by Manjit Handa
A book of short stories from a fresh young thirty two year old writer Bret Anthony Johnston, his first, Corpus Christi, is the town that provides the setting for the ten stories of the collection, a Texas town, oft hit by hurricanes. Hurricane/Storm becomes the connecting thread in all the ten narratives; the physical and the metaphorical storms, that come, cause disorder and then how the victims make things orderly, or do they? Can they?
Only the first story has an actual storm. But fighting that is routine job for Christi dwellers. In fact Sonny has always been “chasing” storms. It is the other storm that has exhausted him and connected lives. It is always the other ones, a force to reckon with, in all the stories. The ones for which nobody is prepared, the ones which sway everything, even the sturdiest of souls. In ‘Waterwalkers’, Alicia is storming in the backdrop and although Sonny is at Janice’s only for work, he and Nora have united after about eighteen years and scenes from their past togetherness and their lost son Max flash off and on. The misgivings, the regrets, the sorrow is ranting in the characters' hearts as the world is brawling with the winds outside. Or Benny, of ‘In the Tall Grass’, unable to forgive his father’s violent, atrocious attacks on Edwin Butler’s operated knee, “which actually popped and made a “thwack” sound.” Any amount of his mother’s justification that it was “just violence, nothing deeper. Basic brutality. . .”, is unable to calm his raging inner moral storm. And he reflects: ”What I think, simply, finally, is that my father made a mistake. . .he knew he’d surrounded himself with people who could never conceive of doing what he’d done and not one person there would ever spend a night in jail.”
In ‘Corpus Christi’, Edie has suffered a miscarriage and had to have an emergency hysterectomy. The fact that she cannot have children has rendered her hopeless and imbalanced. Donnie, another character has beaten somebody up and both have ended up in a mental hospital, storming their lives and everyone else’s. Johnston reflects: “To know them, to understand who they essentially were, you only had to know what they’d lost. This was explicitly clear: Everyone could be seen that way.” The most forceful, however, is the triptych of Minnie and Lee’s stories, strategically placed even in the book, each after three stories, which is a saga of Minnie Marshall, a widow and a mother diagnosed with lung cancer, battling to live and struggling to find an apt way to die. Her son Lee has taken leave from his teaching job, so he can help brave the living dead storm in their lives. They are planning Minnie’s funeral on which she wants to spend the least. On the other hand Lee wouldn’t mind spending a fortune. The futility of it all, of life itself and the awareness of this existential dilemma is a heartrending situation that throws the whole world and its preoccupations meaningless. Lee is “swept over the edge and weeping for all of them [the world?], weeping like a man who was dying or a newborn child, blind and terrified and gasping for breath.”
A modern book, Corpus Christi is wrought with modern themes. For one, communication fails the characters. In ‘In the Tall Grass’, Benny’s mother voices, “I wonder what you know about me”, Weley Wilson in ‘Outside the Toy Store’ approaches Mrs. Anna Eichhardt, a mother of twins, who was once his beloved and wonders: “She could have said anything. Though finally she said nothing at all, but turned her back.” The reason of fire that destroys the house is never explained in ‘Two Liars’, and Toby deliberates: “I felt my father was only waiting for the right time to explain things to me, the chance of that happening was as slim as it was a month later, when he died”. In ‘Buy for Me the Rain’, “though [Lee] wanted to encourage [Moira] before she drifted off, to thank and exalt her, he said nothing.”
Life is absurd, there is no absolute truth, and everything is relative, circumstantial, depicting the complexity of the outside mechanized world. In ‘In the Tall Grass’, George Kelly gives Benny his ring as he is going to kick Butler and contemplates ending up in jail and Benny is unable to make sense of it all: ”Maybe depending on his son in this way was insulting or humbling or liberating or confusing”. Characters are always in a quandary and in a mental state of conflict whence every choice you might have made could be equally right or wrong. The woman of ‘Anything That Floats’, who could have been with Gibert instead of her husband Vince, seeing her son Tyler’s obsession with snakes, muses: “Truth is a coiling, slippery thing, and you can receive it any number of ways”. That although Philip Bundick (‘Birds of Paradise’) has come to know about his wife Fancy’s affair with Luis, Jesse’s dad, it does not “necessarily” mean that it would end up “tragic”, its like, even with open eyes, sometimes you fail to see, like “when you‘re in a dark room and although everything is black, you suddenly realize your eyes are open.” It is strange that Lee’s thoughts wander on and to the librarian in St. Louis when he is talking to the doctor on the phone about his mother whose days are numbered or even the thought of his girlfriend Moira at his mother’s funeral fills him with “fluttering optimism” because despite her leaving him several years before, Lee knew “she wouldn’t miss his mother’s funeral”, so even when Leiland Marshall “buried his mother, he kept shifting in his folding chair, hoping to see Moira Jarrett.” Johnston is refreshingly honest in the depiction of psyche and he even voices his vision in ‘Two Liars’: “Sometimes there’s a difference between telling the truth and telling everything.” For sure, he tells it all.
But the author also suggests some possible solutions to survive the storms. An endorser of values, he tells us, family is important. Robert Jackson in ‘Two Liars’ becomes his mouthpiece and says, “THE ONLY IRREPLACEABLE THING IS FAMILY” or George Kelly confides in his son in ‘In the Tall Grass’: “Boy the only thing in this whole woolly world that scares me is losing you and your mother. I’d be in the tall grass without the two of you. I’d be in the weeds.” Loneliness has been a killer for Sonny and Nora and family time is what they crave, so “their time together threatened to pass within a breath” as the storm subsides.
The genius of Johnston lies in the fact that although the stories centre around stormy, gloomy situations, in the end these storms do settle, something that leaves the reader with a feeling, "it-might-be-insufferable-but-I-can-live-it." I would not exactly refer to it as an optimistic note but an “accepting note” would be more appropriate, which might in turn be optimistic, but with a difference. Consider the ending of ‘I See Something You Don’t See’: “Really, as with us all, that was all she’d ever wanted, someone to watch over, someone who would lie and tell her not to be afraid, someone who would always, always say, Don’t worry, I’m here.” Or even the ending of ‘The Widow’ when she asks Lee: “Tell me where you’ve been”. With acceptance, life suddenly seems bearable.
America has always been a lover of short stories, where the genre has flourished more than any other continent and Johnston has only added to the great tradition with this debut collection.
Anyone who reads Corpus Christi would already be looking forward to his next.
Corpus Christi
by Bret Anthony Johnston
Random House |Hardcover, 272 pages
Price: CAN $34.95 | ISBN: 1-4000-6211-X
Also available as a trade paperback.
About the Author: Bret Anthony Johnston’s fiction has been featured in The Paris Review and Open City, as well as many anthologies, including New Stories from the South: Year’s Best, 2003 and 2004; Prize Stories: The O. Henry prize Stories 2003; and Scribner’s Best of the Fiction Workshops 1999. A graduate of the Iowa Writer’s Workshop, where he received a teaching-writing fellowship, he teaches creative writing at California State University, San Bernardino, and can be reached online at his personal website.
