Lonely Voices

Abstract

Page 27 January–February 2009 Lonely Voices Scott Elliott The Man Back There and Other Stories David Crouse Sarabande Books http://www.sarabandebooks.org 224 pages; paper, $15.95 In The Lonely Voice (1963), Frank O’Connor argues that the short story is the literary form best suited to expressing the otherwise unheard angst of submerged populations, at giving voice to the lonely misfit out of step with a more contented majority. O’Connor would likely approve of David Crouse’s second collection as it chronicles some moments of quiet desperation in the lives of unexpectedly sympathetic male misfits crying out in lonely voices from a variety of stations. As the title indicates, we encounter many of these men as present circumstances force them to acknowledge, once again, and in many cases against their wishes, that they have a history, that they carry around a former, regrettable version of themselves that may arise again at any moment. Or the characters are still on the ropes and stomaching and/or giving the blows that will lead to a break between selves, surviving the experience they will someday look back on as the marker between the men they have become and the men they used to be. These blows come in many forms: a former wife’s potentially career-shattering book, a father’s suicide, the imminent loss of a job, divorce, a son’s attempted suicide, loneliness, the disappearance of a lover, a wife’s discovery of a disturbing addiction. This is literary fiction, so more important than the blows the characters endure is the way they respond and what their reactions reveal about their character. In the complex psychological world of these stories—a world in which characters are not always good witnesses to their own motivations—a heightened awareness of past mistakes and failures does not necessarily lead to an avoidance of the same mistakes the next time around. Instead, these stories implicitly suggest, the mistakes themselves and the interesting trouble the characters get into as a result of these mistakes bring the characters (and careful readers) as close as we can come to powerful emotional truths, the raw material of character itself. Even to classify what the characters do to get themselves into trouble as “mistakes” is problematic in the world these stories forge as many things which could be classified as “mistakes”—for sound reasons based in mainstream morality—may be the best expression of a more primal being. In most cases, the men in this collection no longer enjoy the protection that a false personality, a comfortable material situation, or some other self-delusion might provide. In every case, we see these characters laid bare, and through the laying bare, come to better understand the nature of the mystery informing their actions and our own. Distance from and closeness to self and others is important in this collection. In the collection’s titular story, Sweets, a forty-four-year-old man who has just punched his girlfriend’s ex in a bar realizes how much he and this ex have in common. Crouse writes, “[Sweets] felt sorry for the man in the bar now, for being in the wrong place at the wrong time. He probably didn’t want to have a history either, right? He probably wanted that very much.” The person you damage, the person from whom you might expect you’d like to distance yourself, is likely to be the very one with whom you have the most in common. On one level, the man in the bar is the man back there; on another level, Sweets is the man back there as his present self ponders the question implicit in this phrase: “how much, if at all, have I changed?” Similarly , the very characters convention might compel a reader to condemn may be the ones closest to the reader in his or her secret moments. In addition to Sweets’s redemption through his capacity to empathize with someone he’s punched, he is further redeemed in “The Man Back There” in a quick, almost throw-away moment of aesthetic appreciation for moonlight on a river. The collection is filled with small redemptions...