A male nanny with subconscious Nabokovian feelings for his eighteen-month old charge. A family splintering apart while the sky literally – and slowly – falls down around them. A society actively working to earn the second coming of Christ. A husband and son struggling to come to terms with the loss of their wife and mother during a power outage. These are the fantastical and heartbreakingly realistic stories that make up Kevin Brockmeier's debut collection, Things That Fall From the Sky.
Brockmeier's collection almost defies description, but these stories could almost be described as fairy tales, or in some cases, morality tales. Magical realism exists alongside mental illness and grief, raising interesting questions of the true state of the American psyche. The characters that populate these stories are driven by love, or something akin to it, and their lives are shaped by forces outside their control, as described by the narrator of "Apples:"
"The fall of my thirteenth year was a time when all the important events in my life seemed to cluster together like bees. On the same sun-bright afternoon that I won the school spelling bee, my parents sat across from me in the living room and told me that they no longer loved each other, and a great gray ocean of wishlessness filled our house. Days like this would surface around me every few weeks: I was chased to my front door by a stray dog on the same day that I had my braces removed. I answered the phone to an obscene caller on the same night that my mom went to live with a stranger. And on the same November day that I received my first kiss from Allison Downey, I watched my Bible teacher, Coach Schramm, get killed by a bucket."
The writing in these stories is sometimes dreamy, sometimes hallucinatory, sometimes deeply realistic and other times rooted in fantasy, but never is there a sense of a writer losing control. Brockmeier's language and characters join forces to create stories that are sometimes creepy, as in "These Hands" with its overly devoted male nanny; other times, such as "Space," with its father and son facing grief, Brockmeier is muted and heartbreaking. And occasionally he's laugh-out-loud funny, as in "A Day in the Life of Half of Rumpelstiltskin," which brings the fairy tale character – or half of him, as is the case – into the present time to face to trials and tribulations of modern life. Yet even when laughing at Half of Rumpelstiltskin's exploits, there is a glimpse of tremendous pain that gives the whole, absurd premise life and poignance.
Brockmeier is a highly imaginative, deeply involving writer with a world of tales to tell, a world larger than the everyday one we all cope with. His worlds, even when based on fantasy, aren't escapist; they're created to illuminate the effort and pain involved in living in our own, smaller world.
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