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Book Reviews
Book Reviews Thursday
18Oct
Roy Kesey's All Over
Thursday, October 18, 2007 at 11:17AM 
Roy Kesey's All Over is stunningly overdue, considering that Kesey has been published in nearly every great literary magazine known to man, and has just this year been selected for the Best American Short Stories series for the first time. Thanks to Dzanc Books (an innovative literary startup by EWN-founder Dan Wickett and writer Steve Gillis), the wait is finally over, and readers of literary magazines now have a single collection that shows what we've all known for years: Roy Kesey is a fiction powerhouse, a writer whose talents cross great divides of subject matter, style, and tone. All Over puts aside Kesey's most traditional stories in favor of his more experimental ones, a choice which further accentuates how far Kesey is advancing the art of fiction when he's at his very best. Thankfully, even at his most experimental, he never loses focus of his characters or their lives, giving every story a beating heart for the reader to relate to.
In "Scroll," one of the collection's earliest stories, a painter finishes the painting he's been working on for thirty-four years, a scrolling picture of an "entire mountain range, minus the boring parts, the individually stretched and primed and painted swatches stitched into a single canvas seven feet high and nine miles long." Finally ready to show his painting, he hires an independent trucker to help him, who says that the scroll is "maybe the load he'd been waiting for all his life." Together, they travel the same mountains the painter depicted in his scroll (although they have changed in the years since he began), looking to sell his enourmous painting. Although events do not go as smoothly as he's planned, the painter does eventually find a place for his scroll, one that is both fitting and nostalgic, and when he surrenders his painting to it's resting place there is a sense of the painter's palpable relief, the most honest feeling at the end of any long work.
Many of Kesey's stories take the form of conversations, such as the Spanish inquistion-style questioning of "Cheese" or the hilariously one-sided "Interview," which is without question one of the funniest stories in the book. The best of these, "Triangulation," involves the answers of two men talking to their therapists. One is a cop who is undergoing a post-shooting evaluation, and the other a dairy farmer who let all of his cows starve and freeze to death. The cop is the one who eventually arrested the farmer for abusing his animals, and although the two men confess and self-analyze separately their stories never veer far from each other. The cop is obsessed with what he saw in the farmer's barn:
Eighteen years on the force, I seen plenty of, you know, but nothing like that. The dead ones were frozen solid so there wasn't much stink, but imagine if it'd been a few weeks later, things starting to thaw out... And the noise, it was--the ones that was still alive, they could barely stand up but they was still bellowing. It just never stopped...
The whole barn was full of frozen manure, ankle-deep, even deeper. And it wasn't just the manure neither. Maybe ten of the cows had died while they was birthing, the calves half-way out, dead as dead gets.
More than the scene of his shooting, where he was injured and killed two men, this is the scene that haunts the police officer. Perhaps it is because, like the farmer, the officer is probably ill-suited for the work he does, but one-to-one parallels like this rarely work in Kesey's stories. These are complex characters that give up their secrets hesitantly if at all, even in the midst of confessionals like the ones in "Triangulation."
The story "Wait" is the cornerstone of the collection, a story that starts in a fairly everyday setting and then explodes in an array of the kind of wit and splendid weirdness that defines Kesey's best stories. The story opens simply, with a stark description of an airport waiting lounge. A fog is rolling in, delaying the flight but promising to "lift momentarily," a phrase that becomes more maddening as time passes. The characters most central to the story are a Canadian accountant, a Bulgarian poet, and a beautiful "girl from Ghana," who the accountant often finds himself drawn to. By the end of the story, a whole host of other globe-trotting characters will be introduced, including a Mongolian boy ostracized for choosing checkers over jacks, a pregnant woman bursting at the seams, a bookstore manager with an eye toward increasing profits, and at least a dozen other people and factions.
Needless to say, the fog does not lift. In fact, it intensifies and brings with it further complications, the telling of which would probably ruin this nearly perfect story. Rather than a narrative summary, let it just be said that the next event in "Wait" is almost always completely unexpected but also an excellent choice, heightening the ridiculousness of the situation as well as the dramatic potential of the flight ever leaving the ground. By the time the final paragraphs roll around, so much has happened that it will be impossible to believe the story is only a slim thirteen pages, further illustrating the compact punch Kesey manages to pack into each and every story.
Other standout stories include "Strike," a grandiose recounting of the lives of a homeless couple after a garbage strike, and the amazingly beautiful "Fontanel," a collage revolving around a woman giving birth. "Fontanel" is Kesey's writing at its most beautiful, which I cannot help but offer here as a final sample of this book:
The family: the infant, one hand at his mouth, neither comfortable nor unhappy clutched as he is correctly in the wife's arms; the wife, her complicated smile, her face pale and swollen and exhausted, her hair somehow still beautiful, the thin twisting tube, her covered knees still spread; and the husband there with his mask pulled down, his wide, less-complicated smile nonetheless a stew of happiness and relief and love and pride and guilt. To the left, those gloved hands rubbing themselves together, they are not the obstetrician's hands. And that effect you see, the variegated blues of the wall, brightest in the center and darkening toward black at the edges as if the photograph showed an aura rippling like a pond into which a stone has been thrown, each successive ripple a darker ring--I have no explanation for that effect, no explanation whatsoever.
All Over is exactly what a short story debut should be: daring, powerful, funny, packed with stories that showcase a wide range of the writer's talent.. Roy Kesey's stories are full of strange events and characters that have the potential to both frighten and amaze, and his prose is so tight that it grips the reader firmly in its promise of not a single wasted word, not a single extraneous moment. Once landed in Kesey's world, it is easy to lose yourself in these stories, to forget how unusual it is for a writer to be able to write well using this many styles, to believe that short fiction is always this good. All Over is a great collection, and both Kesey and Dzanc Books should be very proud to present it to the world when it releases next week.
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