Daydreamers
Jonathan Harper. Lethe Press, $12 paperback (164p)
ISBN: 978-1590212967
In the inimitable Gilmore Girls, Lorelai Gilmore is born
into a life of wealth and privilege, a life of strict rules and etiquette, a
life that she finds suffocating. At age
16, she becomes pregnant, and her parents plan out her future: She and Christopher
will get married. Christopher will work
for Lorelai’s father, Richard. Lorelai
will raise a daughter in a stifling house with stifling rules. Not knowing where she is going or what she
ultimately wants, only what she doesn’t want, Lorelai runs away. She settles in the small town of Stars Hollow
and raises her daughter Rory alone, creating a life of pop tarts and coffee and
wacky but loyal friends, a job first managing and then owning a small Inn, and
finally, even a relationship with Luke Danes, the diner owner.
This
was the series I returned to while reading Jonathan Harper’s collection of
short stories: Daydreamers. The characters in these stories often don’t
know what they want, but they are clear on what they don’t: they don’t want a
house full of hovering Aunts, they don’t want a twin bed in “a frilly pink hell
with floral wallpaper and Precious Moments figurines,” they don’t want a life
of religious structure and persecution, they don’t want to be merely
houseboys. What they do actually want,
though, is a bit more shadowy: a half-remembered dream covered in mist. Like so many of us, these characters wander
through life, hoping to stumble head-first into meaning.
This
desire for a bodily transformation, a transcending of the mundane, often leads
these young men into gnawing obsessions that reveal the body at its most
vulnerable. In “Nature,” August becomes
enamored with body modifications and suspensions. In “The Bloated Woman,” Jeremiah finds a dead
woman on the beach who haunts his thoughts.
The unnamed narrator of “Costume Dramas” fixates on his husband’s new
tenant, and in a furious attempt to reconcile a fractured marriage, demands a
violent and intimate reckoning of the body.
“Spank
me,” I said. He gave me a light slap on
my backside, weak and frightened of itself.
I crouched up on all fours. “Do
it again, but hard.” He struck; it barely
stung. “Hurt me. With your belt.”
Often,
in the search for transcendence, these young men find only atrophy. Jeremiah spends his summer taking care of an
old philosophy professor, one with whom he had an affair, now suffering from
dementia. Randal sees a future of
“endless nights on the patio, surrounded by unhappy workers… drinking away
their frustrations,” like Winston, whose eyes are “gray as ash, puffy with long
crow’s feet” or the women with “phlegm-filled laughs.” Before Grant begins a graduate program at
Penn State, he visits Lunch Copeland, a man whose house is filled with empty
birdcages and young boys.
“Years
ago, Lunch had been Grant’s Sunday School teacher and confidant. Back then, he had near mythic qualities: a
sort of suburban Viking, the kind of childhood guardian only found in
children’s books. Now he looked old and
bloated; his once wavy hair was thinning out.
His neck drooped into sagging folds that would need scaffolding to fix.”
In
the end, many of these young men find a moment of grace, but as in Flannery
O’Connor’s stories, these moments are small and transitory; they will not
last. Still, like Lorelai Gilmore, we
care for these young men, and we hope that they will avoid the sand traps and
bottomless pits spread out before them, that eventually they will find their
way.
“The
pool shocked him with coldness…He floated on his back, bringing himself to
perfect stillness. Time moved very
slowly in the dark. There was much left
to do: finish his classes at the tech school, earn a living, eventually find
his own place. His shoulder blade still
felt tender, a small ache but no pain.
It felt like a subtle tapping, a reminder that he’d been daydreaming way
too long. This is what it must feel
like: the weightless sensation, the quiet drifting, only a sharp, subtle
reminder that the ground was still nearby.”
(March 2015)
Purchase Daydreamers
HERE.
Reviewer bio: Melissa Reddish is the author of The Distance Between Us (Red Bird
Chapbooks, 2013) and My Father is an
Angry Storm Cloud: Collected Stories (Tailwinds Press, forthcoming
2015). Her stories, poems, and reviews have appeared in print and online
journals. She teaches and directs the Honors Program at Wor-Wic Community
College on the Eastern Shore of Maryland. When not writing or teaching,
she likes to do stereotypical Eastern Shore things, like eat crabs smothered in
Old Bay and take her Black Lab for long walks by the river.
