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WORK TITLE: Blessings Galore
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE:
rITY: Olympia
STATE: WA
COUNTRY:
NATIONALITY:
http://www.noemipress.org/catalog/fiction/beasts-youll-never-see/ * http://www.full-stop.net/2016/05/11/reviews/jessica-alexander/beasts-youll-never-see-nate-liederbach/ * https://www.linkedin.com/in/nate-liederbach-1439baaa
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Born January 29, 1974.
EDUCATION:University of Utah, Ph.D. candidate.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer, editor, short-story writer, and real estate agent. Real Estate Broker/Consultant, Freelance Writer/Editor at Remax Professionals, Olympia, WA, real estate broker and consultant. Also served as managing editor for the Western Humanities Review and taught creative writing at Western State Colorado University, Gunnison, CO.
AWARDS:
Noemi Press Book Award for fiction, 2014, for short-story collection Beasts You’ll Never See.
WRITINGS
Contributor to periodicals and Web sites, including Mississippi Review, Permafrost, Quarterly West, Alice Blue Review, Storyglossia, Versal, Keyhole, and Pindeldyboz.
SIDELIGHTS
Nate Liederbach is a short-story writer who did his doctoral studies in creative writing and English literature. Liederbach, who also works as a real estate agent, contributes short stories to literary periodicals and Web sites. He also served for a time as managing editor for the Western Humanities Review. Liederbach is the the author of several collections of short stories.
Negative Spaces
Negative Spaces is a short collection, just eighty-two pages, that features three stories set in the American West and Midwest. The story “Genghis’ Knoll” features a woman caring for her diabetic beloved named Genghis. The woman tries to shield Genghis, who may be a dog or a boy, from the harshness of the world but ultimately realizes she is unable to do so and, as a result, decides to shoot him. “Across from the Fish Station” finds two misogynistic men taking a course on “Virginity and Mythos.” The final story, “The Long Tunnel,” features two boys who summon up the courage to crawl through a storm drain. Much of the story, however, reveals the lives of the two boys when they are grown men.
“Nothing . . . is left in the dark in Liederbach’s collection, one best read slowly, a story-a-day kind of thing, letting each one soak into all your own spaces,” wrote Quarterly West Web site contributor Sadie Hoagland. Writing on 15 Bytes Online, Ann Poore remarked: “The pacing was perfect in the stories in this collection; the writing moved along at a mesmerizing clip.”
Beasts You'll Never See
Liederbach’s award-winning collection Beasts You’ll Never See features stories that “deal with emotional or existential distress, with characters in crisis,” as noted by Arts Fuse Web site contributor Vincent Cryz. For example, in the story titled “Assurance,” Liederbach features a Home Living magazine writer named Howell and a sports writer named Mazza. The two are called into an office for a conference concerning the claustrophobic Howell repeatedly taking the bathroom door off the hinges and defecating. Howell “is effeminized throughout the piece, but his habit of removing the door unleashes his emasculation and, in the eyes of his coworkers, poses the threat of contagion,” wrote Full Stop Web site contributor Jessica Alexander. In another story, “Dick the Fourth,” a man named Olson receives a late call that wakes him from his sleep. He learns that his father is in a hospital and near death. Olson races off to the hospital but does not arrive in time to see his father before he dies. He does, however, run into an old acquaintance in the hospital parking lot and reminisces about their days in high school.
“In Liederbach’s stories sons stumble into the wreckage of post-father households, fathers are figuratively crucified by evangelical wives, absent fathers imagine the maladies of sons they’ll never see, surrogate sons watch the ‘dazzling minds’ of fathers go to mush,” wrote Full Stop Web site contributor Jessica Alexander. Arts Fuse Web site contributor Cryz called Blessings You’ll Never See “a strong performance that elicits shrieks of hilarity even while skirting a precipice overlooking despair.”
Blessings Galore
In his collection titled Blessings Galore, Liederbach presents eleven stories. In one tale titled “Abraham’s Loft,” Liederbach tells the tale of a father and daughter who find themselves on a vacation in heaven but nevertheless fail to form a bond. The title story is a postapocalyptic tale, while in the story titled “Aspen and Oranges,” an old man recalls his meeting with a Holy Mother archetype.
