Review by New York Times Review
IN the middle of Manuel Gonzales's lucid and confident first collection of stories, "The Miniature Wife," he tells a tale from the point of view of a half-human, half-zombie with conflicting urges. It's one of the strongest (and funniest) in the collection, no small feat in our zombie-saturated cultural landscape. It also, in its way, sums up the central struggle of many of Gonzales's characters: When does one just sit by, and when do darker impulses bubble up and take over? When do we stand aside, and when do we act? These stories vary widely - an elegiac description of a plane circling Dallas for decades, a futuristic wake mourning the loss of Africa into the ocean, social science "reportage" about false anthropological claims - but they work best when the characters, for whatever reasons, succumb to a buried darkness. Inner zombie rises up. On the surface, the collection could be divided into two categories: invented journalism and absurdist stories that follow a more classic narrative structure. The fake journalism is fun to read - it's such a vibrant literary form these days. There's been lots of talk of nonfiction that stretches facts and conflates incidents, using the tools of fiction to tell a "true" story. But at the same time, there has also been a quieter embrace of fiction disguised as nonfiction: writing that employs the instruments and gestures of the documentarian to detail events that could never happen. Ben Marcus carves out territory here, as do Roberto Bolaño and Jesse Ball, and Gonzales fits right in. He intersperses short invented biographies of unusual types throughout the book, and demonstrates a tremendous knack for integrating quotes, interviews and anecdotes into a formal structure to excavate weirdness. We meet a character who speaks through his ears, and a child with a genius for dead languages, and a scientist who believes, the human organ system can be replaced by a botanic vascular one (wonderfully titled the "Human Vascular Bundle"). Gonzales is at ease with the voices of reporting and science and social science: "Diagrams copied out of early journal entries," his narrator explains, "show that Keith initially hoped to build organ substitutions using the shells of squash - acorn, snake, spaghetti - scooped out by hand and then internally supported by a collapsible yet sturdy construction of miniature wooden beams." This utterly assured tone wraps itself around the casual preposterousness of a man who is certain we can survive with no organs. The reporter meets the dream. Other stories fall into a more characteristic narrative mode, and some of these are even stronger (or at least more overtly active) as Gonzales removes the trappings of reportage and allows voice or premise to move the story. He usually takes on a mythic type we know well - the unicorn, the zombie, the werewolf - and then reinvents the terms. Again, darkness serves the stories. How satisfying it is, for example, when a trapped unicorn, desiring freedom, uses its horn as a weapon! (This, after being carefully fed "fairy dust" that resembles phosphorescent pink and blue play sand. "Ground-up fairies," one character explains. "I had to feed the unicorn half a cup of this stuff four times a day.") Like the zombie tale, these stories often center on a narrator who feels himself on the outskirts of things, a man who can be stoic but is surrounded by a certain amount of chaos. The stories rise to another level when the rock of stoicism is nudged aside and some kind of rage seeps out (Even in the unicorn.) Yes, the narrator accidentally shrank his wife, whoops, and yes, he is remorseful, but she is so angry and vengeful, forging war upon him, that the emotional balance begins to shift and it's in the last line that we suddenly find ourselves in a new and deeper territory. That final turn makes the story. Because his prose is never sloppy and his rhythm is impeccable, Gonzales's sentences unfold with an unusual smoothness. But the writing becomes more tangible, and more memorable, when the careful style contrasts with a situation's ragged danger and strangeness. The curdling underbelly then becomes an opposing force to the language, the riverlike flow that for all its grace threatens to lull a reader until, in the best stories, it is punctured and rattled by event and consequence. A few of the stories remain static despite pleasingly imaginative premises. "The Sounds of Early Morning" sets up an inviting idea about the danger of sound, but keeps it descriptive without pushing it to another place. Others hold the characters at bay so that concept alone becomes the dominant figure in the story. Sometimes the narrator is simply reporting, and the stories told are fresh. But the neutral reporter has a limit, and the stories stand out more when something begins to implode inside the content, spurring the prose into a different kind of movement. In a collection this long, a few of the weaker stories could have been cast aside to make a tighter whole. BUT when they work, as they often do, these stories showcase an exciting new voice. Gonzales's concerns are as real as can be, but his comfort in different lexicons, and weirdnesses, all as ways to shape very human dilemmas, is strong. At the end of the book, he punctuates the eternal debate about action