SUCH
A GOOD BOY
Josh Olsen. CreateSpace
Independent Publishing, $5.99 paperback (98p) ISBN: 978-1495311642
Olsen’s Such a Good Boy is a solid collection of
flash fiction. Not only are these deeply personal short pieces complete in and
of themselves, they also fit together as an autobiographically themed
collection. Olson has an eye for the ostensibly insignificant, which he uses to
strip down the finer details of human connection and abstract communication.
This is particularly evident in the story “Then I…” where the narrator becomes
obsessed by the prospect of connecting with a previous owner/reader of Richard
Pryor’s memoir “Pryor Convictions.” What stood out most about the book for this
narrator, more than anything else, wasn’t even a part of the text. It was an
arrow. A simple, black arrow that some previous reader had scribbled in the
margins that pointed to the one and only underlined sentence in the entire
book: “Then I stabbed the white motherfucker in the back six or seven times.” (From
“Then I…” p.10)
Through childhood
reminiscences, parental confusion, crude imaginings and unhealthy fantasies, Olson pours himself onto the page with an
unabashed honesty. He pokes at the absurdity of life by mercilessly
assassinating his own character, using longstanding personal failings and
hypocrisy as a paradigm for the larger issues at hand. And they are issues he
is not necessarily interested in resolving as he makes comment on the pain of
loss, inadequacy, sickness and death.
“I
would move in with my maternal grandparents, my mom, with my two sisters,
would
rent a small, one bedroom apartment, and my brother would remain in
the
custody of his dad, the man I would come to demonize in my memories and
poems
for lording over us with his brooding, pessimistic nature and
unpredictable
fits of blind rage.
But
now, separated by time and geography, I often find myself thinking, who
could
blame him?
An
unrepentantly unfaithful wife.
A
spoiled, adopted son who was ashamed to call him dad.
He
should have been the fucking poet of the family.
And,
who knows, maybe he was.”
(from
“Home Movies” p.52)
A substantial portion
of these stories are told through the narrator's imagination. Olson lets the
lines between reality bleed into the protagonist’s imagined reactions and
fantasised outcomes. It is this layered form of story building that makes these
smoke-long tales work so well. In some cases, with only a mere paragraph, he
covers a multitude of possibilities by simply looking at an object or
day-to-day situation from various, unexpected angles:
“I
wished that he would turn and acknowledge me, so I could give up my game, walk
back to the car, and go home. But he didn’t. I put my left hand in the pocket
of my flannel jacket and contorted it into the shape of a pistol. It was only
my hand, but the adrenaline coursed through my body.”
(From
“Trigger” p.9)
For covering such heavy
topics, Such a Good Boy never feels
like too much of a weighty read. Olson is sometimes bluntly sarcastic almost to
the point of slapstick, sometimes cynically sharp and often poignant with his
cutting wit. This book is not light, but the tragic elements are lightened by
his gift for pinpointing the funny aspects of misfortune. There is a resounding
sadness in his prose, along with a sense of injustice and anger which
punctuates his humorous approach to storytelling. Essentially this is a
collection that concerns itself with how people interact with each other. This
examination of human behaviour is told through several underlying themes.
Nostalgia, obsession, responsibility, heroes and family are all dissected and
reassembled as Olson illuminates the frailty of our complicated species. Here
is an author who realises that each word has to justify itself within its own
sentence. Furthermore, he recognises that each sentence ought to stand alone
while strengthening its predecessors as well as its descendants. Such a Good Boy is an example of what Flash
Fiction can and should be: precise in its execution, full of purposeful
substance, and, most importantly, sure to provoke various types of emotional
response in its reader. (September 2014)