Many of the stories revolve around Christianity and religion. Other stories include witches and outlaws. In the story titled “We Prepared Him,” a nameless man is tortured and a violent yet erotic fight takes place. A Publishers Weekly contributor noted the stories tend toward “internal purging” and “evocative descriptions.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Poets & Writers Magazine, January-February, 2015, Dana Isokawa, “Noemi Press: Book Awards,” p. 131.
Publishers Weekly, May 2, 2016, review of Blessings Galore, p. 37.
ONLINE
Arts Fuse, http://artsfuse.org (March 1, 2017), Vincent Czyz, review of Beasts You’ll Never See.
Cricket Online Review, http://www.cricketonlinereview.com/ (March 1, 2017), brief author profile.
15 Bytes Online, http://artistsofutah.org/15 bytes (June 4, 2014), Ann Poore, “A Complicated Web: Nate Liederbach’s Negative Spaces.“
Full Stop, http://www.full-stop.net/ (May 11, 2016), Jessica Alexander, review of Beasts You’ll Never See.
Quarterly West, http://quarterlywest.com/ (May 15, 2014), Sadie Hoagland, “All Lit up: A Review of Negative Spaces.”
LC control no.: n 2005059972
Descriptive conventions:
rda
LC classification: PS3612.I3354
Personal name heading:
Liederbach, Nate
Found in: Liederbach, Nate. Doing a bit of bleeding, 2005: t.p. (Nate
Liederbach) p. 4 of cover (lives in Gunnison, Colo.;
teaches creative writing at Western State College)
Of a monstrous child, 2011: E-Cip t.p. (Nate Liederbach)
data view (b. Jan. 29, 1974)
================================================================================
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Questions? Contact: ils@loc.gov
Nate Liederbach is a Ph.D. candidate in Creative Writing and English Literature at the University of Utah. Author of Doing a Bit of Bleeding, and co-editor of the anthology Of a Monstrous Child: Creative Writing Mentorships, Nate's work has appeared or is forthcoming in Mississippi Review, Permafrost, Quarterly West, Alice Blue Review, Storyglossia, Versal, Keyhole, Pindeldyboz, and more. Recently, Nate has assumed the role of Managing Editor for the Western Humanities Review.
Nate Liederbach is the author of the collections Doing a Bit of Bleeding (Ghost Road), Negative Spaces (Elik), and the forthcoming Tongues of Men and of Angels: Nonfictions Ataxia (sunnyoutside). He lives in Eugene, Oregon, and Olympia, Washington
Nate Liederbach
Real Estate Broker/Consultant, Freelance Writer/Editor at Remax Professionals, Olympia, WA
Olympia, Washington
Real Estate
Current
Remax Professionals, Olympia, WA
Experience
Real Estate Broker/Consultant, Freelance Writer/Editor
Remax Professionals, Olympia, WA
Present
Blessings Galore
Publishers Weekly. 263.18 (May 2, 2016): p37.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
Blessings Galore
Nate Liederbach. Wordcraft of Oregon, $15 trade paper (168p) ISBN 978-1-877655-91-3
Favoring internal purging over craft, these 11 incomplete and befuddled stories lack empathy or symbolic understanding. An unnamed figure is bathed, oiled, and tortured before a violently erotic fight in the muddled "We Prepared Him" and a chutney-loving old man recounts meeting an intersex Holy Mother archetype in "Aspen and Oranges." Christian principles are compared to roadkill in "Fruited Plains," father and daughter fail to connect during a vacation in heaven in "Abraham's Loft," and rat baiters await the passing of a postapocalyptic patriarch in the title story. The fantasy and surreal fiction lack cohesion and empathy. The imagery is provocative but meaningless, and plotless set pieces are instilled with unrestrained weirdness, delivered in hysterical language. Liederbach's evocative descriptions become absurd for their own sake, his internal fevers too far removed and too undisciplined to evoke emotional involvement or pleasure in readers. (June)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Blessings Galore." Publishers Weekly, 2 May 2016, p. 37. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA452883997&it=r&asid=c0ac8eb980d8e66dcf39358913fc90ae. Accessed 19 Jan. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A452883997
Noemi Press: Book Awards
Dana Isokawa
Poets & Writers Magazine. 43.1 (January-February 2015): p131.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2015 Poets & Writers, Inc.
http://www.pw.org/magazine
Full Text:
Aichlee Bushnell of Oakland, California, won the 2014 Noemi Press Book Award for poetry for her collection Objects of Attention. Nate Liederbach of Salt Lake City won the award for fiction for his short story collection Beasts You'll Never See. They each received $1,000, and their books will be published by Noemi Press. The editors judged. The annual awards are given for a poetry collection and a book-length work of fiction. The next deadline is April 30.
Noemi Press, Book Awards, P.O. Box 3489, Las Cruces, NM 88003. Carmen Gimenez Smith, Publisher. noemipressbooks@gmail.com
www.noemipress.org/contest
Isokawa, Dana
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Isokawa, Dana. "Noemi Press: Book Awards." Poets & Writers Magazine, vol. 43, no. 1, 2015, p. 131. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA413709769&it=r&asid=b90894186434cb0d076d6447907cf5db. Accessed 19 Jan. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A413709769
Fuse Book Review: “Beasts You’ll Never See” — Short Stories that Elicit Shrieks of Hilarity
Books, Featured, Review Add comments
Mar 252016
Nate Liederbach demotes plot and Aristotelian mechanics, replacing them with the acrobatics of a beer-loud voice that happens to belong to the most interesting talker in the bar.
Beasts You’ll Never See by Nate Liederbach, Noemi Press, 178 pages, $15.
By Vincent Czyz
Jean Toomer’s Cane, published in 1923, is a stunning, genre-bending collection that includes drama and poetry but consists primarily of fiction, though not of the conventional sort. The lyricism, twilit moodiness, and haunting imagery of Toomer’s voice carries these narratives, which bounce between rural Georgia and Jazz Age New York City. About three decades later, William Goyen, a native of East Texas, began publishing short stories that also abandoned the tropes blueprinted by O. Henry and perhaps were most successfully realized by Raymond Carver. Poetic turns of phrase, vernacular that would now be familiar to fans of Cormac McCarthy, and the harsh beauty of desolate settings replace the staple literary devices of plot and resolution. Toomer and Goyen were followed by John Edgar Wideman, whose 1993 fiction collection All Stories Are True relied even more heavily on the intensity of the language itself, which is often stripped even of punctuation, and doesn’t flow so much as roil and froth past as it sweeps characters and events with it.
Nate Liederbach’s Beasts You’ll Never See, winner of the 2014 Noemi Press Fiction Award, comes out of this literary countermovement (I’ve chosen three names, but there are many more that could be pulled out of that hat). As in the case of his predecessors, Liederbach demotes plot and Aristotelian mechanics, replacing them with the acrobatics of a beer-loud voice that happens to belong to the most interesting talker in the bar, a guy who can go all night without stretching his mouth with a yawn or resorting to a commonplace phrase or description. An old tv is described as “a knob-tube fiasco, circa ’83”; a smart phone is “the size and neon flare of some gut-rot fucking Pop tart”; workers “spill from their centers of operation as mice from gassed tunnels.” Leiderbach takes great care, down to calibrating the choice of a single word in a given sentence, In “Daddy Bird,” for example, the main character puts his arm around his anorexic sister and encounters her “ball-peen shoulder.” There are a lot of ways to describe a bony joint, but this has to be among the most inventive. Similarly, there are a couple dozen verbal approaches to a red face, but “smack-blushed” must be among the more striking descriptions.
