“My Father Moves Through Time Like a Dirigible and Other Stories”
Author: Gregg Cusick
Publisher: Livingston Press
Pages: 172
Price: $30.00 (Hardcover)
In an increasingly difficult publishing environment , The Livingston Press at The University of West Alabama continues to issue solid, readable fiction. This volume of stories is the winner of Livingston’s Tartt First Fiction Award. The author, Gregg Cusick, has published in a number of good journals including the “Florida Review,” “The Saturday Evening Post” and the “North Carolina Literary Review.” This is his first collection.
These 14 stories, ranging from 6 pages to 27, are not typical tales of epiphany—the moment a character has an insight, changes direction, or learns something.
These are fairly sophisticated explorations of problems, actual philosophical issues, as they pop up in characters’ lives.
The first of these is time, with many of its troublesome variations.
In “Ghost of Doubt” we see Dr. Hunter, a college literature teacher, compulsively lecturing on the novel “Lord Jim.” There is a moment in Conrad when the protagonist, Jim, changes his life forever with a single act of panic and cowardice, abandoning the 600 passengers on a ship he thinks is sinking.
Hunter was 20 years old on a troop ship in the English Channel when the German torpedo struck. In their selfish panic, the Belgian crew abandoned the soldiers and Hunter was saved only by chance. Teaching Conrad’s book takes Hunter repeatedly back in time to that moment, causing near paralysis, but he can’t leave it alone.
The title story is narrated by an 83-year-old man who in 1925, at age 4, had the dirigible “Shenandoah” pointed out to him by his father. The “Shenandoah” crashed in a storm soon afterwards. He’s obsessed, determined to write a play based on the fate of dirigible, but he is not absolutely sure he ever saw it. Fact is indistinguishable from fiction. Memory and truth depend, he admits, “on one’s point of view, where one places one’s tripod and starts (and stops) the camera rolling.”
Along parallel lines is “Schrödinger’s Cat for Inmates and Baristas.” The protagonist, Mabe, a little pun there, is explaining the conundrum of Schrödinger’s cat to a waitress. A cat in a closed box is destined for death. At any given moment, is it alive or dead? Or both? Mabe is in correspondence with Granger, a convicted killer on death row who writes thoughtful, “sensitive” letters.
Granger was abused as a child. Is Granger a brutal monster or a victim and sap taking the fall for others? Or both?
Apart from the thematic concerns of time and memory, Cusick is also a practitioner of metafiction, a technique popularized by Borges and Barth, especially in “The Floating Opera,” but now out of vogue. A number of his narrators call attention to their roles as narrators.
In a story set in Oaxaca, Mexico, the narrator is observing a writer who is observing and taking notes on the actions of his wife, a professor of architecture, some students, some crooked cops, and a Mexican drug kingpin who has firm plans to go straight by opening a cell phone business.
The volume closes with a humorous story set in a small radio station, with a fascinating taxonomy of callers-in: “the suck-up . . . the know-it-all . . . the conspiricist . . . the irrelevant non-sequitur” and “the genuine questioner.” I guess these five groups would include most of the population.
Don Noble is host of the Alabama Public Television literary interview show “Bookmark with Don Noble.” A shorter form of this review was originally broadcast on Alabama Public Radio.
