Everything Here is the Best Thing EverBy Justin Taylor |
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Reviewed by Adam Gallari
Justin Taylor’s fiction debut, Everything Here is the Best Thing Ever, begins with the ominous line “By two o’clock the sky had gone to ash.” It’s a simple declaration, but one which manages to be quite unsettling, introducing the reader to a world in which Taylor attempts to mine the quaint and quirky neurosis of characters searching for “something,” though whatever these nebulous desires are often remain just as mysterious to each of Taylor’s protagonists as they do to the reader. This beautiful confusion serves the author well, the disorientation of Taylor’s realm serving only to heighten the effectiveness the fifteen stories collected herein.
Taylor’s greatest asset is the strength of his prose. He has a knack for the line, for the occasional turn of phrase that takes the reader by surprise and knocks the wind out of him with a glimmer of profundity that, even if it is nothing more than a simple, well-digested truth, seems as though it was tailor-made for the specific moment at hand. “There’s always a new worse; only tenure varies,” espouses the nameless narrator of the collection’s opening story “Amber at the Window During Hurricane Season,” a line which Taylor seems to be offering as a third epigram to accompany the lines of As You Like It and Gary Lutz that herald the book. Taylor’s pith and his seeming malaise in delivering these offhanded truisms continually lull the reader into a wonderful stupor, one in which they could easily linger if Taylor were to allow it.
In “In My Heart I Am Already Gone,” Taylor’s skill as a stylist and a short-story writer is on full display. When Kyle, a twenty-five year old dreamer who ostensibly wants nothing more than out of his backwater Florida hometown, is tasked by his Uncle Dan with disposing of the family cat, Buckles, Taylor sets in motion the poignant and beautiful tale of a family in the midst of a series of personal upheavals, and for whom the presence of the dying cat might be enough to push it over the edge. “In My Heart…” deftly recounts Kyle’s vacillations and troubles, all the while interspersing brief snap-shots of the family situation at large, until Kyle finally drowns the family cat. Then Taylor goes further, much further, drawing the story out for another two pages in which Kyle engages in a staring match with an aunt who has just discovered him riffling through the underwear draw of his fifteen year old cousin, Yet even as Taylor commands a crescendo of bravura paragraphs that culminate with Kyle’s crushing realization—“I will never escape this town”—he finds a way to exit his story as quietly and nonplussed as he entered it.
Taylor has a sharp and, at times, wistful eye that manages to make even a description of Buckles’ vomit eerily romantic, with “the awful little pile of dried-up goo, the muted, autumnal reds and browns of their brand of cat food, garnished with white-gray springs of shed fur and some new-grown mold.” Furthermore, he possesses the uncanny knack of being able to take a moment to the brink of cliché before reigning it in and commanding it as his own. From “Estrella Y Rascacielos,” a third person vignette that renders of a group of angsty anarchists in a sparse and laconic prose that serves as a fitting transition from the elegance of “In My Heart I Am Already Gone”:
Snapcase lit a hand-rolled cigarette and then tossed his still burning match into the shallow pit. It went out in the air, so he lit another and placed it gingerly in a little pool of whiskey. It snuffed there.” In these brief passes, Taylor leaves one wondering what he’s truly capable of, should all of his stories have received the attention to detail that his strongest pieces do.
It is clear Taylor is well schooled in the art of writing, well read and indebted to the forbears—Barthelme, O’Hara, Bataille (“Jewels Flashing in the Night of Time” is a not so subtle refashioning of Bataille’s debut, Story of the Eye)— that his characters name drop or quote throughout the book. He understands the rules of story, so even when he veers away from the conventional modes of narrative, he maintains control, his risks evidence of a writer trying to push himself into a new realm, to prod the limits of fictions form. Occasionally, though, Taylor falls short in his effort. Thoughts become muddled, and the narration jumbles to the point where the communication between reader and writer devolves into a monologue in which Taylor holds forth, although to some this will come across less as a failure and more a writer creating a new space for his narrative and not minding if his stylistic choices alienate a portion of his readership. However, there are times when Taylor pushes too far, when Everything Here reads less as a fiction collection and more as a manifesto in which Taylor casts his gaze on the issues plaguing present-day American society. His endeavors to be political or socially conscious feel less organic to the nature of his stories and more an example of a writer imposing an Issue onto moments that quickly devolve into solipsistic dorm room philosophy. An example, from “Whistle Through Your Teeth and Spit,” the collection’s finale:
He says nothing, points straight up at the window. It’s a cover of Stations of the Crass silk-screened onto the front of a black pre-stressed designer tee shirt. Nothing so gauche as an advertised price but Jana figures, what--$120? She thinks of herself in middle school, standing in line at the Hot Topic at the mall in a suburb outside Philly, buying a red shirt emblazoned with Che’s face. They commodified her emotions, sold her own rebellion back to her before she even knew it for what it was. Is that better or worse than the post-ironic self-aware sellout-sophisticate garb on display here? Fuck it, it’s all one big Disneyland, and this is a fallen world. No place to hide your faith for safekeeping.
