, though Hemingway, the most minimal of them all—what is his iceberg theory if not a call to minimalism?—never had to contend with such a label. Borrowed from modern art, this label came to apply to American short fiction partly in reaction to the excess of the Reagan eighties, those unashamed glory days of capitalism and the Star Wars program. was at the head of a pack who applied the term with unadulterated praise, especially in his 1986 essay “A Few Words about Minimalism.” With the cold war winding down, there was still much talk of plutonium and mutual annihilation, and some of what Carver, Bausch, and Ford aimed to achieve was a reemphasis on the little American heart in the little American home. John Cheever’s and John Updike’s emphases were similarly fixed, though always in a style that suggests the intel- lectual and rhapsodic. The minimalists favored a more mainlined approach to emotional truths, unencumbered by the acrobatics of the Updike syntax. Lee K. Abbott would have nothing of this. The Heart Never Fits Its Want- ing is an orgy of style, one that performs the magic trick of being at once ine- briated and exact—his narrators akin to world-class drinkers who can down a fifth of Jim Beam and still stand straight. Abbott has often been compared to Cheever, but this is a mystery to me because their sensibilities as story writers are wholly apart, the classes of their characters at nearly opposite ends of the social spectrum. Most of Abbott’s narratives serve his language, and though this is typi- cally the crime of a beginning writer who wants to demonstrate his vocabulary and what he recently learned in philosophy class—usually about Nietzsche—in early Abbott the inversion is the point: without language our stories don’t exist. Like a genuine poet, Abbott wants to create a new mode of communication, william giraldi 71 and if that communication is zany and reckless then so is the human heart. Less is not more; more is more, replete with abstractions, metaphysics, and mayhem: Death. Say the word a dozen times and you’ll see that it will mean as little to you as gibberish in French or what machines speak. Sung as we used to sing about what we thought was love in those days, it will no more touch you than trouble among South Pole penguins or quar- rel across town; it will seem to you now as it seemed to me then—a condition fetched up to disturb the small minds we celebrate.

Imitative form is a fallacy in certain instances, the mode of lazy pens and impoverished imaginations: the writer’s main character withholds information from her husband, and so the writer withholds information from the reader; the character’s thoughts are a muddled mess, and so too is the writing. A fic- tion writer who would make such defenses is not worth listening to in the first place, yet for Abbott the feverish pace of his sentences, the alliteration and unorthodox syntax, are successful corollaries to the motives and inner bedlam of his characters. Originality of character begets originality of language. Abbott is a generous writer seemingly incapable of error, and so imitative form aug- ments the energy of his narratives, which are revelatory and fun. Remember when reading was fun? This is from the story “Love Is the Crooked Thing,” told by an aging football player, Burl Purteet, who has just met the woman he will marry: Time moved on as it will in my world, and in August I went into another Baldwin-Wallace training camp, that beef of me much older, my knees held fast by gizmos of stainless steel and miracle fabric; and I thought little about Ms. DuFoys until that afternoon, during two- a-days, when three from the Blue squad, including a lunatic rookie who desired to be the new edition of yours truly, sought to batter old Burl’s kidneys and shiver his thinking parts so that Number 56 would go down in a pile the size of an economy sedan.

Exaggeration is the machine of the comic, and Abbott, for all his seri- ousness and squalor, is primarily a comedic writer who delights in the folly that is man. In the Southwest of The Heart Never Fits Its Wanting, Abbott’s women say things like “I’m a journalist. I specialize in grief and overcoming,” and his men announce, “I’m bear and snake. I live apart from grace.” His New 72 the georgia review

