Other literary forms

David Means has written two unpublished novels, one of which he has said he discarded.

Achievements

David Means’s second short-story collection, Assorted Fire Events, won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Fiction in 2000 and was shortlisted for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction in 2001. His third collection, The Secret Goldfish, was shortlisted for the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Prize in 2006. He won a PEN/O. Henry Prize in 2006 for his story “Sault St. Marie.”

Biography

David Means was born and grew up in Kalamazoo, Michigan. He received a B.A. in English from the College of Wooster, Ohio, and then moved to New York, where he received an M.F.A. in poetry from Columbia University. He settled in Nyack, New York, where he became a professor of English and creative writing at Vassar College.

Analysis

Since his first collection, A Quick Kiss of Redemption, Means has progressively moved away from Chekhovian realism, taking more chances with experimental narrative structure. Pursuing tactics begun in Assorted Fire Events and made more evident in his third collection, The Secret Goldfish, Means takes increasing liberties in his fourth collection, The Spot, with narrative techniques that explore the nature and importance of storytelling.

“Assorted Fire Events”

The title piece of David Means’s second book of short stories, which won the 2001 Los Angeles Times Book Award, is a poetic meditation on the universal human fascination with fire. The story describes and ponders the significance of several “fire events” in an attempt to explore what drives people to “play with fire” or “follow the fire truck” to a burning building. The story has no single unified plot. Instead, as the title suggests, it recounts a series of events about fire, related to the others only insofar as they are of interest to the narrator.

In the first paragraph, the narrator recalls one winter, when he was thirteen and living in Michigan, when a man set fire to several cottages. This first event does not focus on the person who started the fire but on the boy’s fascination with the effect of fire on a house. What he likes is the way the fire makes its way from the inside out, until there is no more inside, only outside. The skeletal remains after the fire ravages a house create a poetic image of something being stripped to the bone. For the second fire event, the narrator describes sitting in his study writing and listening to his children playing outside when a fire, caused by spontaneous combustion of varnish-soaked rags, breaks out in a nearby house. The narrator introduces the second event by saying that the sound of fire, like popcorn in hot oil just before the kernels explode, makes him laugh. The ironic juxtaposition of this sound against the sound of his children whooping and hollering with joy is what interests him.

The final and most extended event combines the horror and beauty of fire. When a young boy named Fenton tries to launch his homemade rocket ship with gasoline, the fire quickly gets out of control and engulfs him. The ironic juxtaposition of horrible destruction and comic effect is then suggested by a description of Fenton on fire, looking like an actor in a fire suit, a stunt person like a Charlie Chaplin tramp. This is “a holy event,” says the narrator, for Fenton walked into the hot fire of hell and came out with a face hard to recognize as human. Ultimately, the narrator sees Fenton as Christ, for the boy has experienced an extreme mystery that he cannot explain and that the writer can only try to capture in assorted fire events. Style is everything in “Assorted Fire Events,” for the story is an example of a writer’s attempt to use language to explore the basic paradoxical mystery of fire as a powerful force that can burn away the extraneous and reduce one to pure essentials. Means’s method for achieving this exploration is to reject linear narrative altogether and describe various fire events in such a way that, even as they are horrifying, they somehow are eerily beautiful.

The Secret Goldfish

Means—like Anton Chekhov, Flannery O’Connor, Raymond Carver, and Grace Paley—sees the world in a short-story way. This means that one should not read Means for a plot that rushes to an inevitable end or for easily recognizable characters, like the folks one meets every day. Instead one goes to Means for some scary and sacred sense that what happens is not as important as what it signifies and for the shock of recognition that those persons one thought are actually an enigma— one knew one does not really know them at all. One goes to Means for mystery and the paradox understood by the great short-story writers from Edgar Allan Poe to Chekhov to Carver: If one removes everything extraneous from a scene, an object, a person, its meaning is revealed, stark and astonishing.

Means’s short stories are seldom satisfied with linearity of plot and thus often become lists of connected mysteries. “Notable Dustman Appearances to Date” is a series of hallucinatory manifestations of famous faces in swirling dust kicked up by wind or smoke: Richard Nixon, Ernest Hemingway, Nikolai Gogol, Jesus. “Michigan Death Trips” is a catalog of catastrophic disruptions, as people abruptly disappear beneath the ice of a frozen lake, are struck suddenly on the highway, or are hit by a stray bullet from nowhere. “Elyria Man” lays bare mummified bodies found lying beneath the soil, as if patiently waiting to embody some basic human fear or need. In each of these stories, Means reveals the truth of our lives the way great art always has—by making the one see the world as it painfully is, not as one’s comfortable habits hide it from one. In the short-story world of Means, a mundane tale of infidelity and divorce gets transformed by the metaphoric stillness of a neglected goldfish in a mucked-up tank, surviving in spite of the stagnation around it. As the story “Lightning Man” makes clear, the realm of reality that matters to Means is sacramental, ritualistic, miraculous—a world in which the old reassurances, such as that lightning never strikes twice in the same place, are shown to be nonsense. A man is struck seven times throughout his life by a powerful revelatory energy until he becomes a mythic creature, waiting for the inevitable eighth.

