I Am Dangerous: Stories. . - Reviews - book review

Studies in Short Fiction, Spring, 1998 by John Parks Westbrook

I AM DANGEROUS: STORIES by Greg Johnson. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996. 209 pages. $35 cloth; $13.95 paper.

Adorning the cover of Atlantan Greg Johnson's most recent collection of stories, I Am Dangerous, is a figure from a painting by Austrian Expressionist Egon Schiele. At first the connection between avant-garde German art and contemporary Southern American fiction might seem as incongruous as a Confederate flag in the middle of a Dali landscape, but Johnson's prose is attempting to mine the same psychological ground as Schiele did with his disjointed, angular human figures, while still maintaining a particularly Southern identity. If the cover art and title of the collection suggest an aggressive tone, Johnson's stories are actually works of subtlety. In describing the dysfunctions of Southern families, or the malaise of urban and suburban adults, Johnson uses minor details to express the inherent sadness beneath many of his characters.

The majority of the stories deal with the family and the ramifications of childhood events, with the younger characters fearing, pitying, or admiring their parents from adolescence into adulthood. The parents themselves run a wide gamut, from Mrs. Goodman, the wealthy Jewish divorcee in "Scene of the Crime," to the laid-off, drunken father of "In the Deep Woods," to Vincent Kendall, the stern and respected familial dictator in "Hemingway's Cats." It is through their children's eyes that the stories are told, with many of the children viewing their parents as cartoonish, pathetic, or distant. In the first story, "A House of Trees," Cody crawls up into the top of a backyard tree to live after an argument with his father. Told through the point of view of Cody's younger brother, the story treats the reader to emotional family snapshots, including their mother's doting attempts to please both her husband and her estranged son, as well as their father's escalating rage, which finally erupts in his shaking Cody out of the tree after the boy has been in the branches for over a week. With this action, the father unwittingly causes his son to hit his head, rendering him mentally disabled for the rest of his life. The younger brother goes along with his parents in keeping the secret, up to the point that he has almost convinced himself that Cody accidentally fell from the tree. While the other stories are not quite as gruesome as this one, they do continue to hit upon the similar theme of familial complexities, always told through the view of the younger generation, even if the younger generation is a newly married couple having dinner with the wife's parents in "Evening at Home."

Set mainly in Atlanta and in the rural areas surrounding the city, Johnson's stories depict a sort of New South figure, a hardy, traditional person forced to deal with the modern world, such as the small-town father who must take his teenage daughter for an abortion in "Little Death." The psychologies of the younger characters are not so much molded by their parents as they are thwarted by their parents and their parents' inability to connect with the younger generation's restlessness. The driving force behind Johnson's eerily simple sketches is a sense of loss, through divorce, death, unemployment, domestic instability, heartbreak, or simply the end of childhood innocence. The narrator changes from story to story without ever losing his deadpan, sorrowful tone, even when ranging from the young boy who watches his family fall apart due to the stay of a mentally handicapped uncle ("Uncle Vic"), to the middle-aged man reflecting on a romantic near-miss in the title story.

Johnson's stories combine the traditional familial dramas of authors such as Tennessee Williams and Joyce Carol Oates with a darker, postmodern twist. In his stories, awkward moments, such as an adult daughter bumping into her visiting father outside the bathroom of her home, are fraught with as much significance as the abortions and separations and other catastrophes. With this collection of stories, Johnson has taken a familiar style and pushed it to the extreme, forcing the traditionally dysfunctional families of Southern literature into the modern age where the implications of the colliding worlds are as subtle yet powerful as Johnson's prose.

JOHN PARKS WESTBROOK Georgia State University