versus inaction effectively with "Escape From the Mall," a story organized entirely around an ambivalent narrator trying to stay alive in a war against the evil undead. Where are these evil undead? The story's title gives it away. That, in a seed, is the world of this collection: the archetypal evil undead, roaming around their usual suburban home, move past their pop horror movie purpose to become the bizarrely appropriate backdrop for a crucial and relatable moral dilemma. Just keep letting the zombies win, I say. When the bedlam of the moment is allowed to spill into the incredible sureness of the prose, these stories ring and resound. When does one just sit by, these stones ask, and when do darker impulses bubble up and take over? Aimee Bender's new story collection, "The Color Master," will be published in August.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [April 24, 2019]
Review by Booklist Review
Debut writer Gonzales blends imagined histories and biographies with the supernatural and scientific in 18 energetic tales depicting the bizarre as everyday events. Largely set in Texas, the author's home, these stylized stories disclose a zombie-infested mall, an animal-ridden house, and a shed-dwelling unicorn. Swamp monsters battle robots and a father becomes a werewolf, while artists and anthropologists reevaluate their careers. In the uproarious title story, a scientist accidentally shrinks his wife, leading to an absurdly ferocious rivalry involving a dollhouse, dead flies, and makeshift moats. And in the collection's defining opener, a writer aboard a hijacked plane that has been circling Dallas for 20 years chronicles his fellow passengers' acceptance of life in airborne captivity. Loosely anchoring the book is a series of wry, encyclopedic entries recounting the mythic lives of a clown, poet, scientist, and zookeeper, respectively, and another about an innkeeper who shares the author's name. Although these whimsical additions feel extraneous in an otherwise fascinating collection, Gonzales expresses empathy and demonstrates an impressive knack for violent humor, disturbing satire, and genre-infused literary fiction.--Fullmer, Jonathan Copyright 2010 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
It's rare that a debut author is also a seasoned storyteller, but this is the case with Gonzales, whose first book is a deeply imaginative collection of short stories. With commendable skill, Gonzales seamlessly blends the real and the fantastic, resulting in a fun and provocative collection that readers will want to devour. A child born at 10,000 feet on a hijacked plane retraces the same route around Dallas for "according to our best estimates, around twenty years," destined to follow this path forever, in "Pilot, Copilot, Writer"; and a man who works as a miniaturizer mistakenly shrinks his wife into a pint-sized but plucky foe in the title story. Gonzales delights and bends the mind with stories featuring a horror movie cast-zombies, in "Escape from the Mall"; the swamp monsters and robots of "Life on Capra II"; and a werewolf on a mission to eradicate any trace of his prior humanity, in "WOLF!" The mixture of the mundane and the surreal is hardly new, but Gonzales carries it off with a fresh voice. A quiet pathos spans the collection, and a well-timed glibness injects these stories with an undercurrent of dark humor. A surprising, delightful, and slyly didactic debut. Agent: PJ Mark, Janklow & Nesbit. (Jan.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Kirkus Book Review
Imaginative stories elevated by creative renderings of tropes from genre fiction. Debut author Gonzales, executive director of The Austin Bat Cave, a nonprofit writing and tutoring center, offers up a collection of 18 sparely constructed stories, rife with ingenuity and beholden to few rules. The opening story, "Pilot, Copilot, Writer," finds a journalist attempting to make sense of the fact that his hijacked plane has been circling the Dallas skyline for two decades. The title story is about a scientist who, after shrinking his wife to nearly microscopic size, finds himself at war with her. This leads to laugh-out-loud lines like this one, about his wife's paramour: "So what else could I do but cover him in honey and seed and then feed him to the bird?" "One-Horned Wild-Eyed" explores the rivalry that explodes between two friends--over the unicorn they're keeping in a backyard shed. Still other stories infuse real emotion into nightmarish scenarios. "Life on Capra II" depicts a futuristic solider who pines for his lost love, even as he blasts away at swamp monsters and killer robots. In "All of Me," we meet the zombie lurking inside an office drone, who wishes for nothing more than a date with a married co-worker and to devour the obnoxious guy down the hall. Others, such as "Wolf!" and "Escape from the Mall," are more traditional takes on the monsters of our nightmares. But then Gonzales nails the reader with a roundhouse kick like "Farewell, Africa," about a famous speech delivered in concert with the actual sinking of continents. The author also peppers his collection with five sinister obituaries that are quite fun, if superfluous to this inspired string of off-key hits. Delightfully eerie tales from the dark side.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