The stories in the collection deal with emotional or existential distress, with characters in crisis, such as the anorexic woman and her troubled brother in “Daddy Bird.” In “The Distance” (as in “going the distance” in a boxing match, which is the round-by-round conceit structuring the tale) a divorced father who sees his teenage daughter on weekends struggles to balance his desire to be liberal and open-minded with his demand for filial obedience. A professor in “The Roads Amputated the Legs,” is left addled by a brain tumor, but he refuses to give up teaching. His former protégé, himself a professor, tries to save the dying man the embarrassment he’s putting himself through, but something cold surfaces in the younger man, raising questions about his true motives. “Dick the Fourth,” perhaps my favorite in the collection, takes place on the periphery of tragedy. Olson is awakened by the late-night call we all dread: his sister, already at the hospital, advises him that their father is near death. Olson (Dick Olson IV, hence the title), speeds through the night in his battered pick-up truck, but he doesn’t make it in time to hear his father’s last words or give him a final hug. Instead, Olson winds up in the hospital parking lot reliving — in a turn toward the surreal — a couple of scenes from high school with an acquaintance he hasn’t seen for decades.
One thing that sets Liederbach apart from many of the writers who take this fictive approach is the humor, often dark, permeating every story. No narrator misses his cue for a joke or a sardonic remark. Some of the amusement is likely there for its entertainment value, but there also seems to be the suggestion that comedy is the underside of tragedy and that the two are never as far apart as we think.
Admittedly, there are times when the levity seems a bit like a requirement that has to be met before the narrative can proceed, and it could be argued that the protagonists all seem to have the same sense of humor — as though the stories were all happening to the same person — but these are minor objections. A larger issue for me is that some of the endings feel a little like wires that Liederbach has not quite connected. While there’s no need for the last sentence to wrap things up in a bow — particularly in fiction that has little use for convention — a certain conclusive resonance seems at times to be missing.
Overall, however, Beasts You’ll Never See is a strong performance that elicits shrieks of hilarity even while skirting a precipice overlooking despair. Unlike more classically trained authors, Liederbach doesn’t give us stories about life so much as an experience of life. We are tour-guided among the fantastic shapes that form his characters’ inner landscapes, and now and again we get a glimpse of that place where the mind meets the horizon.
A Complicated Web: Nate Liederbach’s Negative Spaces
by Ann Poore on Jun 4, 2014 • 12:38 pm
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negativespaces
Nate Liederbach’s Negative Spaces is a short collection of three stories — just 82 pages — packed with magical writing and imagery that sticks with you long after you’ve closed the covers. Set in the American West and Midwest — Idaho, Colorado, Kansas — this is a challenging but quite entertaining volume that demands close attention for its sometimes lyrical, sometimes raw language and complex plotting. Had this book met the length requirement for the 15 Bytes Book Awards, it may very well have been short-listed for the prize.
How’d she turn the engine over? Set aside the gun? She couldn’t have. In her retreated mind, in this present, all she recalls is her head aching a starry rhythm.
So begins “Genghis’ Knoll,” an edgy seat-of-your-pants puzzler that takes a turn leaving you somewhat breathless and admiring of this Trickster writer who leads you down such a deliciously twisted path. There’s a little sci-fi, a little Ken Kesey, a little Zane Grey and more all mixed together in this dazzling piece of writing. It has to do with a woman and her beloved, diabetic Genghis, with the “huge, gooey eyes,” whom she has tried to protect from the world at all costs. But finds she is unable to:
“A bone to the dog is not charity.”
Jack London said that. She memorized this quote, even considered more than a few times having it tattooed across her shoulders. Said, “Charity is the bone shared with the dog, when you are just as hungry as the dog.”
She wasn’t a lesbo. Wasn’t a girl. Wasn’t a daughter. Wasn’t a lover. Wasn’t a killer. Was just hungry, always hungrier, but not now. She was filling up, could feel it . . .
“Across from The Fish Station” is a graphic, laugh-out-loud funny (much of the time) take on the only two casually misogynistic men (loathed by female classmates – bemusedly adored by the woman professor) ever to take a course on “Virginity and Mythos.” (It’s a big class – stadium seating.) Or at least one of them clearly is a misogynist; the other sometimes seems faintly embarrassed and perplexed by his pal. He’s not having a change of heart, but may be having a change of philosophy. He’s apparently becoming frustrated that they are living “[w]hitebread lives, Ikea lives . . . [with] only ‘Virginity and Mythos’ to break up the monotony.” One penultimate night they are treated to a viewing of some erotic, grisly, Steppenwolfian theatre. Girl-style.
