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Summary
Summary
A debut short story collection in the tradition of writers like Kelly Link, Aimee Bender, and George Saunders--strange, imaginative, and refreshingly original--now back in print as part of Ecco's "Art of the Story" Series, and with a new introduction from the author
Kevin Wilson's characters inhabit a world that moves seamlessly between the real and the imagined, the mundane and the fantastic. "Grand Stand-In" is narrated by an employee of the Nuclear Family Supplemental Provider--a company that supplies "stand-ins" for families with deceased, ill, or just plain mean grandparents. And in "Blowing Up On the Spot," a story singled out by Ann Patchett for Ploughshares, a young woman works sorting tiles at a Scrabble factory after her parents have spontaneously combusted.
Southern gothic at its best, laced with humor and pathos, these wonderfully inventive stories explore the relationship between loss and death and the many ways we try to cope with both.
Reviews (3)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Wilson's captivating debut collection paints an everyday world filled with characters obsessed by weird impulses. Whether it's Guster, the narrator of "The Shooting Man," who goes to great lengths to discover the secret of a sideshow performer whose trick is to shoot himself in the face, or the three bored college grads of the title story who compulsively dig a tunnel beneath their town, Wilson creates a lively landscape with rich and twisted storytelling. A few stories satirize the odd ways families react to tragedy, for example, "Grand Stand-in," which revolves around an elderly woman hired by families who wish to avoid telling their children about an unforeseen death. Two of the best stories involve teens: in "Mortal Kombat," two unpopular quiz bowl stars become enamored of a video game and each other, while "Go, Fight, Win," features a cheerleader who prefers building model cars to the company of her schoolmates. While Wilson has trouble wrapping up a few stories ("Blowing Up on the Spot," "The Museum of Whatnot"), most are fresh and darkly comedic in a Sam Lipsyte way. (Apr.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Booklist Review
Four mutually loathing brothers fold hundreds of paper cranes for a contest to determine who will own the family plantation house. A young man counts every step to and from a factory in which he winnows the Qs from heaps of new-minted Scrabble tiles. Three new BAs spend months after graduation tunneling beneath the hometown of one of them. A professional substitute grandmother gets queasy about her new family when she discovers they also retain a faux child. That last story, Grand Stand-In, is the creepiest in the book, though the bad-dream pulp-noir exercise, The Shooting Man, is a close, gritty runner-up. Two stories of teens and sex, Mortal Kombat and Go, Fight, Win the only third-person narratives here express great though measured sympathy. Wildly imaginative in the manner of new weirdness fiction (see Feeling Very Strange, 2006), Wilson's work is also warmly compassionate in tenor. He creates an appealing voice for each first-person narrator he invents, and in third person, he is flat-out magisterial, with more than a hint of the magical. Watch him closely.--Olson, Ray Copyright 2009 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
THINGS explode in Kevin Wilson's stories: expectations, parents, body parts, cows. Rarely do they catch fire first. They simply blow. In the aptly titled "Blowing Up on the Spot," a young man's parents spontaneously combust. There's no definitive explanation. "Three years ago, my parents blew up," Wilson writes. "I don't know how else to say it." And though the character tries to imagine what led to this tragedy, his deeper concern is that it might happen to him. After all, the cause of the problem feels linked to the danger of love. Did his parents explode because they loved each other too little, too much or just incorrectly? Despite the obvious dangers, the narrator falls for Joan, a confectioner's daughter, who smells of "burned sugar, of a fancy dessert that you set on fire." His temperature rises along with his libido. "After she is gone," he muses, "I wait out on the fire escape . . . trying not to explode." The detonating qualities of strong emotion appear in several stories, but Wilson is equally preoccupied with the absurdity of his imagined modern world. The narrator in "Blowing Up on the Spot" works at a Scrabble factory hunting through jumbled tiles