This Month: Celebrating Small Presses Doing Great Things
In the Morning, The City is the Prairie by Rob Roensch (Belle Point Press, 2023)
One of many things to admire about this novel is that there are almost no flashbacks. In the course of a single week, we travel swiftly over a narrative surface that’s almost as flat as the Oklahoma prairie—or as the apparently unexamined life of Matt Bennet, who has dropped out of college and quit his band to work full-time at Costco. One evening, Matt comes home to find that his parents have evicted him from his room to make way for his dying aunt Becky. In a dislocation that mirrors the loss of his personal compass, he is welcome to sleep on the living room floor with the dog.
Becky’s arrival has also divided Matt’s parents, who argue frequently about money: “[my] father and mother don’t notice me. Their antlers are stuck together. There is sweat on their faces.” Matt’s father harbors a deep resentment against his dying sister, who has been in and out of jail over the years. “You don’t know what she did,” he tells Matt. “Some things can’t be forgiven.” But Matt’s mother is determined to bring about a reconciliation between them even as she struggles to provide Becky with dignified care. Meanwhile, Matt’s younger sister Sylvie, who has usurped his guitar, is writing songs and taking an exceptional interest in the problems of the world. But Matt is laconic and quick to make the obvious joke. This doesn’t help his relationship with his girlfriend Jane, who has joined a statewide teachers’ strike for better pay. When Matt shows up to meet Jane at a demonstration at the state capitol, he is alarmed at the distance he’s allowed to develop between them. “Why don’t I know who she’s talking to?” he wonders. “Why don’t I have any idea what she’s saying?”
Part of the trouble might be that Matt spends much of his free time getting high with Connor, a weirdly brilliant young man who claims to be seeking the intersection of poetry and capitalism. Connor takes Matt up in a skyscraper one night to watch a lightning storm from inside a darkened restaurant: “to build something tall,” Connor says, “you have to conceive of something taller; it’s a metaphor for America; it’s a metaphor for capitalism; it’s a metaphor for how to live.” It is Matt, however, who needs to know how to live; and in his oddball way, Connor is trying to help. He urges Matt to come work for him, an offer Matt never takes up.
But Matt is not feckless, or not entirely so. Though he has numbed himself in response to some disappointment, Matt remains generally cheerful. When Sheila, a visiting nurse, finds him asleep at ten a.m. on the living room floor, Matt takes her ribbing in stride. “She smiles, as if she understands how I can’t help agreeing with people I’m talking to, and at inappropriate moments.” And while Aunt Becky is salty–she asks Matt to buy her some beer, and she can always tell when he’s high–her frailty has a humanizing effect on the whole family. Here is Matt, assisting his mother in putting her back to bed:
I lay her down, trying not to break the surface tension of the lake of the bed. I’ve never tried to be so gentle before. “That hurts,” says Aunt Becky. … She holds one arm at an angle, like it’s stuck in a cramp. My mother shoulders me out of the way. She has a pill pinched between two fingers like she just plucked it from a flower; she dips to Becky, slips the pill into the corner of her mouth, and whacks me with her other hand. “Water,” she says. I grab the flowered tumbler from the side table and pass it to my mother, who holds it to Becky’s lips with a firm, impersonal, ceremonial air, as if it was communion wine.
This is beautiful writing; and while the Bennets may have their problems, the family clearly has good bones. Matt and Sylvie absorb Aunt Becky into the household without complaint. And though Matt is underemployed, he shows a surprising attentiveness to the simple, satisfying aspects of his job:
I love the weight of a roll of nickels best of all the coin rolls. They are also the best coin, not only heaviest but also somehow the roundest. I love the process of changing the receipt roll. I love when an order comes down to an interesting number–$57 even, $77.97, $301.03. I love knowing bananas’ number. I love having the good zapper. … I tell myself I am practicing mindfulness.
I tried making a similar list immediately after I read this; I wasn’t nearly as particular or as successful as Matt. Despite his tendency to blurt out something ridiculous while withholding what really matters, Matt’s humility, his basic goodness, are very appealing.
Matt’s father finally tells him the tragic reason he can’t forgive Becky, but it takes time for this revelation to do its work. “’I told you the story, okay?’” he says. “‘You know the story. Congratulations. Can we watch golf now? Can I have a moment’s rest?’” In a significant exchange, Matt asks his sister Sylvie what they should do about it. Sylvie is playing the guitar. “She’s in the state of distracted concentration. The chord goes up, the chord goes down, broken. … ‘Being present is the first step,’” she says. Later, Matt admits, “I know exactly what I used to think the goal of being alive was: …guitars at the volume of good screaming, the drum like your own heartbeat filling your ribcage….” But now, “[t]here’s a voice speaking I can’t quite understand.” Meanwhile, the teacher protests at the capitol are heating up, and soon, the idealistic Sylvie is deeply involved. When a crisis occurs, Matt and Connor must take the lead. Here at last is Matt’s chance to figure out his vocation–and maybe even find his way back to Jane.
Roensch’s understated, evocative descriptions of Oklahoma brought to mind a passage from Willa Cather’s My Antonia, a book I first read in the suburbs of Omaha, where I grew up:
As I looked about me I felt that the grass was the country, as the water is the sea. The red of the grass made all the great prairie the color of winestains, or of certain seaweeds when they are first washed up. And there was so much motion in it; the whole country seemed, somehow, to be running.
In Omaha as in Oklahoma City, we have built a great many Costcos and Taco Bells since then. But there is something restorative in the way Roensch depicts the self-healing topography of the prairie:
None of the buildings in Oklahoma City are old; even its ruins are obviously temporary–either the neighborhood will ride a wave of oil-boom investment and be reinvented, or the wind and weeds will overcome everything. The unpredictable, enormous sky and the gently troubled flatness of the land are the only true permanents.
This deeper vision will take Matt Bennet a long way beyond Costco.
N.B. I’ve read two books now from Belle Point Press, and I’m deeply impressed so far with the quality of their titles. I encourage you to check out Child Craft, a beautiful collection of flash fiction from Amy Cipolla Barnes. You might also dip into one of their prose series bundles or any of their poetry collections and chapbooks. There are some fine authors represented here.
Joan Elizabeth Bauer 