The third and final story, “The Long Tunnel,” is a childhood tale of exploration and discovery, set in the early ‘80s, with a fabulous twist, of course.
“The bravery! The glory! My backyard all the way to Porter Place Shopping Center, a total scoutage of our flood-drainage system. Plan being the thing’s entirety, no climbing out. But nil reneging means a definite negotiation of the Long Tunnel. Means siblings cannot be told in case siblings rat. To the folks, the mothers, mine surely, but especially Jacob’s, that large and Jehovah-howling procreatrix of Amazonic beauty.
Why such vehemence in the gal? As my young ears have heard whisper (albeit never directly), Jacob’s uncle perished by flash flood. . . . and I stand, index fingers spittled and aloft, eyes perusing the skies for pending furor.”
It’s a wonderful Huckleberry-type adventure that, along the way, takes a sad turn to Hiroshima and Nagasaki, a retirement home and a funeral. But the boys are thoroughly endearing — until they grow up. You’ll see. Liederbach again spins a complicated web.
I delighted in the author’s creative allusions to the everyday that made me reach — and reach way back — for comprehension (to Aqua-net, for instance, which I’d clean forgotten — and no, it’s nothing to do with online — to Davey Lynch; Fat Man and Little Boy; to Christian music diva Amy Grant). Younger readers — though this book clearly is not for very young readers — will have to grasp some of these from context, but that’s often readily done.
The pacing was perfect in the stories in this collection; the writing moved along at a mesmerizing clip and, although the ending of “The Long Tunnel” seemed abrupt, it was fitting. (This was the only story where I came up for air once or twice — it seemed to allow breaks for a cup of tea to be made.)
As is frequent in contemporary fiction, there’s liberal use of the F-word and adult settings. Didn’t bother me a bit; it might you, so fair warning.
Yes, those apparently are eye sockets in Daniel Barron’s cover art for the book. Filled with something or another with a straw, perhaps? It seems that a void, a “negative space,” really must be stuffed. And that’s made clear throughout Negative Spaces.
All Lit Up
A review of Negative Spaces
by Sadie Hoagland
Nate Liederbach
elik press 2014
80 pages
$10
Negative space, visually, is the space in between and around the subject. Musically, it’s the silence between notes. The term seems ripe to apply to language, and bodies, too. However, I think whichever way you might approach the title of Nate Liederbach’s latest story collection, you will find that space filled in, and all possibilities of meaning exhausted by Liederbach’s strange and careful fiction. The three stories in this collection fill those negative spaces by exploring the in-betweens of animal-human, male-female, young-old, then-now, so that at the end of the second story, when the protagonist approaches a hole in a wall, he knows what it will reveal, and that “it will be everything,” and it really, magnificently, is.
The first two stories in this collection contain a certain hyperrealism that borders on magic. In “Genghis’ Knoll,” the protagonist introduces us to a sensibility that seems overwhelmingly practical juxtaposed against the surrealism of the scene. She is driving, both to and away, the isolated, coyote-ridden spot where she will shoot her dog-like boy, or perhaps it is a boy-like dog, with heartbreaking determination. As she does what she has to do, she wonders why she’s the one who fills negative spaces, and while she is thinking about oral sex with girls from her school, the reader understands that she’s filling that space in the story too, and that space for us as readers, when, as she is about to shoot Genghis, she asks, “Maybe pain and violence are just the opposite of death, some sort of exhaust, to throw us off?” She moves from outlining this negative space to inhabiting it, to becoming that which is in between, literally, life and death. This is a Herculean feat for a twenty-five page story.
The second and third stories are no less impressive. In “Across from the Fish Station,” two ski bums have returned to school and are taking a class in Virginity and Mythos, a class where they are the only male students. While one becomes a sort of court jester, making inflammatory comments and hooking up with classmates, the other feels he needs the course, that it is somehow keeping him afloat. But it is as if the weight of their fantasies about female sexuality, coupled with their professor’s ideas on how to “extricate the physical hymen from the exhausted conceptual variety” and the violence of an internet video of a woman being stoned to death, all implode to reach an ending, that really is, as stated, above “everything.”
