Friday 11 Dec 2009
The Man Back There and Other Stories David Crouse.
Sarabande (Perseus, dist.), $15.95 paper (192p) ISBN 978-1-932511-63-5

Crouse follows his Flannery O'Connor award-winning Copy Cats with this moody dirge of nine deeply felt stories, the winner of the Mary McCarthy Prize. In "The Forgotten Kingdom," Denny, a technical-support operator for a video-game company that's "lingering on the edge of death," is unsure why he keeps showing up uninvited at his former girlfriend's house--maybe to hurt her or make her feel the emptiness that plagues his own life, or maybe, he considers, "he was just a bad person." Another borderline stalker, a lonely, unambitious animal-control officer, reappears at his ex-wife's house in "The Castle on the Hill," where she is now remarried and having a party. The title story finds a couple, Sharon and Sweets, stumbling shakily out of a bar after Sweets gets in a fight with Sharon's insolent ex; although Sharon imagines he is defending her honor, Sweets has his own motivation. Crouse digs into dark places, and while readers may cringe, the author's humane handling of his troubled, psychically scarred characters renders their pain authentic and universal, even when their actions are questionable. (Aug.)

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Fri, 11 Dec 2009
The Man Back There and Other Stories
By David Crouse

David Crouse’s stories are like tide pools, miniature worlds of wonder that we can study or admire but that are less steady and more fragile than their oceanic equivalents. The care and attentiveness with which he renders characters and their situations are moving, but there is always the lingering danger of the tides – the necessary, constant fear of being remade or revised.

In “The Man Back There,” his second collection of stories, Crouse offers nine new specimens from his tidal worlds, including a 44-year-old twice-divorced man fighting with his girlfriend and her ex, a 92-year-old senator at the end of his career, and a young man discharged from the Army for trying to kill himself after basic training. Mostly men, and almost all pitiable in some way, Crouse’s cast of characters might elsewhere be labeled misfits or failures, but under his gaze they are only men between the tides, people at risk of being dried up by circumstance or flooded by change.

Fear is the force that moves the tides in Crouse’s world. Anxiety and uncertainty create a sinister terror in each of the nine stories. When Barry, the divorced dogcatcher of “The Castle on the Hill,” wants to warn his ex-wife of “the simple fact there was danger in the world,” his warning might seem an empty portent were it not for the double-murder victims he saw the morning before their deaths. And when Denny, the support technician for a video game company in “The Forgotten Kingdom,” haunts his ex-girlfriend Caroline’s house after work “specifically to hurt her, to make her feel a small fragment of what his mother must have been feeling,” the effect might be more benign were it not that his mother is bedridden and dying.

The danger in these stories is real, if only because the characters are convinced of it. Silence and conversation, company or solitude are equally terrifying for Crouse’s characters in their alienation. In one of the collection’s best stories, “The Observable Universe,” Peter, a man suffering from mental illness, drags his older sister Gwen, a multimedia artist, to a science fiction convention, where they study the other convention-goers and try to understand escapism, disguises and fictional worlds. The biologist whose gaze is usually confined to the small, shallow tide pools finally looks back onto the wider, deeper ocean.

The troubled Peter “saw danger in the eyes of strangers on the street” and marvels at how “humor became horror if you let it spin around in your head too much.” Watching, rewinding and watching again the video Gwen made of his breakdown and collapse at one of the convention events, Peter considers the tape a version of his own death. “Was this knowledge,” he asks of the images: “the gasping for breath and the flutter of the eyes as they twitched open”?
The delicacy of this trembling terror, in the experiences of a mentally ill sci-fi fanatic, scorned and burned lovers, and frustrated office employees, is most striking because it never stagnates. The quotidian fears of failure, loneliness and suffering are conveyed with great seriousness and engaging sincerity.

Take, for instance, Crouse’s careful, almost tedious precision in coining adjectives. A woman in “The Castle on the Hill” offers a “you-have-the-wrong-apartment expression” when met by Barry in his animal-control uniform, a boy imitates his brother’s “I’m-too-funny Buddha voice” in “Show & Tell,” and the mother in “What We Own” refers to her husband derisively as “Mr. Cut-the-lawn-twice-a-week.” Not wanting to let the description settle, Crouse is diligent in his construction of sometimes-too-precise phrases. His style becomes like its subjects: hesitant and tentative, damaged and delicate.

“Stories, like people, are fragile things,” decides the discharged, despairing soldier in “What We Own.” And that decision could be a manifesto for Crouse’s work.
His first collection of stories, “Copy Cats,” won the Flannery O’Connor Award, while “The Man Back There” was awarded the Mary McCarthy Prize. It is hard to know what O’Connor might have thought of this writer’s work, though McCarthy would probably have sneered at his pedestrian characters and laughed a little at their predictable plights. But Crouse’s stories have a contemporary charm to them: His characters, their fears and the alienating anxiety of his fiction are all common, and even familiar.

