Normal People Don't Live Like ThisBy Dylan Landis |
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Reviewed by Stacy Muszynski
It was on the corner of 10 Mile Road and Arlington Street, two miles north of Detroit, in the parking lot of 3D’s Pizza that I first became scared for my friend Paula B. in a way I recognized but was afraid to name. Something in the intensity she put into outlining her baby blues in thick black that day; in the easy way she sassed men with car keys hanging out of their pockets and how she was mouse-quiet around kids in our class. Something about her mother, who, during visitations, insisted I call her by her first name. “Like a friend,” she’d said. Paula and I were in fifth grade then, at St. Angela.
It was in Room 208, Miss Gilbert's seventh and eighth grades science classroom, when I knifed into the smelly belly of a splayed frog. Lots of kids were absent that day, including my lab partner, including Paula, who had swallowed enough sleeping pills to keep her out of school for a week. That was the story. Teachers didn’t deny it. She and I weren’t hanging out anymore by then. I wouldn’t have recognized her telephone number. I shut my eyes and cut.
Then Jeff Buckley walked into the Mississippi and didn’t resurface. When the news broke I was in the driver's seat, parked outside Corporate Detroit Magazine offices just south of 8 Mile in front of Felony Wear Fashions and Shironda’s Nails, watching my office "manager" yell through the cracked-open office door at the rained-on meter reader that Nuh-uh, he’s truly trippin if he thinks she's letting his raggedy ass in the building when she's all alone. Long before this, Paula was on milk cartons. Somehow my life sped up and I missed or forgot all that. I’d heard she’d quit school, hitchhiked to California. She’s the only girl I ever knew who was rumored to have become a prostitute.
It had been more than a decade since I’ve thought of these events and eras, fears and sorrows—or remembered the odors. Dylan Landis’s 2009 debut story collection Normal People Don't Live Like This brought it all back to me.
The opening sentence of the collection (a story called “Jazz,” which originally appeared in Tin House in 2003) stunned and scared me, spoke to every age of me, as I imagine it would to every woman. It goes like this: “It is not true that if a girl squeezes her legs together she cannot be raped.”
Apparently the line speaks to men, too, because my husband—who reads over my shoulder—said, Go on…
“Not that Rainey is being raped. She doubts it, though she is not sure. Either way, it is true that the thirty-nine-year-old male knee, blind and bald-headed, has it all over the thirteen-year-old female thigh, however toned that thigh by God and dodgeball.”
The knee belongs to Richard, but the story belongs to Rainy. And by the next paragraph, when Richard wants to take a walk (“Not far,” he said. “A constitutional.”), my old friend Paula’s heart-shaped face appears behind Rainy’s words, and so it’s her story, too.
“Jazz” is not a comfortable story. None of the ten pieces in this collection are. What they are is full of yearning and worry and fuck-you, of unnamed fathers who “smell like formaldehyde” before they die (Leah’s), or who take a separate bedroom in lieu of divorce (Oly and Pansy’s); of mothers who’d starve before they’d eat a piece of cake or even a piece of toast (Helen), or who “perversely” enjoy their “rat hole” apartments and their ugly lives (Bonita); of daughters who shoplift (Leah, Oly), who are “lost” (Pansy), need an abortion (Angeline), inherit “impressively creepy” boyfriends from their older sisters and wear “red needle-spots on the backs of” [their] hands, as if they’d been “marked” (Oly), who want to know how far is far (Rainy, Leah, Oly and Pansy).
These stories live in fear and move with grace and surprise. They’re edgy yet sophisticated, touching even in their violence. They are real and dirty without being vulgar. Important without being pedantic. They cut all the right angles in trying to make their uglinesses beautiful.
To aid, Landis and one character, Angeline, have a well-placed switchblade. The blade makes its appearance in the collection’s fourth story, “Rana Fegrina,” moving from rumor to reality, from inside the sock to inside the heart.
Paula had a switchblade. When I asked why, she said simply, “Because.”
“Rana Fegrina” also boils down fourteen years old to its emotional essence—like the rest of the book does for the emotions and notions of every age that stews inside it:
“In the beginning was the word and there is no making it go away. Leah’s finger polishes the dark scars in her honeyed desk: the jagged S, the glottal LUT. The word is appended to the initials A.Y. In Leah’s mind the name ANGELINE [YOST] is gleaming and round. It is the razor and the apple, both: lethal and sweet.”
Many of the book’s moves are as stealthy and as smart. It helps that Landis mixes teenage slang (“What’re you, kidding?”) with overpriced words (“glissade,” “treillage,” “crenellations,” et cetera), and tops it all off with not one but several characters with synesthesia, who taste names and who see letters as colors (“O is not red but ‘as white as an onion’”), all to powerful effect. The deeper Landis dives into her characters’ particular passions and lunacy, the more she pushes to distort and jam together our understood language and its rhythms, the more she clarifies her characters’ lives, and our own.
Fair warning: Where other writers’ stories may plot, these juxtapose. They are not afraid of personification. They approve of fragments, adore detail, pile simile on metaphor (example: “A wail, like twisting metal”). And they ride the gleaming edge of terrible nail-biting excitement and surreal ho-hum, no big deal appeal. The results: I’ve stumbled onto excellent coming-of-age stories, but I’ve never gone out looking for them. Until Dylan Landis.
These stories move as their characters (no matter their age) mature: at strange velocities, and with surprisingly fitting arcs. Even the question begged by Rainy at the collection’s start: “How far is far?” gets pushed like desire itself—bit by bit, scene by scene, sense by sense, character by character—until the collection’s concluding and sublime “Delacroix,” where at least one of the girls we’ve come to know in the book’s 181 pages can say, finally, though she doesn’t have any answers, she has sense aplenty to feel her way through.
A final note: If you have speakers available when you get to the story “Excelsior,” play this while you read: Gorecki’s Symphony No. 3. The author will appreciate it. I’m betting it’s as close as a reader can get to slowing life down to each distinct breath, each distinct word; as close as a reader can get to saving a character’s—or a long lost friend’s—or your own—life.