David Means
My colleague David Means has a wonderful—as in knots-in-the-stomach-inducing crazy shit mixed with laughs, or at least a nervous giggle or two, at the smarts or just pure electricity-catching power of the writing—short-story in the latest Harper’s.
The story is titled “The Gulch” and is about—well, about what exactly? It is about boys in Bay City, Michigan, nailing another boy on a cross in what the townspeople called the gulch. The story is about religion and morality and many other things, but one cannot help thinking, whenever reading David, that his story is always about language. As in, how do you find the words to say something, or not say something. Or say something in ways that will make you feel, anew, or more meaningfully, a nail sinking into your skin. Or how, and when, evil enters your soul.
One should not go on at length about David’s writing without a small tremor of doubt–in the Harper’s story he mocks professors who with shaky logic and verbose language make actual reality evaporate into meaningless abstractions. But I will say that while in a country like India it is vernacular literatures in twenty different languages that challenge the dominant literature in English—in the U.S., it is actually folks like David who are producing a writing that, through an ingenious mix of rootedness and invention, throws into question the literature one unfortunately finds constantly celebrated here, writing that is 1. flashily cosmopolitan, acquainted with different time-zones and most expensive tastes or 2. experimental in the most self-indulgent sense, or 3. “ethnic,” making sense of urban angst in these parts, preferably New York City, by going in seach of genocide in one’s family’s past, or 4. anti-intellectual, or at least ludic and priapic, in a determined, self-satisfied way, or, 5. redemptive in the crassest style, when horrible things happen, and the story is narrated from heaven, or just made up from a rehab clinic, or 6. dedicated to its own success, grabbing attention by mourning the dead-end of celebrity. (This particular variety is a species of writing found on no other landmass.)
Check out David’s last book The Secret Goldfish.
With Amitava’s six-part taxonomy we can now cut down the workload by asking prospective MFA students which type they write: is their thing to write family-genocide archaeology or will they instead do something really new, like record an entire year’s weather reports and call it a novel. One friend is tingling with excitement: she will use a collective narrator, something never before attempted (except by David Eugenides, et al.) and combine it with a mail-order bride story. Amitava, you are a cruel satirist.
Comment by Hap — March 19, 2006 @ 1:58 am