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Fri, 11 Dec 2009
The Man Back There and Other Stories
David Crouse

In the introduction to David Crouse's The Man Back There and Other Stories (winner of the 2007 Mary McCarthy Prize), judge Mary Gaitskill writes, "I chose these stories because they made me feel.? However, given the depravity and loneliness, and the penchant toward violence and criminal behavior in Crouse's work, it seems an odd, almost obtuse, observation, kind of like saying you picked your prom dress simply because it looked so bad on everyone else who tried it on, and not because it's such a beautiful match with your figure or made from some fabulous material. Of course, that's a flawed simile, especially once Gaitskill clarifies her opening remark: "By 'feel' I don't mean that I felt a particular emotion, I mean that the outcome of every story here mattered to me. I felt the characters like I would feel a stranger in a room or on a bus with me, that is, with an irrational sympathy more animal than moral in its nature." In other words, the characters' pervading depravity and loneliness only makes them all the more human and exactly like the rest of us. A remarkable gathering of short fiction, the nine stories of David Crouse?s second collection don't just add to his literary resume: They go a long way toward defining it.

The dilemmas Crouse's protagonists face, while episodic in nature, are often the culmination of a larger series of events spanning a measure of years. "The Castle on the Hill" tells us about Barry, an essentially lonely animal control officer. The story begins with an image recently burned in Barry's brain: "They had been playing with sticks--sword fighting, thrusting, dodging, and hacking." The image of two kids at play as they walk down the street while Barry motors past on his way to work is something Barry can't shake because he may have been the last person to see these two kids alive before they were found murdered. Their bodies were discovered at the aforementioned castle, a sight favored by drug addicts looking for a place to shoot up. The castle is metaphor for many things, and one of them is Barry's inability to heal in the wake of his separation and divorce from Sheila two years earlier. And, once he's told about the murdered boys by a co-worker, Barry can't help but think of his own children, now grown, and decides to confront Sheila at the house he used to live in. After all, it?s only Thanksgiving dinner. Why not? But he has no idea what lies at the heart of his confrontation, or why exactly things fell apart in his marriage, let alone why he goes to Sheila's. He knows his children won't be anywhere near there, and the trip will hardly appease his irrational anxieties about their safety. An almost ambivalent confrontation occurs when Barry barges in and sits down to eat, and, inevitably, Barry tries to apologize to Sheila for some of the things he had said years ago, insisting he wasn't himself when he said them: "Maybe that's why he had come here…to be forgiven, because what was what he had done compared to what had happened today up on the hill?" But that's only just another stab at the answer, and not the answer itself, and you realize that pretty soon Barry's the one who needs to forgive himself, if he ever wants to move on with his life.

Despite his simplicity in diction and word choice, Crouse is not a literary descendent of Ray Carver. The tone is bleak, not comic, slick more than anything else, and often stunningly quiet in the face of grave circumstance. The substance of Crouse's diction is often the struggle of human beings trying to understand their own emotions. No story attempts to engage this theme more than "What We Own," which offers a snapshot of family dysfunction. Here Crouse uses narrative suspense, the slow pacing by which we learn of each character's dilemmas, to mirror the unspoken fragility of a family of four. On the surface, it's obvious that two brothers have problems: The older brother, Scott, has been sent home from boot camp after six months away, and the younger brother, Tim, has taken to a life of small crime in the interim. The parents, who seem nurturing at first, are just as problematic, especially in their preference to ignore the boys' behavior, not to mention the issues of their own marriage. Instead the parents attempt to make sure their sons are constantly fed, and their problems downplayed. When the two brothers are asked by their father to run an errand one evening before dinner, Tim surprises Scott by taking him to a stranger's house, which Tim decides to break into. Scott isn't so much paralyzed or stunned than he is dangerously curious of his younger brother's capabilities. Scott, in fact, is the story's narrator: "The truth was, I admitted, I didn't know what was happening, and I wanted to find out more than I wanted to stop it." Of course, you know what's going to happen. The brothers end up in jail, and the father has to bail them out, debating whether or not to tell his wife what's occurred. What's more, the event has long-term implications for their family as a whole. But, before they're caught, Tim reflects on the nature of his crimes to Scott: "…he looked around the room with contempt. 'I mean, what is all this? I don?t care about things. Nobody owns anything anyway, not really.'" Tim is partly right, but Crouse intends this statement ironically. The least of the brothers' problems is the objects of other people. In fact, their struggle to take ownership of their lives is what's at stake because of their inability to understand themselves. And in the end, that's a perfect summary of the characters of The Man Back There and Other Stories, and the very reason why it's a book that shouldn't be ignored.
-Jay Robinson

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Fri, 11 Dec 2009
The Man Back There and Other Stories
By David Crouse

Looking back in anger, the men in David Crouse’s second collection of short fiction acknowledge “the simple fact that there [is] danger in the world,” that it sometimes resides in their own fists, clenching and unclenching. Like Barry, the loveless, regretful dogcatcher in “The Castle on the Hill,” characters in The Man Back There (Sarabande) also give in to bouts of tenderness. Crouse makes you believe, if not in miracles, then in life after the implosion of the heart.
- Cathleen Medwick

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The Bleak and the Beautiful: With Boston and its suburbs as backdrop, David Crouse pulls light from darkness
Boston Phoenix, November 2006
 
By Nina MacLaughlin

A winter walk with a part-time prostitute on Salisbury Beach. A confrontation with a homeless man on Boylston Street. A never-ending party with aging burnouts inside a tattered old Victorian in Lawrence.

