From time to time the natural world creeps into Gigantic, Marc Nesbitt’s debut collection of short stories, and little is generative or beautiful about it: the sun is " arrogant, " trees are " furious, " animals are greasy or fungus-covered or disemboweled. What’s more, the grotesqueness of nature seems an even bleaker reflection of the parade of humanity that populates Gigantic, as characters booze-dawdle through worlds stinky with desolation and futility, coming across as only slightly less hapless, diseased, or nasty than the various critters.
Gigantic follows persons whose emotions are muffled to the point of numbness and whose miscommunications sometimes border on comedy. Its style is clever and seductive but on inspection can begin to feel calculated and cursory. Nesbitt, who was hailed by the New Yorker as a 2001 Debut Fiction Writer, is a master of metaphor and simile: his work glows with poetic images and a vibrancy that makes your brain snap to attention. His no-fat, all-muscle technique is perfect for detailing the gap between emotional paralysis and the yearning to feel. But in the end, the collection frustrates because, after all the surface burn and dazzling word groupings, Gigantic often seems more about style than about genuine emotion or the lack thereof.
Nesbitt’s characters are often racially mixed, yet only in the first story, " The Ones Who May Kill You in the Morning, " does race — or class — spin the action toward a conclusion. And this tale is unsatisfying because the culminating action — one of the black workers flings a chair through a window where the rich folk are dancing — feels as if it had come out of nowhere and would lead to nowhere.
It’s not the only story that seems to hang in thin air. Nesbitt packs his tales with eccentrics and strange details, but Gigantic works best when the characters bounce against each other, as in the break-up tale " Chimp Shrink and Backwards " and especially " What Good Is You Anyway? " The latter follows a young half-black guy in a status-free job (he sells mattresses). The narrator’s one-legged, alcoholic, ex-jailbird father drops him off at the bus stop, where he watches a car get smashed under a truck. Such a scene makes him smile and " for the first and last time in months truly feel blood in every limb, present and accounted for. " He’s so crippled emotionally — and so aware of it — that it’d be hard not to feel pity. And his conversations with his father are funny and real, filled with the non sequitur conversations of people who care about each other but don’t know what to say. " ‘You shouldn’t smoke,’ I say. ‘I don’t have a leg,’ he smiles. "
" What Good Is You Anyway? " ends with a sad sweetness that’s surprising to discover under Gigantic’s hard shell. Father and son drink together in the backyard, and father clinks son’s glass, " which might seem a little thing, but you don’t know my father. " Actually, that’s debatable: Nesbitt has portrayed the poor old crackpot with such clarity and compassion, he’s all too visible and familiar.
The title story is also melancholy and affecting. Fiddy works at the zoo, where the tiger has green gums, the monkeys are balding and insane, and Clarice the elephant throws a rock at him at him before he gets fired and goes on a bender. He reflects: " I’ll miss Clarice. She made my mornings, shaking her head in the sun. That’s why I liked that place: this rock, her enormous head. The tiger on its back, tongue out, letting me hose the dirt off its belly. I should’ve brought Clarice birthday cakes every day, hand-fed her gourmet lettuce. "
It’s one of the truest emotional flashes in the book, and it continues with Fiddy considering Clarice " wailing in her cage " and wondering whether he shouldn’t have mercy-killed her before he left, and maybe " done the monkeys, too, " with a machete. Or maybe " gas pellets in the ventilation shafts, poisonous vegetables. " Such pungently sicko thoughts. Throughout Gigantic, Nesbitt has invented a host of similarly unorthodox characters in gloomy situations. Too bad more of them aren’t like Fiddy, who’s so believable in his drunken musings. His empathy for the animals in the zoo leaves a more enduring mark than much of the stylistic zap of Gigantic.
Marc Nesbitt reads at the Kendall Café on Tuesday, March 26, as part of the " Earfull 2 " series. Call (617) 661-0993, or go to www.earfull.org
