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{"id":2213,"date":"2020-08-23T09:45:40","date_gmt":"2020-08-23T09:45:40","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lonestar.a1professionals.net\/?p=2213"},"modified":"2020-08-25T02:37:59","modified_gmt":"2020-08-25T02:37:59","slug":"lone-star-review-why-visit-america","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lonestar.a1professionals.net\/?p=2213&lang=ar","title":{"rendered":"Lone Star Review: WHY VISIT AMERICA"},"content":{"rendered":"

A review of Matthew Baker’s new set-in-Texas short-fiction collection, <\/p>\n

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There are textual scholars who suggest that the first hundred pages of Moby Dick<\/em> was Melville\u2019s way of instructing readers on how to read the rest of the novel. In the case of Matthew Baker<\/strong><\/a>\u2019s short fiction collection Why Visit America<\/em><\/strong><\/a>, that Melvillian lesson would be for the reader to expect aesthetically crafted, finely woven and layered storytelling on a challenge-level located somewhere between Saul Bellow and John Updike. Yes, it\u2019s that good.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

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The opening story, \u201cFighting Words,\u201d is the most conventional in terms of both subject matter and composition. Here Baker lets the embarking reader gain sea-legs suitable for the rolling, ocean-deep descriptive storyline of good and bad, power and weakness, anger, pain, sorrow, and regret of middle-school bullying as well as hapless parenting. The subtle genius of a lexicography and academia overlay (\u201cMy brother is a professor of dead languages\u201d) against the ruthlessness of \u201ca lout, a brute, a ruffian\u201d allows Baker to inspect the inner-clocklike workings of power and regret, with a deliciously constructed tale of unresolved, perhaps unresolvable, failure\u2014parental and childhood. The writing, the description, the metaphor is all seamlessly vivid, almost tactile. For the reader, you\u2019re in the narrative\u2014not just reading, but living the story.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

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The writing is accessible and engaging, which is necessary to smooth and ease the complex subtext of human emotions interwoven with themes of competing oppositions in every tale. Throughout, Baker has the literary command of an Andre Dubus, with the raw descriptive power of a Cormac McCarthy or a James Wade. Baker\u2019s subject matter ranges from ordinary to nearly fantasy, but the potent, habitable aesthetics move him closer to Baudelaire\u2019s \u201csupranatural\u201d than the supernatural mainstream fantasy genre. Individual page counts put these works at the longer end of the short-story spectrum, but Baker controls the exposition and the exploration so well that length is not an issue. <\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

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After \u201cFighting Words,\u201d \u201cRites\u201d prods the reader beyond the threshold of convention to the fantastic in a macabre examination of designated mortality\u2014and a chilling human confrontation with ritual and expectation. Baker probes even further into the notion of sentience and humanism in \u201cThe Transition.\u201d The reader, like Mason\u2019s tormented mother, must come to grips with what makes a person human and, in that humanity, where precisely authentic personhood resides.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

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Maybe the most simplistic\u2014which is still a lofty standard in this collection\u2014is \u201cTestimony of Your Majesty,\u201d in which Baker juxtaposes real and figurative consumption, and the result is a bulimic consumerism set against the backdrop of teenage cruelty. This is perhaps the most rudimentary allegory in the book, but the message is nonetheless high impact.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

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By the time the reader reaches the final story, \u201cTo Be Read Backwards,\u201d one would expect to be prepared to take on Baker\u2019s most ambitious challenge\u2014but I was not. Yet that\u2019s part of the captivating brilliance of this collection: certainly, the stories read wonderfully and engagingly without necessarily deep drilling on thematics and meaning. But if the reader is willing and able to deep-dive below a simple surface linear consumption of a well-crafted story, a kaleidoscopic galaxy of time, space, and meaning unfolds. This final, decidedly oppositional story is a uniquely diachronic timeline: not only is the sequence backwards, so is the logic. Baker toys with dimensionality in both time and space, and if you read it carefully, thoroughly, you begin to reopen and reconsider the meaning of all the stories in the collection. <\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

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Then, dear reader, you actually are<\/em> \u201creading backwards.\u201d The end is the beginning, the conventional notion of scene and sequel is unlinked, and looking at the other stories in retrospect, new possibilities, new inferences and meanings, take shape.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

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In this very real way, you\u2019re never really done with this provocative, stunning, aesthetically beautiful, and narratively unique collection of stories. Short fiction doesn\u2019t get any better than this. <\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

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