Seeing as how he’s the founder of a punk rock ‘zine, you’d expect Sean Carswell’s stories to reflect that particular anti-establishment ethos. And yes, there are shots taken – at Republicans, at advertising (car sales in particular) and ‘that racist fear that’s instilled in all Americans’ (a sentiment that ignores 40 years of civil rights progress, affirmative action, racial hiring quotas, not to mention Condoleezza Rice!) – though, thankfully, the majority of the stories in Barney’s Crew are more about showing you characters in unique and/or stressful situations rather than telling you what to think.

Half the pieces in the collection can be categorized as childhood/adolescent coming of age stories. The boy and girl in “Fourteen and Small” are further integrated into the mysteries of adulthood when they spy on one of their sisters having sex; a boy who’s never been the best at anything determines, no matter what, he’ll outlast his classmates in a gym teacher’s typically sadistic test of endurance in “The Third Grade Chair”; the food chain within the species Homo Sapiens is revealed to a young boy being chased by a bully in “Tommy Smedley’s Nose”; and in “Pucker Up, Little Camper” (one of the book’s best stories, though, also, one of the most curiously titled) a teenager with the unfortunate last name of Dickgraber comes out of his shell at a party where nobody knows him, only to be humiliated in front of his erstwhile date by the arrival of some kids from his school.

The rest of the stories in Carswell’s collection are not so easily lumped together, although two of them share a character, Sid Harper, named by his philosophy professor father after the Herman Hesse novel Siddhartha.

The first Sid Harper story, “How To Outsmart a Fish”, finds Sid contemplating the human condition on the dawn of the first Iraq war, aided by some magic mushrooms and a head filled with Nietzsche, Berkeley and Spinoza. Not to mention, dear old dad.

The second Sid story, “Sid and the Dragon”, is years later, after Sid’s been sprung from the loony bin by his wife. Now, they are fugitives living the surf bum lifestyle down in Costa Rica. Sid holds court for the guests each night at the rundown bar of the hotel he and his wife live at -- and Sid works for -- regaling them with bits and pieces of philosophy he’s grown up hating. [Didn’t some big-time philosopher once say something about ‘we all eventually become that which we hate?] His wife plays a trick on him one night, forcing the issue by planting the seeds of the event that will make Sid’s ramblings gospel truth: a turtle flying from the sea May 4th at a certain strip of beach. To her surprise, the rumor of this revelation takes on a life of its own and, come May 4th is ‘witnessed’ by a number of believers on a storm-swept shore who were already sold on the idea before the proof exploded from the waves. It might have been a manta ray, but everyone there who wanted to believe in the turtle is convinced that’s what it was.

It was easy to be cynical. You could make fun
of anything. The real strength came in being
able to believe in something. To let go of
your ego and believe that maybe these higher
powers took control over all the things you
couldn’t control.

It is hard to reconcile the profundity of this statement with the backward-looking one cited earlier about racism being instilled in all Americans (as if racism is something uniquely American?), but that just shows the humanity of these stories, the contradictions that one minute have you cringing with indignation and the next reading something that confirms some of your deepest held beliefs. Carswell, like all of us, can lay down the dogma, but is smart enough or intuitive enough an artist to make it all better with an astonishingly universal insight farther on down the page.