We Were Giants
Christopher
Bowen. Sunnyoutside Press, $12 hand-sewn chapbook (32p) ISBN: 978-1-934513-42-2
Layered with bands of loss, “on a long enough time line” any aspect of the human experience is apt to repeat. Accomplishment isn’t minimized by its reoccurrence, just as a continual falling short isn’t any less erosive than a singular event. Delving into an archaic emotional landscape, Christopher Bowen uncovers all of the ways that history has rendered us deficient. Perhaps it is only in memory that We Were Giants, but the profound nature of our communal recollection makes our past selves, massive or minuscule, worthy of excavation.
In just eight short-short stories, an evocative antiquity
is unearthed. Revealing through their minor heartbreaks and heroics the
substance of modern life, the chapbook’s characters face an inertia that abides:
underemployed, interpersonally flawed and lacking in vigor, this slim
collection especially explores the emasculation of its men through commonplace relics.
From the pillows that at night whisper to the father who “can’t afford those
things” his daughter deserves, to the wife who “makes eyes at the other
firefighters,” to the retiring preacher sitting below a Monet print and
considering how his “stepping down was like stepping on water lilies,”
experiences fossilize as memories—actual or imagined—and form the indelible
impressions of existence.
Perhaps the most enlightening artifacts are
byproducts of work. What then if a mere trail of fragments remains, like the
father “full of sweat and tears and hunger for something … better” who is
forced to travel “selling things statewide” to find ways to cover the
“immeasurable” cost of life? Or the husband whose personal traces have been
destroyed by the fire he fights, its simultaneous power to set alight and scorch
drawing him to a flame that could explode at any moment. And are the humble vestiges
of faith, embodied in the final sermon, “when he preaches it to his flock and
they see the tired, old man he is” enough to inspire the congregation in the days
to come?
Men “in need of care,” particularly from the women
in their lives, stratify these small fictions. Yet not all narrators are male;
two of the more memorable stories, “The Knocking” and “The Borrowing,” are
textured in their telling as matriarchy makes its mark. By letting “one’s grip
go to gravity’s pull” and settling into roles of cultivator and nurturer (or
flouting such customs), the daughters, mothers, and grandmothers of We Were Giants solidify their heritage. On the contrary, the men are “like
an instant message alert, online but nowhere near talking”: unable to prove
anything through the desire for something “better” but a “lack of skill and
forethought”; convinced that a wife’s flirting “never … means a thing”; or
baffled by love that seems “beyond containing and always seeking.”
Unable to embed into static lives, these men strain
against the immense weight of time. Acting under the enduring notion that
nothing can “reach history books quite so closely or nearly or neatly … [as]
any war fought”—these characters often confront with pointless zeal life’s most
banal battles. The traveling-salesman husband who is earnestly determined to
cover the “unexpected cost of things”; the firefighter who likes to “play with
fire and fight it, wrestling it to the ground like a younger brother” but never
expecting its smoke to “bring tears to [his] face”; and the “half-crescent
bald, gray head” of the suited leader who faces the childhood notion of being
perceived as “yellow” or “chicken” if he walks away from his church. Despite their
many losses, in Bowen’s characters “the fighter’s spirit” prevails.
Because what is
victory to the mortal existence? If everything eventually becomes recollection
and all that remains is what is physically left, why can’t lives have been
great? Who we were may ultimately
matter less than that we were—our
very existence preserved in a thriving living memory. Giants, indeed. (October 2013)
Purchase We Were Giants HERE.
Purchase We Were Giants HERE.
Reviewer bio: Erin McKnight is the publisher of
Queen’s Ferry Press. Her own writing has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize
and W.W. Norton’s The Best Creative Nonfiction, and her reviews of
fiction and poetry can be found in multiple venues. Erin lives in Dallas with
her husband and young daughter.
