Review by New York Times Review
THINGS explode in Kevin Wilson's stories: expectations, parents, body parts, cows. Rarely do they catch fire first. They simply blow. In the aptly titled "Blowing Up on the Spot," a young man's parents spontaneously combust. There's no definitive explanation. "Three years ago, my parents blew up," Wilson writes. "I don't know how else to say it." And though the character tries to imagine what led to this tragedy, his deeper concern is that it might happen to him. After all, the cause of the problem feels linked to the danger of love. Did his parents explode because they loved each other too little, too much or just incorrectly? Despite the obvious dangers, the narrator falls for Joan, a confectioner's daughter, who smells of "burned sugar, of a fancy dessert that you set on fire." His temperature rises along with his libido. "After she is gone," he muses, "I wait out on the fire escape . . . trying not to explode." The detonating qualities of strong emotion appear in several stories, but Wilson is equally preoccupied with the absurdity of his imagined modern world. The narrator in "Blowing Up on the Spot" works at a Scrabble factory hunting through jumbled tiles for the letter Q. In "Worst-Case Scenario," a man makes a living by describing the disasters that might befall his clients. In "Grand Stand-In," a woman rents herself out as a grandmother to families too cowardly to admit that their real granny has died. While the almost plausible situations call to mind the fiction of George Saunders, Wilson isn't aiming for satire ; the pressure of living in a distorted society isn't his most pressing concern. Wilson's true gift is for depicting the dangers of strong, complex emotions. In "Birds in the House," brothers from a dysfunctional family gather in Tennessee to play a game that will determine who inherits the ancestral mansion. The tension is palpable, and the young narrator watches this seemingly adult response to death and greed with a reserved curiosity. In a metaphoric leap, he recalls some cows that escaped from his father's pasture and eagerly consumed the neighbor's crimson clover. The clover expanded inside them until they blew, "like popped balloons." It's a cautionary tale, a warning against unchecked desire and joie de vivre, and its moral repeats in unexpected ways. Most of Wilson's main characters are on the cusp of adulthood. They do not "fit correctly into the spaces available to them," he writes. This helps explain all the combustible material. Not only do emotions cause heat, so does youth itself. In "The Dead Sister Handbook: A Guide for Sensitive Boys" (structurally, one of the collection's more experimental stories), a girl's "muscles absorb the body's surplus of sugar, nicotine and pure grain alcohol. . . . Packs of ice must be applied weekly to the arms, legs and chest." One anecdote in the story features a brother and sister who practice kissing each other. Though it's a small, childish transgression - one that might, in most cases, be tucked away in memory - in Wilson's world, "due to unknown chemical reactions in the body, this practice causes at least one of the two parties to die within 10 years." THE narrator of "The Shooting Man," Guster, cannot curb his desire to see a sideshow in which a man shoots himself in the face: "It just seemed like fun," he says. He persuades his beloved Sue-Bee to go along for the ride. But it's not fun. The shooting is real; the external explosion changes, forever, the narrator's internal world. Wilson's protagonists are frequently survivors, marred and changed from their exposure to the world. And when Wilson leaves behind his quirkiest conceits to focus on this more subtle material, his work shimmers. Take the story "Mortal Kombat" -for its bravery and darkness, one of the strongest in the collection. It, too, deals with the detonation of love, and the explosions are twofold. The first comes early on, when Wynn and Scotty, both boys in the midst of puberty, kiss and fondle each other in the school's AV closet. "When it is over they are sweating and shirtless, skin burned red in the shape of handprints." The first explosion is an orgasm. The second comes when Wynn and Scotty play the video game Mortal Kombat. All the tension and animosity they feel toward each other well up, causing the game to feel like an actual war, with jarring bursts of violence. Perhaps this story provides the clearest window into what all the blowing up really means in Wilson's collection. The boys don't want the stigma of loving the "wrong" person. But they want to be loved. And they want pleasure. They find solace in each other, but lose it almost instantly. Their emotions don't fit in their changing bodies. Instead, they become unwieldy and odd - odder even than the explicitly "strange" elements of Wilson's work: infants with teeth or cheerleaders obsessed with model cars. But by the end, the very oddness of the emotions stands revealed as a kind of beauty, a difficult human truth. One of the most striking absences in this lively, inventive book is the sensory. Wilson offers fabulous twists and somersaults of the imagination, but not the details to make them wholly visceral. It's an approach that can work in fables, but in Wilson's highly particular world the lack of concrete experience makes some stories feel unfinished. This is not to say that the book isn't daring and often exquisitely tender. But as Wilson continues to dig into the texture and mystery of the world, his fiction should grow, like his best characters, in strange and remarkable ways. Assuming, of course, he doesn't blow up first. Robin Romm is the author of the memoir "The Mercy Papers" and the story collection "The Mother Garden," which has just been released in paperback.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [October 27, 2009]
Review by Booklist Review
Four mutually loathing brothers fold hundreds of paper cranes for a contest to determine who will own the family plantation house. A young man counts every step to and from a factory in which he winnows the Qs from heaps of new-minted Scrabble tiles. Three new BAs spend months after graduation tunneling beneath the hometown of one of them. A professional substitute grandmother gets queasy about her new family when she discovers they also retain a faux child. That last story, Grand Stand-In, is the creepiest in the book, though the bad-dream pulp-noir exercise, The Shooting Man, is a close, gritty runner-up. Two stories of teens and sex, Mortal Kombat and Go, Fight, Win the only third-person narratives here express great though measured sympathy. Wildly imaginative in the manner of new weirdness fiction (see Feeling Very Strange, 2006), Wilson's work is also warmly compassionate in tenor. He creates an appealing voice for each first-person narrator he invents, and in third person, he is flat-out magisterial, with more than a hint of the magical. Watch him closely.--Olson, Ray Copyright 2009 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Wilson's captivating debut collection paints an everyday world filled with characters obsessed by weird impulses. Whether it's Guster, the narrator of "The Shooting Man," who goes to great lengths to discover the secret of a sideshow performer whose trick is to shoot himself in the face, or the three bored college grads of the title story who compulsively dig a tunnel beneath their town, Wilson creates a lively landscape with rich and twisted storytelling. A few stories satirize the odd ways families react to tragedy, for example, "Grand Stand-in," which revolves around an elderly woman hired by families who wish to avoid telling their children about an unforeseen death. Two of the best stories involve teens: in "Mortal Kombat," two unpopular quiz bowl stars become enamored of a video game and each other, while "Go, Fight, Win," features a cheerleader who prefers building model cars to the company of her schoolmates. While Wilson has trouble wrapping up a few stories ("Blowing Up on the Spot," "The Museum of Whatnot"), most are fresh and darkly comedic in a Sam Lipsyte way. (Apr.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved