Within the last couple months, a handful of complex fictional works have traveled to the kinds of rural locations that erudite artists often leave behind, and have dug around in unpaved parking lots and browsed broken-down thrift stores. These works—among them Mike Harvkey’s In the Course of Human Events, Katherine Faw Morris’ Young God, and Michael Parker’s All I Have in This World—have attempted to capture the grittiness of life in the middle-of-nowhere, infusing every word with grime, leaving the reader with the sense of having spent a day working under the sun, face decorated with sweat and dirt, lungs packed with dust.
Novelist John Brandon’s first collection, Further Joy, feels akin to the aforementioned novels in spirit, if not totally in style. Many of these eleven stories take place in areas “of unnamed, interchangeable churches”—the kind of town “whose recommendation [is] its very lack of recommenders.” Unlike those other books, Brandon’s prose is pristine and clear-eyed. He hovers above his subjects and locations without getting too close, rarely inhaling the dust clouds kicked up by the passing motorcycles and eighteen-wheelers.
This remove makes sense, for Brandon tells his stories from the perspective of outsiders, a narrative motif signaled by his very first sentence: “Since Garner had been back…” In the opening story, “The Favorite,” Garner returns to his small hometown after losing a high paying job (he made a series of borderline-legal financial decisions). Settling in with his mother, he tries to negotiate a much smaller life than he was used to living in the city, accepting compliments from his mother’s friends about what “a fine young man” he is, watching local football games, and attempting to rekindle a high school romance. But Garner’s “own gestures often [feel] odd to him, forced,” and soon he begins scheming to return himself to his former financial status through the same kind of shady, illegal dealings that lost him his job in the first place.
Most of Brandon’s other characters find themselves in similar situations, trying to negotiate their new lives in uncomfortably small places: a woman visits her friend in the Chicago suburbs, finding herself drawn to her friend’s teenage son; a little league player visits a former “hotshot financial advisor” (now a bitter alcoholic) to make a far-fetched business proposition; a man for whom “an espresso drink would be, at this point, an extravagant expenditure” tries to restart his life after a nasty breakup, but instead finds himself obsessing over the seven human brains that have inexplicably appeared in his spare room. In this latter story especially, Brandon demonstrates his gifts of patience and understatement. (After all, it’s special kind of writer who waits four pages to mention human brains suddenly appearing on a floor.) But sometimes Brandon is too patient and understated, and a few stories feel slight, lacking depth or conflict—ideas for stories rather than stories: there’s the lite sci-fi of “The Midnight Gales,” the stylistic oddity of “Further Joy” (which seems to ape Rick Moody’s masterpiece “Boys”), and the muted emotions of “Naples. Not Italy.” But even in these semi-misfires, Brandon retains his sense of—and affection for—characters adrift, wandering society’s margins.
