On the book jacket, the blurbist (blurber?) describes Taylor's prose as "crystalline, spare, and oddly moving". This seems to me an uncommonly bad sign that you might be writing outside of the norm of narrative expectation and this is certainly true of this collection of stories. In this case, the subject matter is not especially surprising of modern short story writers; most of the stories in this collection are about aimless anarchists and disaffected youths. Most of the stories are written with typically preternatural adolescent malaise and ironic affectation that not-so-successfully disguises a deep inner turmoil about some of the most basic ontological problems of living.
So all of that is perfectly in line with most twenty- or young thirty-somethings publishing short fiction. What does set Justin Taylor apart from his peers (and perhaps accounts for the 'oddly moving' descriptor) is his utter self-abnegation. Taylor's stories are so much an exploration of the world and people around him that he seems to largely discount the importance of a narrator.
Taylor's stories are almost reverse-solipsistic - the world only exists insofar as other people do for his narrators to obsess over, to observe. And any amount of self-worth comes from one's capacity to surround oneself with interesting characters - "you are who you love". Most of the stories revolve around a basically indistinct narrator cataloguing the idiosyncrasies - physical, social, emotional - of various people who pass through his life.
Two stories, for example, are written about the elusive, emotionally distant singer of an anarchist punk band and the narrator's overwhelming desire to make her notice him. Another story is about a man who exhausts himself sleeping with a girl who's spoken for and lusting after the skate boarder whose pants hang deliciously low at the deli where he works.
The effect is that the stories exude, paradoxically, distant intimacy. Each of the stories is written in first person, which is a convenient way for an author to disguise his narrator or his lack of insight into his narrator. Taylor's narrator's voice is sharp in its insights on other people but these narrators are virtually indistinguishable from one another; each seems to blend into the next with the exception of rare conspicuous deviations in minor demographic variables like age.
It is inevitable that when a first person narrator fails to adopt a convincing characteristic voice - especially when that voice is revisited over and over in a collection of stories - that a reader begin to substitute the author for that collective narrative voice. The game then becomes exploring an author's psyche rather than exploring an author's worldview through a character's psyche. Every story becomes revealing in terms of what it shows us about the author, like eavesdropping on a friend's intimate conversation or seeing someone naked for the first time. It's intriguing for all the wrong reasons; when Taylor's narrators display casual bisexual tendencies, for example, my interest is purely voyeuristic.
(This reader-author voyeurism is partially, perhaps, my problem with memoir.)
The trouble with this dynamic is that it places the reader in a place of judgment over the author, rather than the reverse. Taylor's inability to flesh out truly idiosyncratic first person narrators reads as his attempt to disguise his own presence in these narrators and imparts a minor feeling of victory when he reveals himself as opposed to when an author prompts a moment of self-discovery.
This is not to disparage the quality of Taylor's characterizations of his secondary characters, the objects of his narrators' lust. His collection is full of vibrant characters who struggle to distance themselves from their existential sorrow and morose, apathetic characters who disregard common sense approaches to safety in true anarchic spirit. These characters are fluid sometimes, but have some essential element of truthfulness about them. In this way, Taylor's stories feel refreshingly modern to me. The characters here feel an accurate portrayal of what I hesitate to call my generation.
His friends, with their raucous spirit nearly brimming over with frustration at the difficult problem of discovering how to live and their self-effacing irony about their own sadness, remind me a great deal of my own friends. I suppose then, that part of my discomfort with Taylor's narrative ambiguity is the role it casts me in by extension - that I, too, am but an observer wrapped in lusting and idealizing and mourning the parade of people around me like satellites easy to make out in the sky but too far to touch.
One of his narrators remarks at one point that "the world is not brimming over with grace, but it does have some." This sentiment (I hesitate to call it that; it feels cheap) speaks not only to the gratefully melancholic mood of Taylor's book but to a certain extent my own ethos (if I can be said to have one). It seems that Taylor would do well to turn this principle inward and to be unafraid to find some self-worth beyond his adoration of broken, beautiful people. And I suppose I could take my own advice.
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