|
If You Lived Here You'd
Already Be Home
by John Jodzio
Replacement Press 2010
Paperback
First collection
|
|
John Jodzio is a winner of the Loft-McKnight
Fellowship. His stories have appeared in One Story, Opium, The Florida Review
and Rake Magazine
and a number of other places, both print and online. He’s won a
Minnesota Magazine fiction prize and both the Opium 500 Word Memoir
competition and Opium Fiction Prize.
Read
an interview
with John Jodzio
|
Win a copy of this book! See the Competitions page for details.
|
|
"I get paid eight dollars
an hour to pretend I am Vincent, Mrs Ramon's dead son."
Reviewed Stefani Nellen
I could pick out almost any sentence from this book and it would be
precise, complete, surprising, with that "Yes! This is exactly what
it's like!" quality about it, followed by a moment of intrigue:
"Wait...Tell me more." Examples, randomly selected? "Dr. Molina is a
milder-looking Antonio Banderas, shorter pony tail, wider nose,
millimeters from gorgeous." (Flight Path)
"Another Saturday, a couple of weeks after the parrot, a man named
Karpus showed up wanting to connect a pair of hawk's wings to his cat."
(Whiskers) "Our baby swallowed a ninja star and then it swallowed a Bakelite button." (Inventory)
Gems like these flow into each other apparently effortlessly, giving
the book an elegant, silvery feel. Each sentence is polished, yet none
– or hardly any – come across as desperately "hooky" or attention
grabbing. This book should have a sticker on the cover: "Lovers of
Poignancy and Odd Details are guaranteed to enjoy this."
So
it's well written. But it's more interesting than that. While the
language wasted no time in pleasing me, I struggled a bit longer in
coming to terms with the content. It seems to me that the stories
behave like origami patterns unfolding: they start out as
two-dimensional triangle-patterns but turn out to be another thing, and
another, and another.
Take the story Flight Path,
for example. On the surface, it's an odd tale told by a mental patient
who is attracted to a comatose man. Many familiar ingredients
appear: the self-destructive fellow-patient and the rest of the
supporting cast, the nicotine-patches-trading nurse, the group-therapy
sessions, the vaguely hopeful open ending. Then the unfolding starts,
since this is a long story that takes time to explore itself fully, and
the familiar parameters disappear while the world of the story becomes
real and immersive. At first, the sadness and defiance breaks through,
not scripted but completely unexpected and real, like the sudden
nicotine-induced euphoria of Trudy, "one of the girls":
"We
all stood around and admired her as she strutted down the hall at
breakneck speed. She was using the hall as a catwalk and she couldn't
stop talking – blabbing on about her old boyfriend, about her hometown,
about how she used to go to the beach all the time and wore a real
bikini, not a fake one made of nicotine patches. [...]
'I
thought that my heart was going to explode,' she told Dr. Molina. 'I
was so damn excited about being alive. Who feels like that anymore? You
tell me who'." But the great strength of this story, its
greatest reward (this actually goes for most stories in this
collection), is that it ultimately captures the humanity of the
characters instead of using them as quirky freaks. There are no straw
men or cue-givers; even fringe characters like the above-mentioned Dr.
Molina are brought to life with very few impeccably precise
descriptions: "Behind his desk, mounted on the wall above his head, are
framed pictures of him in action – running a marathon in Hawaii,
milking a cow in India."
This casual ability to identify the
inevitably most interesting and telling detail, arriving at minimalist
descriptions that never feel insufficient, is what I like about John
Jodzio's writing.
The information in most stories is very
dense and satisfying. When I think back on my favorite stories in this
book, I get a sense that they consist of layers and layers of details –
Lily's bedroom in the title story, the lover's tattoo in Alejandra, Rosarita putting a magnet to her steel rod- supported shin in The Egg, the fake baby in Homecoming – that are piled on top of each other until the stories become as rich and un-summarize-able as reality.
For
this reason, the longer stories in this book are, to me, the most
satisfying stories. As I said before, they keep unfolding in unexpected
ways that never become tedious. Whiskers,
which, like a couple of stories features a character compulsively
eating inedible objects, starts out as a darkly surreal tale and,
convincingly transcending the bizarre, ends up as an "Aww!"-inducing
feel-good story. (I know this is vague, but I'm not going to spoil it.
Read the book!) And the mechanism behind these transformations seems to
be not compulsory plot twisting or word play or great dramatic scenes,
but simple descriptions – as if the stories were being pulled along by
a world that had already existed, and that is only being chronicled by
the writer, instead of painstakingly imagined.
However, not all
stories in this collection are equally successful. The book has been
plumped up with some shorter pieces that didn't lave a lasting
impression and that felt more distracting than anything else. That
doesn't mean they're bad. Pieces like Mail Game, Vessels, Shoo, Shoo or The Dojo
would probably pleased me a lot, had I read them when they first
appeared (mostly online), but here they lose their lustre in comparison
with their longer, more daring companion pieces. They feel too written
and, at times, gimicky. Inventory, with its item-swallowing baby, reads
like an exploration of the "compulsory eating of inedible things" theme
that makes a more effective appearance in several longer stories, where
it is treated as more than a weird idea.
Everyone Prank Calls the Clown ends too early, I think, without exploring its interesting premise, and the too-whimsical Kallispell doesn’t fit in with the rest of the book. And Gravity, after starting out extremely grim, makes a sudden U-turn towards love and understanding that I couldn't quite buy into.
But
with all being said and done, I liked reading this book. A lot. At its
best, it had me turn the pages with that small smile of the happy
reader: bewildered, engrossed, and blissfully unable to predict what
would happen next.
Win a copy of this book! See the Competitions page for details.
|
