NAKED
MEChristian Winn. Dock Street Press, $18 paperback (210p) ISBN: 978-0991065721
Fair weather reader I, rarely does a season pass
without my readying to give up on the short story collection. It’s too much an
insider’s genre, I tell myself, meant for the MFA community and a few zip codes
in Manhattan, Madison or Multnomah County. However, like Michael Corleone with
the mob in Godfather III, every time I think I’m out, story collections pull me
back in.
To be sure, 2014 has been a year of tremendous
collections: George Singleton’s Stray
Decorum, Claudia Smith’s Quarry Light,
Adam Wilson’s What’s Important Is Feeling, Lauren Becker’s If I Would Leave Myself Behind, to name
a few. A quick look at some of the publishers of these titles, Dzanc, Magic
Helicopter, and Curbside Splendor (a label I call home), might make evident
that a reason for this surplus of good story collections is the rise of savvy
small presses. Which makes sense: Who better to step into the breach than
operations with two or ten people on the staff, all equally devoted to the book
as art object and ice axe for the frozen soul. Every indie reader has her list,
but whether your fave is Two Dollar Radio, Civil Coping Mechanisms or
Publishing Genius, I suggest you add Dock Street Press out of Seattle, and what
better way to get familiar with them than their second title, Naked Me, by Christian Winn.
Before Naked
Me arrived at my house I hadn’t heard of the press, hadn’t read any work by
its author, which created for me a very rare experience of utter novelty. From
the book’s handsome production—and brazen placement of images of nipples on the
cover—to the fifteen stories within, I found myself charmed and charged up to
be far more aware of both Dock Street Press and Christian Winn in the future.
As its back cover touts and its fiction foregrounds Winn’s penchant for dealing
with characters on the fringes, bedeviled by bad jobs and bad choices, drugs,
drink, and other vices, inevitable comparisons might be made to Carver, Tobias
Wolff, Denis Johnson, and Willy Vlautin. Such comparisons seem even more
appropriate in the light of the common settings of many of the stories: the
Pacific Northwest and the Inland West. Yet Winn’s work shows more than a hint
of originality; he’s keen to claim territories both emotional and geographical
as his own. To wit, many of the central characters are not locals; they’ve left
behind places for this grim and gloomy section of the lower forty eight,
hopeful for renewal but wary, often to a fault. Take Stephen in “Mr. Formal,”
who arrives in Boise with his philosophy professor father from San Jose, after
“things broke down nasty.” Or Tompkins in “Rough Cut,” who left Seattle with
his mother after “his father left them when he moved south and away four years
ago.” That many of his characters still have opportunities to make choices that
might elevate them from past calamities infuses a sense of optimism in the
stories, releasing them from the occasional grim determinism found in fictions
set in this region.
What’s more, Winn manufactures terrific atmosphere
and setting, rendering worlds through deft detail that conjure up vivid
backdrops to the urgent dramas faced by his central characters. In “Rough Cut,”
“the summer creek runs slow and murky,” where in “False History,” “this desert
valley lolls and dips in patchy shades of brown.” He’s equally adept in some of the stories
set in California, able always to find both the strange in the familiar and
vice versa, thus establishing that sense crucial to story that Jim Thompson
once offered: that “nothing is as it
seems.”
Most significant, though, to me, in Naked Me, is Winn’s formal exploration.
One senses that Winn’s wanting to find forms for his fictions that avoid formula.
Most of the time he does this exceptionally well, handling first and third
person narrators ably, manipulating time through past tense’s retrospection and
present tense’s shocks. Interspersed throughout the collection’s longer stories
are a series of flash fictions or vignettes and none seemed alike; all
possessed an integrity of form that warranted their length, prevented them from
seeming like false starts or empty exercises in mood. And the longer stories
demonstrate attempts to create tension and suspense apart from plot alone. The
title story’s bravura ending hinges on a smart shift in tense and narrative
angle—the narrator telling us mostly what he did not say—and in “Rough Cut,” a
similar move to future tense makes even more aching the present action. An
occasional misfire occurs from time to time—I wanted the wonderful cataloguing
of dead celebrities in “All Her Famous
Dead” to mean more about whom the central character is—but in the main, Winn
seems sure with his devices, adept with artifice. Never does the technique
overshadow the very real men and women with which he populates these stories.
In the main, Naked
Me offers proof that the short story collection isn’t as much on life
support as we fear: it’s still a fine showcase for a writer, like Winn, testing
his strengths against the limits imposed by the forms he embraces. Is this
collection serving as a laboratory for a novel? Who knows. Winn seems a writer
we’ll always be wanting to hear from, no matter what kind of fiction he
fashions, for he has in Naked Me made
that crucial discovery: that the key to most readers’ hearts and minds is not
telling them what they’ve never heard, but finding ways to make the most
humble, the most familiar seem limitless in what they can share. (July 2014)
Purchase Naked
Me HERE.
Reviewer bio: Tom Williams is author of two works of
fiction, The Mimic’s Own Voice and Don’t
Start Me Talkin’. His collection of stories, Among the Wild Mulattos and Other Tales, is forthcoming from Texas
Review Press in 2015.