for the letter Q. In "Worst-Case Scenario," a man makes a living by describing the disasters that might befall his clients. In "Grand Stand-In," a woman rents herself out as a grandmother to families too cowardly to admit that their real granny has died. While the almost plausible situations call to mind the fiction of George Saunders, Wilson isn't aiming for satire ; the pressure of living in a distorted society isn't his most pressing concern. Wilson's true gift is for depicting the dangers of strong, complex emotions. In "Birds in the House," brothers from a dysfunctional family gather in Tennessee to play a game that will determine who inherits the ancestral mansion. The tension is palpable, and the young narrator watches this seemingly adult response to death and greed with a reserved curiosity. In a metaphoric leap, he recalls some cows that escaped from his father's pasture and eagerly consumed the neighbor's crimson clover. The clover expanded inside them until they blew, "like popped balloons." It's a cautionary tale, a warning against unchecked desire and joie de vivre, and its moral repeats in unexpected ways. Most of Wilson's main characters are on the cusp of adulthood. They do not "fit correctly into the spaces available to them," he writes. This helps explain all the combustible material. Not only do emotions cause heat, so does youth itself. In "The Dead Sister Handbook: A Guide for Sensitive Boys" (structurally, one of the collection's more experimental stories), a girl's "muscles absorb the body's surplus of sugar, nicotine and pure grain alcohol. . . . Packs of ice must be applied weekly to the arms, legs and chest." One anecdote in the story features a brother and sister who practice kissing each other. Though it's a small, childish transgression - one that might, in most cases, be tucked away in memory - in Wilson's world, "due to unknown chemical reactions in the body, this practice causes at least one of the two parties to die within 10 years." THE narrator of "The Shooting Man," Guster, cannot curb his desire to see a sideshow in which a man shoots himself in the face: "It just seemed like fun," he says. He persuades his beloved Sue-Bee to go along for the ride. But it's not fun. The shooting is real; the external explosion changes, forever, the narrator's internal world. Wilson's protagonists are frequently survivors, marred and changed from their exposure to the world. And when Wilson leaves behind his quirkiest conceits to focus on this more subtle material, his work shimmers. Take the story "Mortal Kombat" -for its bravery and darkness, one of the strongest in the collection. It, too, deals with the detonation of love, and the explosions are twofold. The first comes early on, when Wynn and Scotty, both boys in the midst of puberty, kiss and fondle each other in the school's AV closet. "When it is over they are sweating and shirtless, skin burned red in the shape of handprints." The first explosion is an orgasm. The second comes when Wynn and Scotty play the video game Mortal Kombat. All the tension and animosity they feel toward each other well up, causing the game to feel like an actual war, with jarring bursts of violence. Perhaps this story provides the clearest window into what all the blowing up really means in Wilson's collection. The boys don't want the stigma of loving the "wrong" person. But they want to be loved. And they want pleasure. They find solace in each other, but lose it almost instantly. Their emotions don't fit in their changing bodies. Instead, they become unwieldy and odd - odder even than the explicitly "strange" elements of Wilson's work: infants with teeth or cheerleaders obsessed with model cars. But by the end, the very oddness of the emotions stands revealed as a kind of beauty, a difficult human truth. One of the most striking absences in this lively, inventive book is the sensory. Wilson offers fabulous twists and somersaults of the imagination, but not the details to make them wholly visceral. It's an approach that can work in fables, but in Wilson's highly particular world the lack of concrete experience makes some stories feel unfinished. This is not to say that the book isn't daring and often exquisitely tender. But as Wilson continues to dig into the texture and mystery of the world, his fiction should grow, like his best characters, in strange and remarkable ways. Assuming, of course, he doesn't blow up first. Robin Romm is the author of the memoir "The Mercy Papers" and the story collection "The Mother Garden," which has just been released in paperback.