A different kind of totality emerges in “The Long Tunnel,” where two boys finally dare to journey through a storm drain, and they emerge, but in between we hear about their relationship when they are older, the narrator’s first marriage, his second wife, his father and grandfather, an obsession with Amy Grant, and it seems again that no stone has been left unturned, that every possibility for this story has been dragged onto the page for us to see. As when the boys are in the storm drain, briefly afraid of a noise overhead, and the friend asks the narrator “What’d you think it was?” He replies, “nothing,” but wonders:
Nothing…Nothing but a resurfacing memory. Sure, but in its
nothingness, something? How, in attempting to abolish thought, it’s
hooking the poor kid. It’s reeling him. Folding everything of back then
into right now. How memory devours the present, and listen, this is a true story. I want you to know that. My integrity insists. It was written when I
was a boy, yes, but revised with sincerity now that I’m a man.
Nothing, then, is left in the dark in Liederbach’s collection, one best read slowly, a story-a-day kind of thing, letting each one soak into all your own spaces.
May 11, 2016
Beasts You’ll Never See – Nate Liederbach
by Jessica Alexander
Beasts Youll Never See[Noemi Press; 2015]
Gertrude Stein opens The Making of Americans with an anecdote about an angry man who drags his father through an orchard, until the old man finally shouts: “Stop! I did not drag my father beyond this tree!” The anecdote is about progress, I think. Though it’s unclear what progress means. It has something to do, it seems, with a son surpassing or murdering his old man: an act, which, symbolically, may appear iconoclastic and irreverent, yet is no less a ritual of deep veneration, an homage to heritage. Similarly, the son standing over a father’s casket is a fraught and sentimental cultural narrative, a public display of inner feelings for social ends. The son seems to be drawn and quartered by it. All that authority, identity, and history could disintegrate, should he refuse this inheritance. And of course his father’s mastery is a mythical mantle. The son, perhaps, is skeptical. He dons it with circumspection. It’s something like the emperor’s new clothes. Of course, the son is still an emperor, only his mastery, his rightful inheritance has somehow gone limpid. His subjects see right through it. The son never could fully claim it. He’s stuck somehow in a circuit, demanding a more opaque form of authority, and then, rescinding the very demand, which exposes him. In Nate Liederbach’s Beasts You’ll Never See this narrative plays on repeat, and is foiled, complicated, and queered with each reiteration.
In Liederbach’s stories sons stumble into the wreckage of post-father households, fathers are figuratively crucified by evangelical wives, absent fathers imagine the maladies of sons they’ll never see, surrogate sons watch the “dazzling minds” of fathers go to mush. In Beasts You’ll Never See fathers die, are dead, or dying constantly. While the stories are preoccupied with the disintegration of a father’s power, this loss is often dramatized by the power struggles between genders. “Must He Fend For Himself,” for instance, opens with the admission “His wife holds the door for him and he hates that.” The protagonist is currently unemployed, which isn’t a problem, the narrator states. The father is dead. The son inherited his money. His wife, “his woman,” is “disrupting their marriage to go back to school.” But “hold your p.c. ponies,” the narrator warns, “she often refers to herself as ‘your woman.’ And doesn’t such show of tender idiosyncrasy relax even the most contemporary of feminist hackles?” Of course, it does not, as I’m sure Liederbach is well aware, for the story continues to chip away at the protagonist’s precarious foothold. Simultaneously, his wife reads her way through western metaphysics, well into the dissolution of authority and mastery! Her husband reads the books she discards, awaiting the opportunity to share his compelling insights. “Because it can’t just go on and on and on, ad infinitum, Kant cancelling Hume, Nietzsche cancelling Kant, Russell cancelling Nietzsche . . . ” The son dragging the father further into the orchard. “His wife will have to look back on where she’s been, won’t she?” But where has she been according to this protagonist?
Appolline. Like Apollo. Like Nietzsche. Like lines in the dirt from tragedy’s birth. Lines his father drew. Or his father’s father’s father . . . One thing’s for sure: his father wouldn’t have it. If she tried to hold the door for him, the man quite simply wouldn’t enter.