Mexican isolatos have no trouble approaching unknown women on the street and declaring, “I love you. Here, feel my face,” and then afterward pondering their lot: “I could hear the genetic chit-chat of my hormones.” At a party, one of Abbott’s men spots the woman of his fantasies and declares, “My heart shot to my neck like a squirrel, all claws and climbing.” And then comes this sad observation: “In my part of the world, people suffer horribly from love.” Ditto in ours. Many of Abbott’s people speak alike, and their speech has little corre- spondence to our actual world, but that’s because they live in this awkward wasteland Abbott has constructed for them. And, oddly enough, they are com- fortable there: his people are altogether themselves and wouldn’t be capable of recognizing a different realm if they suddenly found themselves in one. Abbott’s plots unfold in an eerie, dreamlike haze of booze, narcotics, and disap- pointment—“I had eight thoughts, then eighty, several of which had to do with drinking and the truths you find doing it.” And yet never does one suspect that Abbott is penning anything other than grainy realism, except that he molds his planet as would an insane god and then rules over it with just as much mad- ness. Writing is one of the only methods a person has of approaching godliness: in the beginning was the word. In “Love and the Hurt of It,” one of Abbott’s funniest stories, the protago- nist Dallas has a Casanova effect on females—all females, prepubescent and postmenstrual alike. Groups of them pounce on him like ravenous Bacchae wherever he travels; old girlfriends break his bones, bruise him, and make him bleed. Dallas is at once lovable, dopey, and, like all of Abbott’s people, metaphysically minded. Is this permissible? Are fiction writers who are ostensibly realists—that is, those who have no stock in the supernatural, the fabulist, or the satiri- cal—allowed to compose a world of characters in situations whose nexus to our own is untenable or shaky at best? I hope so, or else we’ll have to trash half of the serious American fiction ever written, starting with most of Mark Twain and moving on into Yoknapatawpha County. Abbott’s people might carry on like nobody you’ve ever met, but so does Huck Finn. Fielding has something to say about this, too: a writer must not “be inhibited from showing many persons and things, which may possibly have never fallen within the knowledge of a great part of his readers.” What we are privy to in Abbott is most certainly the mysterious workings of reality, but a reality tinged with his purpose of render- ing it quite unreal. william giraldi 73

The tired blather about whether art mirrors life or vice versa—as old as Aristotle—has turned obsolete along with the nature-nurture question, whose answer has always been “both.” The human being is a synapse between the channel of life to his right and the channel of art to his left. We bring ourselves to literature and take from it the writer’s purpose. Aristotle was suspicious of mirror realism, positing that an artist has no business portraying the actual, only the probable. In the story collections Abbott published in the 1980s and ’90s—Love Is the Crooked Thing, Dreams of Distant Lives, Living After Midnight, Wet Places at Noon, and especially Strangers in Paradise—he had it both ways: traditional narratives of longing and loss infused with an element of the comic absurd that taxes all credulity. But when you enter a fiction writer’s world, and the language of that world establishes its own peculiar authority, you leave your doubt at the door. The Heart Never Fits Its Wanting is all amplification and excess, with nearly every sentence a memorable joy: “Her hips were doing something Span- ish and unexpectedly ancient.” The style of Abbott’s subsequent collections is slightly less Dionysian, though never without flair. In “Living Alone in Iota,” a love story from Strangers in Paradise (1986) that very well could be taking place just prior to the apocalypse, Reese is abandoned by a woman who keeps changing her name. She was Billy Jean La Took—one of Abbott’s many recur- ring characters—and before leaving Texas she scribbles Reese a note: “I have talents and numerous dreams of glamour. You never saw me dance. Plus, I have improved my mind.” The women in Abbottland are modern vixens with ferocious intelligence, women who have taken the feminist imperative and turned it southwestern. Their individuality is lawless and spicy, and the men pay heavily in heartache. Reese was love-sawed; and the drunk he sought that night was posi- tively medieval. There was slop in his thoughts—as well as self-pity, sorrow, and wicked lessons in heartcraft. “I am without solace and affection in this world,” he hollered. “You’re looking at a man who aches!” He made all the bars around Iota . . . marching into each, his shirttail flapping behind, his tearful eyes flashing with woeful and frenzied lights, shouting that he was a left man and full of doom. “Somebody hit me,” he cried, “I want to leave this vulgar planet!” . . . Pale and rancid with some kind of consumptive sweat, he was drunk-clobbered then, the world swirling without comfort, calm, or knowable center. “You’re looking at a feeble and pained hombre,” he 74 the georgia review

said to the bartender. “I want black booze and a straw. Then loan me an ax so I can cut off your nose.”

