Wilson Knut's Witticisms

W.W. Norton & Company released Thomas Lynch’s first collection of short fiction today.  Lynch is probably best known as the “poet-undertaker” and author of The Undertaking, his meditative collection of essays on, you guessed it, being an undertaker.  The Undertaking was a finalist for the National Book Award.

In “Matinée de Septembre,” protagonist Aisling Black  sums up the themes of these stories with what she teaches her writing students, “Sex and death… are the only subjects worth thinking about… Love and Grief, she would further instruct them, share the one body.”   No surprise, Lynch, like most writers, sticks to what he knows – death, loss, grief… and well… I guess sex.

The collection opens with “Catch and Release,” a story about Danny, a young fishing guide who comes to terms with the death of his father by taking his father’s ashes fishing with him in a thermos.  He visits spots on the river that spark memories of his father, who taught Danny to fish. When Danny was restless and sullen after his mother died, Danny’s father encouraged him to do what he loved best.  “‘The Lord,’ the churchman told his son, ‘has a fondness for fishermen.’”  The story ends with a little twist.

“Bloodsport,” in my opinion, is the best story in the collection.  Martin, a funeral director, has to pick up the body of twenty-year-old Elena, who was shot by her husband in a murder-suicide.  Martin first met Elena when he planned the funeral for her father.  She was fifteen at the time, and Martin had an inappropriate infatuation with the girl that he skillfully hid.  He tries to fathom Elena’s fate:

How could someone kill someone so coldly, someone with whom you had made plans, had sex, watched television, promised love? It left him with a functional ambiguity.  Martin tried to assemble a resonable sentence in which the last phrase went like and then he shot her twice, because… but he was always unsuccessful.

We get Elena’s tragic story through Martin’s restructuring of events as he goes through the  process of preparing the body and comforting Elena’s mother as she makes plans.  Lynch, who is obviously very familiar with this process, skillfully writes:

…embalming was only part of the process of laying out the dead, which was only part of the process of the funeral, and the funeral was only a part of the larger concept of a death in the family, and a death in the family was a more manageable prospect, more generic, somehow, than the horror–round and witless and recognizable and well beyond his professional abilities–of a lovely girl, grown lovelier as a woman, who leaned on him and counted on him and had kissed him once as if she meant it and who moved away and then got shot like an animal in the woods by a man about whom Martin knew next to nothing.

In “Hunter’s Moon,” we meet Harold Keehn who has lost two wives to divorce, one wife to cancer, and a daughter to an accident.  In the previously mentioned “Matinée de Septembre,” Professor Aisling Black, whose husband died long before the  story begins, is trying to deal with the loss of her youth.  Both stories have twists at the end that most readers will see coming.  I think Lynch is trying to capture too many details in both of these stories, and in doing so, he loses the characters.

The novella and namesake of the collection, Apparition, is about Adrian Littlefield, a Methodist pastor whose wife has left him for another man and a more exciting artistic lifestyle.  Adrian loses his job at the church, but goes on to write a bestselling self-help book for divorcees, gets rich, and has lots of meaningless sex with strange women on the lecture circuit.  As Adrian makes a day-trip to the site of his wife’s first infidelity the day after one of his speaking engagements, he recollects how he got where he is and the story unfolds.

After his wife leaves, the local Catholic priest, who drinks, smokes dope, and cusses like a sailor, leads Adrian astray.  Adrian sings The Beatles’ Let It Be in front of the congregation after a night of partying with the Catholic priest and sleeping with the babysitter. He basically becomes sacrilegious and makes up his own rules about marriage, divorce, and sex. And although Adrian has written a bestselling book on how to handle a divorce and how it can be a God-sent good thing, he really hasn’t come to terms with it at all.

Again, I felt that this story is bogged down in details that don’t add any real value.  We learn a little too much about the priest, about the babysitter, about the lecture circuit, about the investigation into his wife’s fling, about the old lady who gives him a tour of the island where his wife first cheated on him.  Ironically, Lynch gives the old lady, Gloria, the defining lines in the novella:

The young these days are so unhappy, so impatient, so full of expectations.  All we wanted was to survive it. To be together. To get through, Bob and me, you know, and for the children …Nowadays they just want too much.  Whatever they have, they think there must be more.  They want so much they don’t know what they want.

All in all the flaws in these stories are nothing that couldn’t be fixed with careful editing. The seeds of stories here are engaging. The characters and themes try to capture humanity when it has been dealt the most devastating blows and reminds us of compassion, love, humor, and life.