The protagonist awaits his wife’s return in order to quote Schopenhauer, “to nail that damn Aristotle’s kairos.” Yet his great moment of metaphysical mastery never arrives. His wife returns with a book. Reads a Warhol quote: When will a person not break a record? If somebody runs at 2.2, does that mean that people will next be able to do it at 2.1 and 2.0 and 1.9 and so on until they can do it in 0.0. Infinity becomes nothing, non-existence. He did not anticipate this. Here loss of mastery is coupled with the dissolution of masculine identity. His wife does not notice his distress, doesn’t realize they’re competing, and he is threatened. She is, on the contrary, exhilarated by the excess, which defies all mastery.
“The Distance,” stages a similar battle for rhetorical mastery. The story is structured as a boxing match, the sparring split into twelve rounds. Samuel, the protagonist, comes off as a broadminded humanist, but all that goes out the window when his daughter, Iz, enters the kitchen wearing a t-shirt with the inscription “FCKH8” emblazoned across her chest. This, according to Samuel’s humanist views, is uncritical frippery, irony that does not open conversation but shuts it down. One’s gaze dips, locks on Daughter’s chest and — Samuel can’t explain why it enrages him. Has he been attacked? The daughter’s anatomy is talking back! Must he fend for himself? The daughter’s breasts do not open conversation, but shut it down. He cannot divorce Daughter’s chest from her rhetoric. Cannot say “incendiary frippery” without “strapped to your burgeoning bosom,” or “tight across your tits.” It is precisely the coupling of the two things that unmans him: the daughter’s body tethered to its own logos, trite, maybe, but intentionally uninviting. Who hates you? Samuel queries. The daughter has engaged in “weekend cuddle-a-thons” with a girl named Ash on Samuel’s couch. A thing the mother disapproves of. The temporal horizon dilates. Here comes Keri, Samuel’s evangelical ex-wife.
She starts kicking. Chest, neck, bashing my cowering and blackened balls. Even so, I keep my arms limp, cover nothing. On and on, her kicking hysterical because she’s so ashamed. Ashamed that the very man, so lofty a second ago, the very man she’d been applauding for balancing so delicately, performing for her high-righteous entertainment, well he isn’t what she imagined. Up there, silhouetted against bright sky, all she could see when she first fell in love with me was a single, solid form. So she must punish me now for failing her.
The battle is never merely over a daughter’s ideology. These elements are inextricably linked to her dangerous and doomed body, her sexuality. The story performs this poignantly. Keri blames Samuel’s laxity, his obsession with Nietzsche, the splintering of his truth and mastery for the daughter’s sexuality. Samuel, while denying his own anxiety, must eventually confront his complicity in a culture where a daughter’s body, austere as it may be, incites, if not full-blown crusades, then heated conversations.
“Assurance” like “Distance” deals with masculine anxiety and dissolution. Yet the story stands out. Its tone is distinct from other pieces in the collection. It’s stylistically reminiscent of George Saunders’ satirical and absurd critiques of bureaucratic power, but the piece also pays homage to Lee Edelman and Leo Bersani. It takes place in an office. It’s topic: the public bathroom. Howell, a writer for Home Living, is called in for a conference, along with Mazza, a sports writer. The topic of discussion: Howell’s habit of taking the door off its hinges when defecating. Howell is claustrophobic. He is effeminized throughout the piece, but his habit of removing the door unleashes his emasculation and, in the eyes of his co-workers, poses the threat of contagion. Defecation, as Edelman notes, undercuts the primacy of the phallus. For Edelman sphincteral relaxation signifies loss of control and self-mastery, for Bersani, self-abolition and self-shattering. Whereas many of the other stories dramatize masculine anxiety by sticking a wrench in their means of production, “Assurance” satirizes masculine self-hyperbole and makes the male body itself the site of anxiety.
The stories in Beasts You’ll Never See are prone to self-vexing. Each narrative dismantles its protagonist, draws and quarters him, splinters him into linguistic abjection. His body breaks apart. Dead insides twitch and flop alongside his still surviving drive to swallow the world and spit it out in his own image.