“The Blade”

Two stories in Means’s fourth collection, The Spot— “The Blade” and “The Junction”—focus on tramps gathered around a campfire spinning yarns. In “The Blade,” the central character, Ronnie, hesitates about telling his peers his “blade story,” for he knows it will involve making explanations about how he spent a couple of years with an old tramp named Hambone, which would expose the old tramp to the ridicule of the men. Ronnie’s blade story centers on his waking up one morning with Hambone holding a knife at Ronnie’s throat, insisting that if Ronnie does not believe the good things the tramp has told Ronnie about the tramp’s mother, he will kill Ronnie. However, Hambone has told Ronnie two stories: one characterizing Hambone’s mother as a wonderful woman and another, two months earlier, in which Hambone said she did not have a decent bone in her body. Even though Ronnie tries to placate Hambone by agreeing that his mother was a great woman, the old man does not let up; Ronnie is forced to turn the knife and kill the tramp, making Ronnie’s blade story one in which he wields the weapon.

“Nebraska”

Three stories in The Spot deal with another group of characters who live their lives on the road—thieves and scam artists. “Nebraska” focuses on a young woman involved in an armored-truck robbery in Nebraska, engineered by a man named Byron, with whom she lives. These are amateurs, members of the underground in the late 1960’s, planning the robbery to finance bomb making to demolish the status quo, with Byron spouting a lot of rhetoric about striking out against the corrupt system. Although they make careful plans to execute the robbery, at the crucial moment, when Byron and his partner shoot two Brinks guards, the central female character, in charge of the getaway car, panics and drives away, leaving them literally holding the bag. The central tension in the story is the young woman’s romantic identification with the Great Depression-era thieves Bonnie and Clyde—not the bank robbers, however, but Faye Dunaway and Warren Beatty, who starred in the 1967 film Bonnie and Clyde.

“The Gulch”

In “The Gulch,” three teenage boys crucify another boy on a homemade cross set up in a gulch to see if he will rise from the dead. The focus of the story is on various possible explanations for the murder, as news commentators and professors try to find reasons and precedents for the crime. A detective named Collard, who is investigating the case, thinks that when he retires, with a memory full of stories, the incident in the gulch will be the classic one he pulls out of his hat when the conversation gets boring. He knows, however, that his job is to find out who dreamed up the idea and made it true. Making an idea come true and making stories out of inexplicable acts constitute the themes of many of Means’s stories in The Spot.

“The Knocking”

“The Knocking,” the shortest story in The Spot, is in many ways one of the most complex. The first-person male narrator complains of knocking noises emanating from the man who lives in an identical apartment above the narrator. The reader knows nothing about the narrator or the noisy neighbor—just a lot about the nature of the knocking—until three-quarters through the story, when the narrator says that the knocking often comes late in the day, when the man above knows that the narrator is in his deepest state of reverie, feeling a persistent sense of loss of his wife and kids. In the last two paragraphs, the narrator begins to identify with the knocker, remembering when narrator had gone around, fixing things at his house, trying to keep it in shape. “The Knocking” is about having nothing worthwhile to do and thus engaging in an activity that is irritating but that one cannot cease doing. The rhythm of the story echoes the repetitive, annoying, meaningless actions. Means creates a timeless universality that allows the reader to become deeply embedded in the story, caught up in a language event that is, paradoxically, both a personal obsession and an aesthetic creation.

“The Tree Line, Kansas, 1934”

This story, which appeared in The New Yorker in 2010, shows how far Means has pushed his fiction toward narratives about the nature of narrative itself. Two Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) agents are on a stakeout in Kansas in 1934. The younger of the two, Barnes, insists that the criminal they are waiting for will not return; the older agent, Lee, says little but is fed up with Barnes’s complaining. After five days of waiting, Barnes is taking a smoke in the trees when Carson, the criminal, and his men drive up; Barnes walks out of the tree line and is cut down by, as the cliché goes, a hale of gunfire. On the surface, this is all that happens in the story.

However, this story quintessentially is about what all stories are about: Something appears to take place in time and space. The first paragraph emphasizes time by repeating: “Five days of trading field glasses. . . . Five days of surveillance. . . . Five days of listening to the young agent named Barnes. . . . Five days of listening to Barnes recount the pattern. . . . For five days Barnes talked. . . . Five days reduced to a single conversation. . . .” The last paragraph emphasizes not the passing of time but a “moment” when Lee “froze up” and Barnes steps forward out of the tree line, dulled by the “persistent tedium of a scene that had gone on for what seemed to his youthful mind an eternity” into “a single ferocious moment” of a “fury of gunfire.” Moreover, space is emphasized in this story. The two men are hiding at the tree line, watching a farm; their pattern of behavior in space and time is to take turns going back into the trees to smoke and watching at the tree line. They try to feel assured that what has been imagined in the Chicago FBI office, using maps and line drawings, properly matches the Kansas reality they are watching. Thus, in time and space, the two men wait for something that is imminent. Barnes considers probability, trying to calculate the patterns of behavior as determined by Carson’s previous movements. This is what all stories are about: time, space, expectation, perceiving patterns, and figuring probabilities—the transformation of the casual into the causal.

In the last paragraph, Barnes has been back in the tree line smoking, feeling a deeper relaxation. As he steps into the gunfire,

The pleasure the story provides lies not in the relationship between the two men but rather in the music it makes about waiting, about being caught in time and space, about trying to predict the future by making patterns out of the past.

Bibliography