We Are Never As Beautiful As We Are NowBy Adam Gallari |
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Reviewed by Gabriel Blackwell
In an interview with Adam Gallari for HTMLGiant back in May, Roxane Gay asked Gallari about the many (former or soon-to-be-former) baseball players in his debut collection of short stories, We Are Never As Beautiful As We Are Now. With his reply,Gallari offered a rather neat ars poetica on the stories in that collection:
The human element for error is constantly present in baseball, and while it might look to a layman that nothing is going on, there is really never a dull moment. Everything is thought about and then rethought. The approach of everything can change based on whether the count is 1-0, 1-1, 2-1. These little things effect everything from whether or not the runner is going, to what pitches are going to be thrown, to what the batter is going to try and do with whatever comes his way. You need to know about 5-10 things before the ball is ever put into play for nearly every situation that might arise. So you’re constantly thinking, thinking, thinking, thinking, and then finally, when everything is said and done, you have split seconds to react.
In these nine stories, the depth of Gallari’s understanding of his characters puts us on the field with them, our eyes on the ball but our minds and theirs somewhere else, cycling through anxieties and fears and hopes and suspicions. Speaking about developing that deep understanding of character, and the tendency of writers to shy away from it for fear of abandoning altogether traditional, linear plotting, Gallari says: “What is important is urgency.” Indeed. These stories don’t unspool so much as adjust and then readjust, awaiting the ball finally, finally put into play, a moment that, here, threatens never to come. They can be aching and rheumatic like the Vladimir and Estragon of “Throwing Stones” waiting their turn in the bullpen, or they can be strained and tense like Reid in “A Beautiful Lie” and Dave in “Good Friend”:
For a second Dave braces himself. He’s waiting, even hoping, for the clenched fist pressed against Matt’s side to be hurled towards his jaw. Just get it out, Dave thinks. Just release it. Just let it go. But Matt shoves his hands in his pockets, keeps on walking.
The posture of the characters is that of Gallari’s game: Matt on the mound and Dave behind the plate. But Gallari tantalizes us; he never gives us the release of the game itself, even when, as in “Throwing Stones,” the story takes place during a game. The baseball in “Throwing Stones,” as in the other stories that revolve around it, is the game that we play in order to play the game, the toil that we manage so that we can have the time to play. The cipher at the center of each of these narratives is game, is play, is fun—we seem to be waiting for joy, waiting for tension to dissolve or resolve into physicality. Even when we have nothing but physicality, as in “Chasing Adonis,” Gallari makes sure that we know that we are seeing not release but a manic, frantic build. To what? It is a question that these characters leave not only unanswered but unasked.
Gallari’s characters seem possessed of a conspicuous muscularity of thought, yet one that is not supple enough to turn about and ask the really essential questions of itself. There are beautiful, serious thoughts here, but they are confined by rigid rules and codes, sidelines and boundaries beyond which we know these characters will not venture, and the thrill of reading this collection is watching Gallari bring them right up to the line and then flirt with crossing it.
In the final story, “Warwick Damon,” Gallari’s narrator, a writer, says this of his juvenilia:
These stories, which in fact were not stories at all, but glorified sketches that often ended where they began—at a barstool from which the consciousness, but never the body, of the character fled—sought to examine men musing on the failing of their lives… I saw myself and them, the men I wrote about, as… men prepared for a special fate, one, they were convinced, that would spirit them away from the doldrums of every day life.
Gallari’s stories, dealing with much the same material, are by contrast manifestly peripatetic—the restlessness and anticipation of “Good Friend,” and “Go Piss on Jane,” get embodied in their characters’ migrations. But even when they’re too drunk to stand up, like Danny in “No Cause for Concern,” the urgency of Gallari’s “thinking, thinking, thinking, thinking,” won’t let them just rest:
“Pick your head up.” Todd stands over [Danny], a towel tucked into his pants and his arms crossed over his chest.
“Give me a minute.”
“No. This isn’t negotiable.”
“One second.”
“Either you pick your head up off the bar or you leave. It’s easy, black or white, got it?”
Gallari gives us the sense that Danny picking his head up from the bar (or not) is not in the least black or white; it is more like a ream of statistics, charts, and graphs showing which way the ball should slew depending on which pitch is thrown, and no matter which pitch is chosen, when the bat makes contact, still, anything can happen. “Danny picks his head up and waves Todd off with his hand”: so—this time, maybe—it was a blooper, wobbling and dropping into the second baseman’s glove. But in Gallari’s game, it ain’t over till it’s over.