Gigantic Failures: Disconnected
Stories
Mark
Anthony Cronin. Small Victories Press, $14.95 paperback (250p) ISBN:
9780989178303
“The
labyrinth is the only feasible model of the Universe,” a character in Mark
Anthony Cronin’s short story collection, Gigantic
Failures, explains to a friend who’s more interested in rolling another
joint. While this might, at first glance, seem like insouciant stoner
philosophizing, the statement speaks to a number of deeper truths that echo
throughout the text – the difficulty of escaping one’s circumstances, the
enduring pain of paths not taken, the inevitability of defeat, the disturbing
possibility of a world that naturally favors disappointment over joy. If that
seems like a lot of heavy stuff to tackle in one slim volume, it is, and Cronin
is more than up to the task in this darkly fatalistic, subtly caustic and
surprisingly uplifting debut from a new voice as deadly (and dead-on) as it is
promising.
The
book is subtitled Disconnected Stories,
but not because of any thematic incongruities between the pieces. Rather, the nine
stories’ characters are bound by an ubiquitous sense of disconnect, the unavoidable
creep of isolation in antisocial lives that often feel as if they’ve been
boiled down to choose-your-own-alienation adventures. In order to thwart his
overbearing parents and their flawed perceptions of success, a boy must retreat
into an ocean of solitude. An already lonely man becomes increasingly unstable
while obsessing over a girl he only knows through a webcam. An actor finds it nearly
impossible to reconcile his inner life with the scarred personas he’s paid to
play. These lost and losing souls are, for the most part, products of a technologically
saturated, consumer friendly modernity where physical interactions have been degraded
to “Facsimiles” of belonging, where the goal is only to want “to look
absolutely human. Normal, totally supposed to be there doing what I was doing,”
agonizing moments of rehearsed gesticulating before returning to the comfort of
detached voyeurism that really isn’t that comfortable, either.
Cronin
does not distance himself from his characters like a media pundit vaguely
bemoaning the poverty of his or her “culture.” Writing with a deftness that
suggests a deep kinship, if not first-hand familiarity, with the lives he
chronicles, he allows the reader full access into the fascinatingly scarred interior
worlds of people with decidedly ordinary exteriors. By fully exposing the
entrails of the otherwise unnoticeable everyman, he imbues his narrators with a
morbid universality, a sense that the struggle against (and in spite of) one’s
natural circumstances is as old and as futile as time itself, a futility that
is wonderfully apparent in every razor-flick of a daily shave, in every bite of
another solo Waffle House dinner. It is hard, if not impossible, not to see a
part of oneself in the characters’ emotional arcs, quiet build-ups that are
never quite pure rage or pure bliss, but always complex enough to be undeniably
human: “I’d tear up, not like crying or nothing, but you know how you get when
you’re laughing so hard. You just can’t help it.”
Gigantic Failures’
greatest strength is how it fuses the poetic and the crunch of the street,
seamlessly transitioning between a wide range of voices and perspectives – a
quintessential trailer park slacker, a middle-aged husband saddled with the
burden of his vegetative wife and a literary-minded son he can’t understand, a
1930s actor-turned-businessman who happens to be a childhood friend of Howard
Hughes – each written with a confidence that leaves little doubt of its
credibility. It is a testament to Cronin’s ability that he can juggle a variety
of forms, from dialogue-free neo-fables to first-person narratives to page-long
sketches of mental incineration, and not have any of them glare too
conspicuously in the reader’s memory. Instead, they serve to amplify the whole,
smoldering variations lighting the same path toward the oldest void.
Two
of the book’s best stories, “The Weight of Certain Bodies in Water” and
“Daedalus, The Bastard!” contain instances of a character shooting bullets into
a pool. One interpretation of the evoked image is that it’s another example of
inevitable failure, water as a buffer rendering impotent even the most
well-aimed shot. But I prefer to take the opposite approach, that the water, the
unfettered pursuit of individuality, is the sole means of escape from the
bullets life constantly showers, a conduit offering the possibility of creating
one’s own mythology, to find a peace “where he could sit for a while,
weightless and absent from the world.” The worst failure, Cronin is telling us,
would be to stop swimming. (June 2013)
Purchase
Gigantic Failures HERE.
Reviewer
bio: Chris Vola's recent work appears in Monkeybicycle, The Fat City Review, McSweeney's
Internet Tendency, and The Lit Pub. You can find him being mildly weird and
offensive at @ChrisVola.