Love-sawed, positively medieval, heartcraft, black booze and a straw, and that last bit of non sequitur—Cormac McCarthy might speak this way if he suddenly tripped over a sense of humor. But the American fiction writer with whom Abbott most shares sensibility is Barry Hannah, and not simply because their work has a section of the country in common. The language of Hannah’s Airships (1978) and High Lonesome (1996) revels in rhythmic syntax, dark humor, and originality of phrase. His sentences are mini-symphonies that cannot be ignored; he understands that the key to dramatic thrust, and to keeping the reader’s attention, lies not in plot but in the quality of voice that propels characterization and informs the fiction writer’s purpose. Consider this from the opening of “Through Sunset into the Raccoon Night” inHigh Lonesome: Lovers are the most hideously selfish aberrations in any given ter- ritory. They are not nice, and careless to the degree of blind metal- hided rhinoceroses run amok. Multitudes of them cause wrecks and die in them. Ask the locals how sweet the wreckage of damned near everybody was around that little pube-rioting Juliet and her moon- whelp Romeo.

In one short paragraph Hannah has fashioned an entire universe, complete with a belief system and individuality of voice. You know immediately whether or not you’ d like to hear the rest of that speaker’s story. The misfits and degenerates of Hannah’s fiction, like Abbott’s, crawl through the mud of a world in which honor has become debased, shame is a foreign concept, and the Hemingway code of grace under pressure is a laugh- able impossibility. Like Hannah, Abbott knows that storytelling is fundamen- tally oral and that if a writer wants to affect—and, yes, entertain—his audience, he must own a style that corresponds to that oral tradition. Reading Abbott is like sitting across from him at a campfire, and many of his narrators address the reader directly. Indeed, in “The Final Proof of Fate and Circumstance,” from Love Is the Crooked Thing (1986), storytelling is the main character; it has a life of its own when a father defines himself to his son through the various yarns—true and false—he spins about his distant past. william giraldi 75

Abbott and Hannah share another element: the former admires golf the way the latter does tennis; both writers have a bizarre reverence for their respec- tive sports. When I first discovered Abbott I was skeptical about his tendency to deliver human drama on the grass of eighteen holes, because I’ve always been a working-class snob who thinks golf is for overweight Republicans with too much money—white men who need a break from bigotry and their mission of trying to unite church and state. Of course Tiger Woods changed all that, though he himself has come to resemble those white men with billion-dollar bank accounts—money knowing one color only. But how can an activity be considered a sport when it’s possible not to shed a single drop of sweat, when a lackey does the heavy lifting? Abbott’s golf courses and country clubs play host to damaged male egos, offering arenas synonymous with civilization, each of them manufactured with deceptive beauty and serenity as Disneyland versions of what Wordsworth found in nature. Abbott’s antiheroes are bored stupid beneath the murderous New Mexican sun, though hitting golf balls doesn’t seem like such a wasteful way to pass the time. If Hannah’s tennis court presents a battlefield, a dividing line between “I” and “Other,” Abbott’s golf course is an ocean, an undulating, seemingly endless mass whose end we might not be able to reach: Neither Deming’s best golfer nor its worst, Mr. Dillon Ripley was, as the six thousand of us in these deserts now realize, its most ardent, having taken to the sport as those in the big world we read about have taken to drink or to narcotics. Almost daily, you’ d see him on the practice tee—elbows, knees, and rump in riot—his fat man’s swing a torment of expectation and gloom. . . . [He’ d] stare down the range, as if out there, waiting as destiny is said to wait, stood neither riches nor simple happiness, but Ripley himself, slender and tanned and strong as iron, a hero wise and blessed as are those from blind Homer.

