. . . careful, layered creation
A Dark House and Other Stories, Ian Colford. Vagrant Press, 2019.
Reviewing Jean Marc Ah-Sen’s In the Beggarly Style of Imitation (Below the Level of Consciousness), Andre Forget praises its flamboyantly artificial style, calling it a “sophisticated form of play.” That word “sophisticated” heralds the approach of a straw man: a naïve conception of realism that “encourages us to imagine a ‘real’ world… and to think of style and tone and diction as merely being tools that help us reproduce a reality that exists independently of them.” I think that ‘realistic’ representation is also highly artificial and tend to view writers’ styles along a continuum. At the fancier end, Nabokov’s “Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth.”
But what is at the other end? The baroque simplicity of Ernest Hemingway? “In the morning there was a big wind blowing and the waves were running high up on the beach and he was awake a long time before he remembered that his heart was broken.” The parsed simplicity of Norman Levine? “The breaking waves, white scars in the dark. They gash the black in several places. The gashes grow wider. They join. One white line the length of the beach.” Obviously there are subspecies of a simpler style and different kinds of authorial performances — ravishing acts and vanishing acts — but they all create illusions out of sentences and paragraphs.
Ian Colford’s A Dark House and Other Stories is at the plainer end of our imaginary style-line. He does not seem interested in sonic, lapidary or self-conscious effects. And yet Colford is a hell of a good short-story writer. The texture of his sentences is unassuming, but their details matter. In “McGowan on the Mount,” McGowan’s youthful, sensual curiosity — ”Look! Look at this!, he was known to say as he bent the highest branch of a bush down to show you a red-winged horned beetle or an elaborately striped caterpillar . . .” (75) — is as attentively depicted as his later, straightened period. “Then for supper he would chop up the wieners and fry them until they’d blistered and blackened and he could taste the charcoal in them.” (79).
Colford’s strength is his careful, layered creation of characters attempting to, failing to, and somewhat understanding themselves: not so much the ‘shock of recognition’ as the shocks of re-cognition. In “The Ugly Girl,” a professor, separated from his family, fixated on an ‘ugly girl,’ moves from oceanic bewil-derment to insight in this passage, the last sentence deepening through its mildly delaying syntax:
As if from miles away hundreds of footfalls formed a clattering echo in my head, I heard phones ring and doors slam, and a multitude of voices drifted over and swarmed around me, not one of them speaking words I was meant to hear. It seemed another realm, and I realized all at once it was precisely that: the realm of the living. I remained where I was a few moments, just to gather strength. But then I began to notice an expression of unease settle into the faces of the men and women who approached where I stood, noticed too that they were all following the same wide arc around me, as if I were an obstacle placed mischievously in their path or a reminder of some unpleasant thing they would rather not think about. (116)
To arrive at such effects, Colford’s stories trace twisting, turning paths. “The Comfort of Knowing” follows a morally obtuse Christian, who spectacularly fails the “what would Jesus do?” test by documenting his youngest sister’s affair, then wrestles with what to do next. Though I would not shout hosannas about its style, it, too, is a sophisticated kind of play: there’s great fun in watcing this feeble moralist wriggle in his certainty, insecurity and righteousness over and over again.
Colford’s technical instrument for doing this is often the long paragraph. When he first notices the affair (22-23), we get his reluctance to believe (“I began denying every aspect of what I was looking at”); his minimal self-control (“I try, oh, I do try not to get worked up about things.”); his denials of his own prurience (“I don’t claim to know what they were up to . . .”); his jumping to conclusions (“. . . whatever was going on here had been embarked on rashly and in haste . . .”); his prudishness (“. . . his denim trousers were taut with a full load of buttock and thigh.”); and his thunderous judgments (“. . . left them to their sordid longings.”)
Colford draws this interior teeter-totter with great finesse and variation. “It’s true that I have recently tended to be more judgmental in my thinking than in the past, and maybe it’s beginning to show in ways I’m blind to. But, generally speaking, I think she’s dead wrong about me.” (23). Rationalizations! Self-congratulations! Assertions! Retractions! By registering each nuance of thought, Colford creates the illusion of a complex person. At the end of “Comfort,” instead of reinforcing an earlier, comforting epiphany, he undermines it in a surprising way: a testament to his craft.
“The Dictator Surveys his Realm” uses an interesting structure to portray an authoritarian state, and partially succeeds: the story evades a simplistic reading where a singularly evil figure dominates, but tends to make all the characters into victims of circumstance. By turns we get the close third-person of a dictator, a dutiful, somewhat decent soldier, and a leftist journalist, a rotating point of view as the plot moves towards the journalist’s execution and culminates in a not unpredictable reversal. There are some B-movie clichés of feeling: the good vs. evil soldier trope, the journalist’s sentimental look backwards at his life; the long-serving good soldier dreaming of his retirement. Also, getting into the head of the thug-like soldier might have been a more interesting challenge. There are also unexplored complexities. The dictator’s declared state of emergency has gone on for twenty years and his emphasis on education has deteriorated into widespread illiteracy — but how, exactly? By the end, I wanted the story to break free of its strictures and move into a more horrific dreamscape. (Colford said in an Antigonish Review interview that when young he was obsessed with Jerzy Kosinski’s The Painted Bird and Steps.) I wondered if “The Dictator Surveys” was the earlier study — the sketches for the painting — for Colford’s 2012 novel The Crimes of Hector Tomas, in which a man is accused by a brutal regime of terrorism, but this is mere speculation.
Colford tells us that these stories were written between fifteen and twenty-five years ago, and there are moments when he seems to be at an earlier stage in his craft. In “Stone Temple” there are better and worse suggestions of an abattoir — “the cushioned rasp of saws ripping through flesh and bone,” but “. . . he feels more like a slab of meat than a living creature, a carcass stripped of skin and hanging from a hook in a freezer,” (pages 5 and 7) and these seem extraneous, laid on for extra texture. Colford is actually much better than this at exact articulations of complicated feelings: “The panic that stilled his blood the first time he struck rock and spun the tires has subsided to a languid, almost comforting state of anxiety.”
I was impressed by these stories and I look forward to reading more of his work.
— Steve Noyes
recently published a novella in Rabbit Hole Magazine (Hong Kong).
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