This passage encapsulates another of Taylor’s pitfalls, the continuing of the unfortunate trend begun by fellow millennial Tao Lin of product placement in writing, as though in presenting an exact location or brand-name item the writer can go beyond verisimilitude into a realm of profundity that, ironically, the specificity expressly prohibits. These monikers are less cultural identifiers of status and wealth than examples of an author mailing it in and letting the commodity, rather than the writing, form the mental space they wish the reader to inhabit. Why Taylor has chosen to cheapen his art this way is unclear. Perhaps its merely the desire of a young author to take on the weight of something other than storytelling, but this moment, like the others in which Taylor finds himself proselytizing, comes off as an author trying too hard to be profound. And while Taylor could be easily forgiven for pushing the bounds and for endeavoring to fail grandly rather than play it safe, his main faux pas is not his ambitious posturing but his coming off not as a writer sympathetic to the issues he wants to highlight but rather as an angry young man casting judgment and therefore forcing the reader to question the truism that has been so surely presented. Moments of “Tennessee” read not so much as Taylor molding his own identity but as a cheap pastiche of Philip Roth’s The Counterlife, and “What Was Once All Yours” possesses an uncomfortable sense of elitism directed at those whom the author sees as not measuring up to particular level of (urban) sophistication, as evidenced by the moment during which the narrator, Troy, accompanies his quasi-girlfriend Cass for her abortion procedure:
There were protestors outside the clinic. This had not been unexpected, but was still a fairly great shock to see. These people in their mad devotion. Old men with liver spots held up posters depicting things no less horrible for being mostly obvious fakes. Young people in their church bests. Enormous middle-aged women with short haircuts and fanny packs, heavy necklaces of colorful unprecious stone… A man in a cheap suit stepped into our path and I let go of Cass’s hand and stepped in front of her. ‘Where are these children’s parents?’ he shouted. Not to us, but past, addressing his own cohort, re-proving whatever it was they were all so sure they already knew.
Taylor’s once muted word suddenly becomes glaringly black and white. There is no room for the reader’s intellect or decision making. And though the verdict has already been handed down, Troy goes on to characterize the man as a “weasel,” who, in a great act of righteous indignation, he would like nothing more than to punch in the face.
Of all Taylor’s attempt at polemics, “Jewels Flashing in the Night of Time” comes closest to succeeding, though it is ultimately undermined by a thinly veiled condescension towards those the narrator describes as “the poor or underachieving tiers of my graduating class.” The line references the soldiers in Abu Gharib who “in the name of God and country” have engaged in a series of notable offenses now common knowledge to the American public. Despite this, Taylor takes a page and a half to list them all. A bold and ballsy move, but it is the tone of presentation (the list appears directly after the overt sarcasm of “in name of God and country”) that betrays him. When coupled with the fact that the only thing seeming to constitute any type of achievement in the narrator is that he is a quasi-autodidactic who possesses a love for Bataille and Conrad, this comes off as Taylor being coy rather than setting up a situation whose dichotomy could further enhance the author’s point about the inherent heart of darkness within all men. Taylor’s goal to establish a realm in which the narrator and his lover, Andrea, re-create their own version of Abu Gharib in bed is hindered not by the skill of Taylor’s storytelling, but because the world of Iraq—a hot button topic, if there is one—feels less something capable of threatening the current life and identity of the characters and more an overt fictional artifice meant to serve as foil to the narrator and Andrea’s violent sex play.
Repeatedly, Taylor offers telling moments, ones ripe with potential, yet sadly there is no questioning. There is no attempt to probe further into the mindset, to present a quandary, to subvert a preconception, made more frustrating because Taylor has shown himself to be a writer capable of adding that one key ingredient to a scene to make it wholly original and authentic—even sublime—as is the case with “A House in Arms,” which one could argue is a perfect amalgamation of Taylor’s minimalist candor and urbane wit, and where he manages to delicately pirouette through moments that leave the reader both satisfied and slightly disoriented upon the story’s completion.
Everything Here is the Best Thing Ever is a wonderful example of an author discovering himself before our eyes, of working out the kinks of his style and the identity of his mission on a grand stage. If his prose is any indication, Taylor seems perfectly comfortable with this arrangement. The most satisfying aspect of Taylor’s debut is its fearlessness and uncompromising attitude, even if it not as finely manicured as it could be. Roughness aside, Taylor has achieved what most young writers aspire to—the creation of an identity formed solely through the presentation of one’s prose. Upon finishing Everything Here is the Best Thing Ever, this reader is left feeling that Taylor is perhaps only testing the temperature and depth of the water before him, but hopefully its a sign that he is preparing to subsequently dive headlong into the pool.