Arrested Development

Buffalo Lockjaw

by Greg Ames

2009, Hyperion

Recently, The Believer magazine named their fifth (or so) winner of the annual Believer Book Award. The award went to a book called I Am Not Sidney Poitier, which I have to admit interests me very little. But a few months earlier, the staff of the Believer had sent out a small postcard asking readers for their suggestions for the most moving and inventive works of fiction that they read in 2009.

I suggested on my card Auster's Invisible, Holt's In the Valley of Kings, and Chaon's Await Your Reply, all of which wound up the reader survey shortlist published recently. At the top of the reader list, in which I was far more interested than the staff award, was a novel called Buffalo Lockjaw by Greg Ames. After a short investigation, I discovered that my local library had a paperback copy and I went right over and picked up.

Buffalo Lockjaw, as its title might suggest, takes place in upstate New York. In reading it, I was reminded of a recent article that appeared in the New York Times regarding the maturation (or lack thereof) of Gen X. While Ames's age is not readily apparent (and I am also more than a bit confused about where generations begin and end), Buffalo Lockjaw would seemingly fit rather well into A.O. Scott's explanation of the inherent silliness of the irony-laden anxiety-riddled over-educated under-achievement that seem to typify that particular generation at first glance.

The main character of the book is one such underachiever, a young man named James who has moved to Manhattan to make something of himself and has fallen somewhat short. James, who is now a greeting card writer (much like Joseph Gordon Levitt in 500 Days of Summer, but less of a romantic), has returned for Thanksgiving weekend to his boyhood home in Buffalo, New York.

James's trip home is fraught with interpersonal peril; he attempts, with hesitation, to reintegrate himself temporarily into his home life, which seems to have more or less carried on without him.

His friends still hang out in the backyard drinking beer, getting stoned, grilling hotdogs. James finds it all too easy (and more than a bit eerie) to slip back into these behaviors; it is as though none of his friends have aged a day since his last winter break from college. For these ambition-less townies, James's move to Manhattan is not entirely dissimilar from his semesters at school. his stymied attempts at success in the world are, for all intents and purposes, the continued false starts of those early collegiate attempts at becoming an adult; while he has made nothing of himself yet, he still might.

It seems that James holds his re-admittance into this slacker circle at an arm's length. James is reluctant to socialize with them and caves from boredom, he doesn't flaunt his career in Manhattan in part from embarrassment at what it ultimately amounts to and in part from humility at what it implies about their own stalled lives. But moreover, James is disturbed by what this smooth transition to old social patterns implies about his life: is it possible he hasn't changed as much as he has thought?

To counterpoint this theme of paranoia about the true extent of one's adulthood, James attempts to ingratiate himself to his nuclear family. James's father is a garden variety local charmer who knows the waitresses at the restaurants and remembers the names of people's mothers. James's sister, a lesbian who brings her partner home to visit, is and always will be more successful than James in everything from earning their parents' adoration to social grace to striking out in the world. James's move to Manhattan pales in comparison to his sister's successful career which has taken her to the Pacific Northwest.

James is unable to make an impression on either his sister or his father as much of a success. James seems unable to shake his post-adolescent personality with either his family or friends; the impression he made as a young adult proves too deep to change, or perhaps the distance he has carved out for himself has effectively eliminated the ability for anyone to witness such a change.

Perhaps the person who might be able to afford James a sense of perspective on himself, his fears about not having matured enough or his inability to reconnect successfully, is his mother, who is in the last stages of Alzheimer's.

Part of James's desperation to be taken seriously as an adult is because he has decided to undertake the emotionally devastating project of euthanizing his mother.

Buffalo Lockjaw, then, seems to express rather perfectly the fear that as you grow older and mature, there will be no one to guide you or to recognize the changes you have been through. James is forever to his family and friends as he was at 19 and while James could easily look outward to serious relationships with women or building a family, Ames directs the reader's attention backward, to the past.

Ames seems to be giving voice to the childhood fear that there will be no one to see your success, to appreciate who you are, and that those we suspect might are forever disconnected from us. James has no one from which to obtain the approval he needs to successful strike out as an adult in the world. His return home, with its specifically adult quest to silence his mother's suffering, is disconcerting.

James does not feel confident in his adulthood when he can too easily mirror his adolescent life and where no one can tell him that it doesn't fit him anymore. In James's Buffalo, you can go home again, but you might find you don't like how easily you belong.

"Hardscrabble" Lives

Irish Girl

by Tim Johnston

2009, University of North Texas Press

Recently, I had an opportunity to see David Sedaris read for the second time in a year read at Boston Symphony Hall. Mr. Sedaris is one of my favorite writers and he is an absolute delight to hear read his sardonic, but incredibly vulnerable, prose.

Sedaris recommends a book written by another writer each time he goes on a new book tour. Last year, he was peddling The Braindead Megaphone by George Saunders (for whom I did not particularly care until he published an adorable little story called "Fox 8" in a recent McSweeney's). Sedaris reads from these volumes as part of what I hesitate to call his set. When I saw him most recently, he had selected a book of short stories that recently won the Katherine Anne Porter Prize for short fiction, called Irish Girl. He read a very short excerpt and prefaced his selection by insisting that the stories within the collection were very, very dark.

Irish Girl isn't really as dark as I was led to believe. It's stories are reminiscent of Carver in their focus on blue collar people fumbling their already broken (what a jacket writer would prefer to call hardscrabble) lives.

Tim Johnston's stories are full of empathy for his characters even as he tortures them with the full range of his deus ex machina abilities. Johnston's stories, while well-written, are essentially one of many collections in which uncommonly bad things happen to uncommonly normal people.

The title story of the collection was a notable exception. "Irish Girl" tells the story of a young boy who idolizes his older delinquent brother. He forms a special bond with this brother and watches as his brother smokes pot and cigarettes and generally carouses with other maladjusted teenagers.

The boy's father tries desperately to eliminate the possibly corrosive influence the older boy has on his younger brother, but in doing so alienates the older boy with his judgmental outbursts. The younger boy is swept away by his brother as a birthday present and spends the evening with his friends, including the incredibly beautiful titular Irish girl. At the end of the evening, the boy is dropped home by his brother who disdains to spend an evening with the harried father and is subsequently hit by a train in his car. The younger boy's relationship with his father is forever altered after the tragedy.

While I summarize at length (and also comprehensively), I cannot fully convey the beautiful, sad horror of this story, of what it means to be torn from a parent by allegiance to a spurious idol, of the father's sadness and frustration at his inability to preserve a child's innocence.

The entire collection is very readable and I wouldn't shoo anyone away from reading it in its entirety. However, it is the highly visceral title story with its elegiac tone and empathetic point of view that makes Johnston memorable.

Don't Feed the Bears

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