In Hannah’s storytelling the portraits of spiritual depravity are rarely ever touching; his chief objective is to force a recognition of the world’s barbed truths, of how Christianity has failed and degenerated into an existential loath- ing. But Abbott can switch hats when he wishes and mitigate the zaniness of his creation with genuine forays into the heart. “The End of Grief”—originally published in Strangers in Paradise and reprinted in All Things, All at Once (2006), Abbott’s volume of new and selected stories—probes into a father- 76 the georgia review son relationship in which the father is obsessed with his brother’s grisly fate during the Bataan Death March of 1942. Narrated by the son, this soberly told story involves an intentional deceleration: we see an occasional burst of classic Abbottland style—as when the son declares, “I felt slumped inside, as if all there was of link and snap and hook had crashed loose and lay ruined at the pit of me”—but Abbott knows that at the pivotal moment when a father and son are about to understand each other for the first time in their lives, the pace of the narrative must slow to a near halt. One must breathe in order to see. “The End of Grief” concludes not with grief verging on black humor, as do so many of Abbott’s stories, but with acceptance and healing. The finish is subtle and without fireworks. After an encounter with an old soldier who claimed to have known the brother during the death march, the narrator’s father, disillusioned and tired of his fruitless search for answers, allows his obsessions to dissolve. Here are the son’s final words: It was slow, I saw, but it was not painful; and in time he had put aside his boxer’s temper and his banker’s concern for numbers. He was a man with a plan now, I thought. A before B. Work and play. Then he got up, stretched, rubbed his hands, and a dozen, free breaths came back to me.

All Things, All at Once is long overdue; most of Abbott’s collections have been out of print for a decade. Like Richard Yates, Abbott is a writer’s writer, rarely reaching the middle-class white female who reportedly keeps the pub- lishing business afloat. Yates’s reputation was revived in part by the efforts of Stewart O’Nan and Richard Russo, who helped bring out his collected stories in 2000; one no longer had to search used bookshops or spend a lunch break on Amazon trying to find a long-lost Yates title. I personally have spent untold hours looking for Abbott’s stories in the bookstores of Manhattan and Boston, and also in whatever little New England town I’ve happened to find myself passing through. Amazon was a help with all except two of his books, and I still haven’t managed to get my own copy of The Heart Never Fits Its Wanting. Writers are amazed that Yates was ever permitted to fall out of print, and I feel that way about Abbott, a story writer who has been hailed by the best minds in American short fiction, among them , Frederick Busch, and Richard Ford. william giraldi 77

The selected stories in All Things, All at Once are culled from every Abbott book but his first, and they provide a cornucopia exhibiting the versatility and frenetic energy of his voice and vision. The new stories, too, display Abbott’s signature exuberance and wit. The golfers, wanderers, and love-ravaged indi- viduals are here, each of them no closer to nirvana than the hapless people who haunt the early collections. Abbott’s ability to hurt your abdomen with laughter in one story and then clamp onto your heart with pathos in the next is stronger than it’s ever been. My playful swipe at Cormac McCarthy notwithstanding, I don’t believe—as some do—that the best writers are necessarily those who can balance humor and pathos within the same work. Cervantes is the chief proof for this argument; the Greek tragedians, though, with their stories that influenced all of civilization and set the psychological template for man, are not funny for even a minute. The fact that Abbott can allay the severity of his pessimism with comedy and wit is most certainly a plus, but it is not the factor that distinguishes his brilliance. Still, I think Abbott can challenge George Saunders’ position as the cur- rent king of wit in American short fiction; in fact, Abbott is frequently funnier than Saunders, whose fun is often too satirical and cerebral to be moving. He has a cult following, and deservedly so, but I’ve seldom met a reader who has been touched by Saunders’ work—impressed by his fine intelligence and partial to his silliness, but rarely touched. Saunders is having fun all right, but sometimes he’s the only one on the playground. Abbott’s wit, in contrast, is always in the service of feeling, of embracing the truths of our emotions. “Ninety Nights on Mercury,” a recent love story à la Abbott, represents the confession of Heath Howell: “She was Betty Porter, a being as much of magic as of muscle, and I who I ever am . . . and, as events will prove, the dimmest of sinners, male type.” There are no free passes in Abbottland: transgressions are promptly or eventually punished, men left alone when they cannot behave. This belief that no crime goes unpunished is not so much Christian as it is Freudian: the lies we tell ourselves and the deceptions we perpetrate upon others—all stemming from a past that was not of our making—amount to self- destruction, an unhealthy personal rejection of emotional honesty. One must confront the demons to expel them; ignored, they multiply. Abbott is always a student of human psychology, the humor and the horror of it. In All Things, All at Once, the new stories without wit and comedy are tragedies of the first order. Never one to shy away from a storytelling chal- 78 the georgia review lenge, Abbott offers in “One ofStar Wars, One of Doom” a minute-by-minute imagining of the dread in a Columbine-type high school slaughter. Like the best horror films, the story starts the heart racing, and one turns the pages with bated breath. “Gravity,” too, strikes squarely in the chest: unbeknownst to Lonnie Nees, his teenage daughter has entangled herself with a gang; she goes missing and Nees, beset with a tremendous sadness, hunts down a member of the gang in order to understand what has happened to the girl who has transformed hideously right under his nose. Like Barry Hannah’s disrupted southerners and Cormac McCarthy’s heedless bandits, Nees carries a handgun: a man has the right to react with violence in a world that seems to cheer on carnage and to refuse his happiness. The Wild West is not dead; firearms are inextricable from some Americans’ sense of liberation and fairness, and Abbott’s men are nothing if not American. On average, Abbott’s stories have lengthened over the years—the new works in All Things, All at Once are some of the longest in the collection. If Abbott fuses a poet’s purpose with a fiction writer’s, the lyrical with the narra- tive, as I believe he does, then his stories cannot stand to get much longer. It’s impossible to sustain that level of stylistic fervor, those orgasms of language, for more than twenty or twenty-five pages. Even stretches of Paradise Lost and The Prelude read like prose because of this impossibility; if Hopkins’ “The Wreck of the Deutschland” had gone one more stanza it might have burst from its own vigor, from its own brand of syntactical brilliance. Abbott’s novella Living After Midnight strains the reader’s tolerance, becoming a comet that burns a bit too long and hurts the eyes. Like Raymond Carver and Thom Jones, Abbott has a vision uniquely suited to the story form, and I don’t think we can expect a novel from him—which is fine by me. We need American fiction writers who remain true to their purpose, to their story- telling sensibilities, and who refuse to pen a novel simply because the market demands it.

