Читать книгу Greetings from Below - David Philip Mullins - Страница 7

Foreword

TO FIND A BEAUTIFUL COLLECTION OF STORIES IN A PILE OF manuscripts is, for any judge of any contest, a wonderful surprise, a kind of revelatory experience. This comes in part from knowing––as most writers know––that a good short story is a balancing act, a tightrope walk of innumerable elements all working together for a short duration to draw out and reveal a particular mystery. It’s one thing to read a good story in a magazine, singular and alone, but it’s another to find an entire book of them, fully realized, each one honed to perfection, neat and tidy, into a collection that holds together like one of those great pop albums of yore, producing a cohesive aesthetic experience. What a pleasure to find not only a strong collection of stories, but a distinctive voice, clear and precise, and a vision that is unique and new while at the same time rooted in the traditions of the form, echoing Ernest Hemingway, Frank O’Connor, Flannery O’Connor, and all of the other great practitioners who took the risk of writing short fiction. As Frank O’Connor pointed out, each attempt at writing a story contains “the possibility of a new form as well as a possibility of a complete fiasco.”

Well, David Philip Mullins risked a fiasco and instead created a highly original collection of short stories. Mullins understands that inventiveness arises from acute attention to the demands of each story and respect for the material itself. Every writer finds a way into the work: Chekhov leaned close and, with his ear cupped, caught the intimate conversations between lovers––and serfs and masters––watching them move in what seemed to be isolated chambers of their desires. Borges sealed himself into a diving bell of his own fantastic style, plunging deep into seas of time and culture. Alice Munro maps expansive topographies of relationships, mostly female, using her utterly and deceptively unique style to reveal the complex meeting points of personal history, geography, and destiny. And Mullins, for his part, gently threads the narrative of a single character through a hole of paternal loss, watching carefully as he passes through early boyhood up through adulthood (and we’re talking real adulthood, not the delayed adolescence so common in the culture today), uncovering in each story something about the mystery in the connection between the loss of a father and the formation of a sexual identity. The originality here is not the loud kind––stylistic high jinks, flashy explosive plots––but rather the quiet kind that comes from deep thought, from an impulse to tweeze apart the experiences found in the life of a character named Nick Danze.

Another great pleasure in this book comes from discovering David Philip Mullins’s own, unique Las Vegas—not the Las Vegas of so many movies and books (a hardcore playpen of debauchery and sin) or the Las Vegas of Hunter Thompson (the cold center of the dead American dream), but rather a city as seen from the vantage of a typical suburban kid looking through scrub and grass at the lights, feeling the magnetic draw of cheap thrills from afar. Throughout this collection the city shifts and changes as Nick matures. He moves in close, tempted by its allure, but never gives in to it as his mother does. And because we are moving alongside him, we’re given a huge gift: a new perspective on a place we thought we knew.

Don’t be fooled by the cool, clear voice of these stories. Mullins, like most good story writers, is by nature deeply subversive, unwilling to look away, voyeuristic in his impulse to glance through the keyhole at the action behind the door, risky in his willingness to once more take on the theme of male experience. I’m grateful to him for giving the world an indelible, unforgettable character. Far into the future, where literature will continue to live, many readers will be grateful, too.

—David Means