Excerpts
Excerpts
Tunneling to the Center of the Earth Stories Chapter One Ggrand Stand-In The key to this job is to always remember that you aren't replacing anyone's grandmother. You aren't trying to be a better grandmother than the first one. For all intents and purposes, you are the grandmother, and always have been. And if you can do this, can provide this level of grandmotherliness with each family, every time, then you can make a good career out of this. Not to say that it isn't weird sometimes. Because it is. More often than not, actually, it is incredibly, undeniably weird. I never had a family of my own. I didn't get married, couldn't see the use of it. Most of my own family is gone now, and the ones that are still around, I don't see anymore. To most -people, I probably look like an old maid, buying for one, and this is perfectly fine with me. I like my privacy; if I go to bed with someone, it isn't a person who has to spend his entire life with me afterward. I like the dimensions of the space I take up, and I am happy. But it's not hard to imagine what it would have been like: husband, children, grandchildren, pictures on the mantle, visits at Christmas, a big funeral, and -people who would inherit my money. You can be happy with your life and yet still see the point of one lived differently. That's why it seemed so natural when I saw this ad in the paper: "Grandmothers Wanted--No Experience Necessary." I am an employee of Grand Stand-In, a Nuclear Family Supplemental Provider. It's pretty simple. With so many new families popping up, upwardly mobile -couples with new children, there is a segment of this demographic, more than you would think, who no longer have any living parents. So many of these new parents feel their children are missing out on a crucial part of their life experience, grandparents. And that's where I come in. I currently serve as a grandmother to five families in the Southeast. Each role is different, though I specialize in the single, still-active grandmother archetype, usually the paternal grandmother, husband now deceased, quite comfortable but not rich, still pretty, fond of crafts. I am fifty-six years old but I can play younger or older depending on what is needed. The families work out the rest of the details with the company. Old photos are doctored to include my image, a backstory is created, and phone calls and visits are carefully planned. For each project, we call them fams, I am required to memorize a family history that goes back eight generations. It's difficult work, but it's fairly lucrative, nearly ten thousand a year, per family; and with Social Security going down the tubes, it's nice to have spending money. But that alone can't keep you interested. It's hard to describe the feeling you get from opening your door, the inside of your house untouched by feet other than your own for so long, and finding a little boy or girl who is so excited to see you, has thought of little else for the past few days. You feel like a movie star, all the attention. They run into your arms and shout your name, though not your real name, and you are all that they care about. I go by Gammy, MeeMaw, Grandma Helen, Mimi, and, weirdly enough, Gammy once again. At the beginning, I had trouble responding when someone said my fam name, but you get used to it. Tonight, while I'm writing birthday, congratulations, and first communion cards for the month, all for different families, I get a call from my family arranger, with offers of new jobs. "The first is easy," he says, "just a six-week job, a not-dead-yet, one kid." A "not-dead-yet" is when a family purchases, in weekly installments, a phone call from a grandparent who has, still unbeknownst to the child, recently died. It allows the parents time to decide what to say to the child, how to break the news to them. It's a hundred dollars a call, no face time, but it's morbid and I try to avoid them. Still, I have a fairly easy phone schedule for this upcoming month, and it's useful to practice your voice skills, so I take it. "The next one," he says, "is a little different than usual. We need somebody with good disconnect skills, so of course I immediately thought of you." "Face time?" I ask. "Lots of face time," he says. "We're looking at weekly face time." The more face time, the more preparation required. On the plus side, it makes it easier to establish a bond with the children. It pays a lot more too. "Okay," I tell him. "I can handle it. What makes it so different? Do I have a husband?" "No," he says, "It's not that. It's a switch job." A switch job means the child already knows the actual grandparent but a switch is needed due to an unforeseen death. It has to be done just right, usually with situations where the family rarely sees the grandparent. A switch job with lots of face time could be a problem. You don't want to make it worse on the child, add insult to injury. "Let me think about it," I tell him. "Well, think about this too," he says, and then he is quiet for three, maybe four, seconds. "She's still alive." Tunneling to the Center of the Earth Stories . Copyright © by Kevin Wilson . Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. Available now wherever books are sold. Excerpted from Tunneling to the Center of the Earth by Kevin Wilson All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
