Nocturnal America by John Keeble
University of Nebraska Press, 2006, 267pp. $26.95
Reviewed by Jon Baskin
1.1.07
The jacket copy for John Keeble’s award-winning collection of short stories, Nocturnal America, announces that the nine stories in the book “hinge on love.” This turns out to be misleading. In fact, the stories hinge on two of life’s more prosaic constants, work and death—and they are suffused, not with love, but with loss.
Keeble’s stories are set in the rural, depopulated tableau of the Pacific Northwest, where men and women are adept with chains, transmissions, planks, levers, metal pails, pickups, batteries, four-by-fours and winches, but clumsy with their feelings. His characters build their own houses and kill their own food, lamenting the growth of the “big farmers” and the corporatized economy, which threatens to ruin “the mix of people and work.” Generally self-sufficient, hardworking and unreflective, even their social lives revolve around helping one another do things like fix tractors and build barns.
Death, whether feared, remembered, or discussed, functions again and again to jolt Keeble’s characters out of their routines and make them contemplate something they cannot fix with tools, no matter how they might try. In the title story, Fay takes a job as a kitchen manager on a freight ship to mollify her grief over her husband’s death. “Such simplicity as cleaning and refilling bottles, she found to be what she most needed,” Keeble writes. And yet, scattering her husband’s ashes out over a river at the end of the story, Fay remains as “confused” and “terrified” as she had been at the beginning. “The Chasm” chronicles the mind-numbingly difficult work involved in Jim and his wife’s attempt to build their own house outside Spokane. The house’s symbolic significance revolves around the two deaths that book-end the story—no matter how much “insulation” Jim uses on his family’s house, he remains unsheltered from the hard facts of mortality. Five other stories in the collection, including the prayerful “Zeta’s House” and the concluding novella, “Freeing the Apes,” begin with a body gone cold. In nearly every case, the action of the story consists of a man or woman attempting (unsuccessfully) to insulate themselves from their pain at the loss of a loved one through work.
At its best, Keeble’s prose matches the workaday stoicism of these men and women. In “The Transmission,” an old man with “colorless” hands lays a hauling chain onto a tractor “with the air of one to whom nothing is extraordinary.” In “The Chasm,” Keeble catalogues Jim’s daily hardship building his house in winter: “The bathroom trap froze every day. He thawed it with candles, a torch, and finally worked out a dangerous system with an electric heater placed inside a makeshift tent. He insulated the floor. He cut the bats and shoved them under the house, crawled after them, dragged them around, and placed them up between the joists. It took a week.” During a small-town xenophobic outbreak in “Chickens,” the narrator’s mother and father discuss the persecution of a local German. Their language is terse, simple—it would be Hemingwayesque, except where the former conveyed robust machismo, the latter substitutes an exhausted pragmatism:
“And now they’re after Hugo,” his mother said.
“I suppose they are,” his father said.
“They’ll have their way no matter what.”
His father said, “They believe he’s had his too long.”
“Yes,” his mother said. “That’s the truth. But there are laws. They should follow the law.”
“Yes,” his father said. His voice sounded hollow. “They’ll make use of the law.”
“Make use,” his mother said. “Then there’s no law but what’s to be as twisted as he is.”
His father raised his hands, palms up. It was a preacher’s gesture, which expressed the inescapability of pain. “It’s gone past me now.”
The fineness of the passage is set off by the superfluity of the concluding quotation; Keeble has drawn such a sharp image of the boy’s father’s “preacher’s gesture” that no elaboration is necessary, and indeed there is an ambiguity as to whether the father has actually said the words. In “Zeta’s House,” Zeta displays a similar stoicism in admitting the insufficiency of even the most robust insulation: “It’s true, our house is a refuge,” he tells his friend. “and yet the world comes in.”
The corollary to Keeble’s confidence with his characters’ concrete lives and ideas is, at times, an awkward handling of their more abstract or sentimental moments. The most psychologically direct piece in the collection is “I Could Love You (If I Wanted),” about a single mother, Lola, caring for her dying mother, and it is no coincidence it is also one of the least engaging, with Lola’s despair and frustration in love unfolding along clichéd grooves (in her failed relationships, she is “seeking the father she’d never known”; Lola has to care for her mother “as if her mother were a child”). In the passage that ends the uneven “Nocturnal America,” Keeble’s narration shades into a seedy lyricism which does more to muddle our sense of Fay’s internal state than to clarify it.
Nevertheless, Keeble’s missteps are in some sense easy to spot precisely because he is a gifted stylist and he makes few of them. Most of his stories are marked by precision and perspicacity, never moreso than in what may be the collection’s understated masterpiece, “Zeta’s House.” The story consists entirely of the narrator speaking with Zeta in his kitchen about Zeta’s recently deceased daughter, while Zeta’s young son builds an “abstract” construction out of metal scraps. At the end, the narrator remembers how Zeta told him his young son was “the most affected by his sister’s death.” She had told him, says Zeta, that “God was taking her for a reason she would soon learn.”
In this light, the son’s “construction,” which “shimmered in the fading light like a constellation afloat in space,” becomes a monument to his loss, and also his attempt to make sense of it. This is, for anyone who has lost something, precisely how Keeble’s fiction presents itself.