When I was a kid, flying with my parents from Maine to Minnesota to visit family, I would look out the airplane window, fascinated by the geometrical weirdness of the upper Midwest. New England always looked like a mess, random and haphazard, neighborhoods built along unruly rivers and roads, everything curved and bent like the bristles of an old broom. But from my bird’s-eye view, the Midwest appeared clean, almost stenciled, and the houses looked uniform, nondescript, just boxes fastidiously arranged into rows and columns. Yet, because I knew my own family, I also knew what kind of strange pains could exist inside those tidy shapes.
Reading the stories in Christopher Merkner’s The Rise & Fall of the Scandamerican Domestic reminded me of those Minnesota-bound flights. Merkner’s voices are uniform, his writing tidy and unadorned—yet each of these stories holds eccentricities and horrors behind its bland exterior.
Each story takes “domesticity” as its setting and/or theme, then mutates the familiar. One character is indifferent to his uncle’s grotesque death and, instead, wants only to fuck the pig sitting on his lap. Another character exchanges sexual IOUs with his wife whenever one of them completes a newborn-related chore. In one story, a husband’s fantasies of divorce become realer than his marriage. Elsewhere, another husband hires a woman to pretend to be his wife in an elaborate charade, and then attempts to seduce her. For one couple, the painting of a house becomes an extended and explicit metaphor for trying to conceive (I think…).
Then there’s the violence, which exists alongside the banality of domestic life; as a result, many of these stories feel like David Foster Wallace’s definition of the word Lynchian. A mother and her baby are the victims of a hit and run. Dogs get their throats slit. Children are drowned. “Of course I entertained violent acts,” a character confides at one point. “I am only human.” In Scandamerican Domestic’s world, humanity is a dangerous affliction.
Merkner is a talented writer who has put his gifts in the service of crafting something truly unpleasant. Despite the provocative nature of the content, the language is bland and the characters feel featureless—just gobs of plastic shaped like exaggerated approximations of the human form. Merkner writes each story in the first-person, and each first-person voice feels the same. (Only “The Cook at Swedish Castle” breaks this monotony.)
Blandness, I believe, is Merkner’s point. Consider the fascinating “Time in Norrmalmstorg.” In this story, the narrator takes his four- and three-year-old kids to another kid’s birthday party, at which the neighborhood children beat a piñata to death. When the narrator voices concern about such violence, it leads to a series of attempted murders, with the narrator himself the victim. But his tone remains detached, uninflected: “It crosses my mind with more certainty and clarity now that I have been shot and that these people are attacking me and that I am in danger. I cannot move my extremities.” The narrator seems unable to work up much passion about the violence directed his way, uninvolved in his own life even during its most dramatic moments.
In fact, many of Merkner’s characters are unable to muster much involvement in their lives. And after 203 pages of this, I had some trouble myself. I had become one of Merkner’s mannequins, indifferent to the violence of a story like “When Our Son, 36, Asks Us for What He Calls a Small Loan,” in which a son casually stabs his mother. When no character takes anything seriously, it’s hard for the reader to either. One of Merkner’s characters—a doctor—says that most of his patients “need someone to scare the shit out of them.” Many of Merkner’s characters need the same thing. But in a book with so much depravity, how can anyone be scared shitless? How can anyone—these characters, or even the book’s readers—not simply become desensitized to the horrible things that happen?
All of this purposeful monotony almost feels worth it when Merkner arrives at the collection’s final story, titled “Last Cottage,” which focuses on a lakeside community’s hatred of the Larsons, a family that visits each summer, refusing to sell the property to developers. “Last Cottage” has a first-person narrator too, but the narrator speaks for the community, observing the Larsons as they respond to their neighbors’ attempts to run them off. Merkner barely tries to make a real “character” of the narrator, instead creating a voice that lingers somewhere between The Virgin Suicides and The Great Gatsby, alternating between ghostly observation and extreme investment in the story’s outcome.
“Last Cottage” is the scariest story here because it seems the least constricted by its absurdity and, as a result, the most unpredictable. For 25 remarkable pages, Merkner relinquishes the chokehold on his style, staring down cruelty—in other words, that human propensity to “[entertain] violent acts”—and following wherever it leads, examining why people destroy other people. While many of these stories are purposefully glib, “Last Cottage” is brave. It’s the most painful work here, but also the most tonally complex, making a mosaic of horror, comedy, rhapsody, and tragedy.
“Now we know they know us,” the narrator says at the end of “Last Cottage.” And by the end of The Rise & Fall of the Scandamerican Domestic, I felt I was just getting to know Christopher Merkner—not only the talented writer of this intriguing collection, but also the extraordinary writer he will become when he allows himself to lose control, instead of forcing his craziness into tidy geometry.
