Benjamin Cavell: Rumble, Young Man, Rumble; Joshua Furst: Short People
[Published in PLAYBACK:stl, August 2003]
In Rumble, Young Man, Rumble (Knopf), Benjamin Cavell’s surprisingly well-blurbed first short story collection (“airtight meditations on American masculinity,” writes Richard Price), blandly macho males enter and exit the boxing ring, pick street fights, play paintball, work out, and play the role of would-be assassins. They say things like, “I never killed anybody. But I could,” and “Indecision, kid. It’s what separates us from the animals.” The book’s females are for the most part taken in, posing questions such as, “Are you strong?” The answer is obvious (physically, yes; mentally, not so much), and it’s in line with what seems to be the book’s point: the stunted growth of the muscle-bound. But the reader understands this point the first time most of these characters open their mouths, leaving the remaining pages with little purpose or interest.
Part of the problem is that Cavell doesn’t develop these characters from the inside, so much as place in their mouths a series of general statements that could belong to anyone (which, of course, could be the point, but it makes for boring reading). The characters’ lines are often either instructional (“In close quarters, the pistol is ideal because of its concelability and ease of use”); inventorial (“We’ll beat them with phone cords and Spirit-breaker riding crops (two for $79.50)”); or completely incidental (“For dinner, Heather had the New Orleans-style catfish with chipotle dipping sauce”). Over the course of the book these statements simply accumulate, rarely resonating on a larger, more meaningful level.
Cavell, who’s just 26, produces a few moments of realized prose, but even these sometimes suffer from repetition. After one narrator neatly describes his intimidatingly beefy father (a dinner glass “disappears in his fist”), Cavell hits the same note a few pages later (“He picks up the tie clasp. In his hand it looks like a toothpick”). On the first page, even, there’s room for an editor’s pen: “His face is cratered with acne scars. It looks like the surface of the moon.” Cratered – imaginative and exact. So why does Cavell then go on to refer to the moon, which he’d just much more subtly placed in the reader’s imagination?
The book’s final story, “The Ropes,” is solid. Much more time is spent building the narrator alone, as he recovers from an in-ring bludgeoning, then touchingly pursues an engaged wealthy girl who’s intrigued by his fighting life. But this in-depth treatment – not held down by the side-cronies who crowded the other stories – just reminds us that the previous stories were of little depth at all.
I don’t doubt that Cavell understands the plight of his characters – that their dull lives ruled by muscle-development leave little room for the development of the mind. But the book can’t shake off the characters’ inherent dullness to reveal anything moving or insightful. In the end, the characters’ deadened deliveries – their stock machismo, their lack of having anything original to say – become the book’s.
*
There is so much to admire and be moved by in Joshua Furst’s first collection of stories, the brave, thoughtful and kid-centered Short People (Knopf). It begins, appropriately, with “The Age of Exploration.” It’s summer – a time for “things that haven’t stopped growing” – and two boys inspect the ground, play in the pool, imagine, and generally ride the day, “grass-stained, kool-aid-tongued, starbursting in a limitless world.” The story’s about the boys’ parting, and their mean-time adolescent activities provide surprising meaning to their wave goodbye. As the boys drop pebbles from an overpass, Furst writes that they’re “less interested in destruction, in their own ability to destroy, than in the construction that they provoke, in the mystery of creation.” Heady thoughts for kids just roughing around town, but the sentiment works because it’s not about intellect, but about wonder, which for kids is all.
Another story, “This Little Light,” takes the focus from two boys to just one, Shawn Casper, a nine-year-old awaiting the baptismal pool. The author captures the wandering minds of kids (Shawn’s trying to listen to Preacher Dan, but thinking of what it’d be like to be color-blind), along with their expectation of immediacy (having just been dunked, Shawn “wonders when the feeling of transcendence will kick in”). Transcendence doesn’t, but moral condescension does, lifting Shawn to a religious highhorse from which he sneers at his classmates and even his parents (“It’s called covetousness, Mom,” he says at one point). But then come the hormones. He’s handed “A Christian Kid’s Guide to Sex,” which is supposed to scare him silly, but, of course, turns him on. Soon he’s steering sessions of late-night onanism, mind-exploring “his beloved – whoever she is – dance[ing] blurry and half-formed in the olive grove of his imagination.” Furst is exact in describing the boy’s interior shifts, and by the end of the long story, Shawn – having dismounted the highhorse – is left feeling like something wonderfully inexact – “like a scribble that could mean anything.” Much, that is, like a kid,
Furst has a gift for revealing fresh patches in familiar terrain, and he does so throughout the book’s other stories: a shady estranged father on his random drop-in dinner; the insecure character with the much cooler friend; the smothering humiliations of the picked-on. And while Furst’s narrators occasionally let slip lines that sound a bit out of place – a young narrator’s notion that “Scientists should be dispassionate” is one of only three examples in the book – the author succeeds in creating characters both believable and original.
In between the stories in Short People is a series of one- or two-page case studies – ominous predictions for young people in danger. “She’ll be ten years old the first time,” one study begins, graphing the creeping onset of a father’s sexual abuse. “She’ll know something’s not right the way she knows smog’s diseased sky: by the sick feeling she has about it later.” Another study, this one on behavioral medication, begins, “He’ll gag and heave, but his parents will force him, twice a day, to swallow, and eventually he’ll appear healed.” These brief interludes – poetic, moving and relentless – are put into context in the book’s final section. We learn that they’ve come from the pen of another character, a nurse in the second-to-last story, “Failure to Thrive.” I grew immediately angry with Furst for having this single character – a nurse who kills in the guise of love – usurp these studies that had become such a memorable part of the book. It was a surprising, bold choice, and one I’m still not certain improves the book. But credit goes to Furst for creating stories that mattered so much to me. If I hadn’t been so moved by these characters’ stories – and by the author’s penetrating prose throughout the book – I wouldn’t have cared. But I do.