David Crouse excels at placing his readers within the "serene suburban quiet" that makes it "feel like something horrible [is] going to happen."

In his debut short-story collection, Copy Cats (University of Georgia Press), the 38-year-old native of Haverhill presents stark stories in which the bleak and the beautiful are tethered by tender, tenuous strings - all within the outskirts of Boston.

"People are where they live," says Crouse, who teaches writing at New Hampshire's Chester College of New England. "The places where we live make us who we are.... You have a foundational place in your life, a place where you have key experiences. You keep going back there. I'm going to write about this place for the rest of my life."

The collection of seven stories and one novella - which won a 2005 Flannery O' Connor Award for short fiction - effectively walks a tightrope between dark and light, the bleak and the bright.

There's Office Space absurdity in "Code," an ink-black comedy about a man in the midst of a wave of layoffs. Humor is balanced by Crouse's portrait of a man in crisis. Stuck in a traffic jam - symbol of rat-race entrapment - the narrator exits his car, climbs over the guard rail, and wanders into the woods, stripping naked as he goes. It's a moment of supreme liberation - beauty in the bleak - but it's also a moment in which a man becomes unhinged. Crouse is gifted at crafting scenes that resonate in multiple ways. In the worlds he creates, nothing is black and white.

In "Kopy Kats," Anthony works at a Kinko's-type copy shop in Boston with co-workers - "talentless alcoholic musicians and stutter-voiced painters wearing untucked, stretched-out concert T-shirts" - who "dribbled down and collected at the store in clusters of bitterness and unfocused fairytale ambition."

When a homeless man bangs his head in the store and is rushed away in an ambulance, Anthony goes on a quest to find him. On his way, he considers heading to Brigham and Women's hospital and his pal in X-ray who sells speed after hours. He thinks of stopping at Mystery Train Records, and of his pothead girlfriend and her "gonzo fanzine-reading buddies in Allston." He ends up in the hospital room of a stranger, and comes no closer to figuring out who he is.

Music filters into many of the stories - Agnostic Front, Cannonball Adderly, Black Sabbath. "It's tied up with that quest for identity," says Crouse. "Younger people especially use music as an emblem of who they are.... If there's anything that unites the characters, it's that they have this vague sense of their own identity. A lot of times they're sort of searching for some sort of costume to wear. Their sense of their own selves is so amorphous that it causes huge problems."

In "Morte Infinita," the literal costumes - it's Halloween - both illuminate and further muddle the characters. Thirteen-year-old Kristen and her troubled dad fumble through an angry time by teaming up together watching horror-movie marathons and trick-or-treating. The father's diminished sense of self translates into an inability to communicate with his daughter: "Her dad was talking about death and divorce and the depressing sound canned tomato soup makes as you plop it into the pan. 'It's the little things that will bring you down,' he said. 'Happiness requires a certain - I don't know - indistinctness of vision....' That was the way he spoke to her, as if she were forty years old and four years old."

After that Halloween with her father, Kristen comes to realize that there are two types of people in the world: zombies, which make up most of the population, and vampires. Zombies, it's implied, have that certain indistinctness of vision. Both are monstrous. Both are marginal.
"All of the characters," says Crouse, "exist on the margins. And some of them are looking for something genuine but all they're finding is other layers of façade."

In the novella "Click," for example, unemployed photographer Jonathan starts a project shooting a sometimes-prostitute named Stephanie. He accumulates image after image of her, yet it's unclear whether the pictures reveal or obscure identity, both his and hers. "He was making her life more real. Or not," Crouse writes. "Maybe it was just the reverse - that with each photograph of her he was the one becoming more substantial." The project inevitably becomes more complicated as Jonathan questions whether he and Stephanie share more than he and his fiancée.

Like the sound of metal on bone, Crouse's stories are in many ways "too close to real." But it's for that reason, for the chilling truths and the dark revelations, that the reader can recognize the light hidden beneath.

"There's this interesting feeling that I get - maybe you get it, too - sometimes listening to music, like a Leonard Cohen song, or reading a dark story. You have this feeling of exhilaration. And I think it comes from a feeling of recognition, a feeling that, 'ahh, this person is noticing this thing,' and the act of noticing it and reporting it is beautiful."

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