To get a clear reading on the current state of the American short story is dif- ficult; after the Carver-inspired minimalist fervor of the eighties, the nineties seemed a rather dull decade, or at least one not governed by any particular aesthetic, any specific bonfire around which writers could gather. I don’t mean to claim that no worthy American story collections were published in the nine- ties, or even that writers need a collective bonfire. Jones, Busch, Tobias Wolff, william giraldi 79 and Ann Beattie were at the top of their games; Denis Johnson garnered a cult following around Jesus’ Son; and the old masters, Updike and Joyce Carol Oates, were still at it. But the banner of minimalism revived interest in the American short story in a way that was conspicuously absent in the nineties, just as it is currently absent in this first decade of the twenty-first century. Movements of any kind—political, religious, literary—manufacture interest because we as a society, as social, group-dwelling creatures, are often more captivated by a group’s than an individual’s actions. One guy screaming in the night is just a madman; a group screaming in harmony is a phenomenon. Those who keep tabs on the sordid business of New York publishing know that agents and editors continue to announce the death of the short story, yet every week new story collections by unknown young writers are published. When Flannery O’Connor stressed concern fifty-odd years ago that the short story was in danger of dying from competence as a result of the proliferation of MFA programs, she also offered a corrective: vision, guts, myth. Lee K. Abbott and Barry Hannah seem to me the only living American story writers who have matched O’Connor’s aptitude for Kafkaesque mythmaking, for transforming the filthy reality of blood and bone into allegory unfettered by place and time. Those citizens of New Mexico in so many of Abbott’s stories remain obsessed with Mars, and Martians are a favorite metaphor—New Mexico is, after all, the site of the supposed Roswell UFO crash. What is the fixation on UFOs if not a recycling of rudimentary myths, the human urge for stories, an avenue by which desperate people might explain, escape, or transcend? Barry Hannah has stopped writing short fiction, but Lee K. Abbott has not, and it is his mythmaking, his ecstatic vision of squalor and grandeur— rather than the exhausted, MFA-encouraged dramas of domesticity—that should be at the center of our newfound zeal for the short story.