This collection of short stories was overwhelming in more ways than one. Both the prose and the narratives have the feeling of an overflowing plate where delicacies have been heaped upon each other to a detrimental extent. Stuff gets buried as the food piles up and what might have been delightful and delicious on its own becomes indistinguishable or invisible amid the glut. This is by no means to say that all the stories are bad or unenjoyable. Most of them I found confusing and forgettable and I would put ‘The Starlight On Idaho’, ‘Strangler Bob’ and ‘Triumph Over The Grave’ in this category.
I really liked ‘Doppelganger, Poltergeist’. In this instance, I found the complexity of the narrative to be perfectly judged. It was intricate and had many excellent kinks and contortions but was still easy to follow. I loved the way the story took place over a long period of time but was detailed sparsely using a few key encounters to populate the landscape. It was nonetheless vivid and the characters were adroitly drawn. The way the story moved from an mid-life crisis rant about Elvis to a compelling conspiracy theory about lost twins and swapped identities before climaxing to a revelation about the narrator’s own identity was masterful. It’s hard to know what to make of the various stages of the plot’s development and while I would say my overall attitude remained sceptical, like that of the protagonist, it's impossible not to entertain the elaborate, enticing theories at some level. After this story, the final one in the collection, I could begin to understand what all the gushing praise from famous authors littered across the covers and first pages was on about. As opposed to obscuring one another, the ideas came together and catalysed each other. It was a wonderful symphony of ideas, characters, places, prose and dialogue. The only part that felt extraneous was the random account of the 9/11 attacks in New York. It felt like it had been added in as an afterthought or should have been edited out as it bore no relation to the rest of the story and was out of place.
The opposite of this fantastic story was the first one in the book called ‘Silence’. The first 25-odd pages of the story are discombobulating. There are almost as many characters introduced as there are pages and a mind boggling array of events occurs. A man asks a woman to kiss the stump of his amputated leg at a dinner party then starts crying. A different man burns some expensive art after a drunken evening. A man speaks to his ex-wife for the first time in 40 years and learns she is dying; this one later turns out to be the protagonist. Another man commits suicide. A friend of the protagonist interviews someone on death row and then meets his widow, who turns out to be a sex worker, and regrets not trying to sleep with her. Yet another man finds a phone on the street belonging to someone who has been killed in a car crash and then goes to meet his widow who has been calling the phone every 30 mins since his death. This man then commits suicide. It’s frantic, shouty and feels like the author has tried to squeeze every idea he has had for a story into as few pages as possible. The protagonist even gets propositioned in a bathroom stall via a message scrawled on some toilet paper, which leads nowhere, like large swathes of this book. From there on the story sets a more manageable pace and some semblance of a single plot emerges rather than the clamour and screech of 20 different plots all competing to be more scandalous than the last. The main character, Bill Whitman, is not really likeable, twice divorced because of his lies and infidelities. He comes across as a vacuous ad man who’s saving grace is his ability to recognise own mediocrity and propensity to say the wrong thing. He seems detached from his family, worn, jaded and loveless. The main thrust of the story seemed to be how mundane Whitman’s life has become but this is oddly juxtaposed to the absolute explosion of characters and events at the story’s beginning. Perhaps the idea is that Whitman is looking back over his life comparing the eventful with the quotidien. I found it a bit overwhelming and felt that it was overflowing with content and this made it somewhat grotesque because so much was crammed into so few pages. I wanted the various narratives to be more fully developed and finished the story with the sensation of reading the first few pages of about 10 different short stories!
The person who gave me this book said they had to read it twice before the stories really sank in. I’m not sure I liked it enough to do this and there is so much more to read but ‘Doppelganger, Poltergeist’ definitely piqued my interest in this author in a way none of the other stories did and ‘Silence’ actively did not.
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