River Street: A Novella and Stories

Studies in Short Fiction, Spring, 1996 by Lyall Bush

River Street: A Novella and Stories by PH Condon. Dallas: Southern Methodist University Press, 1994. 229 pages. $22.50 cloth; $10.95 paper.

Raymond Carver's hand-made style, with its gleams of surreal joy camped inside depressed Northwest yards and kitchens, blows like a familiar breeze through the cracks of the 12 stories and one novella that make up Phil Condon's first collection of fiction. The plainsong descant in Condon's sentences seems tuned to a Carver bow, as are the drifters and migrant workers, assorted oddballs and desperados who speak them. Carver's influence, however, is a curious one. Condon represents people, inevitably most of them men, with low-stung consciousnesses and main-street regrets, who have begun to reach the sad limits of themselves. Scenes recur in which characters stare at glass, look to the sky or into mirrors or at bodies of water. But where Carver's characters catch glimpses of a greater, wilder world out there that whirls in a buzz-saw tangent to their own, Condon's human flotsam are mostly vexed at their inability to put all the pieces together.

Possibly as a result, his stories drift to summation paragraphs that riff on preceding passages of recollection and their accompanying desires. One story, "Walt and Dixie," ends this way:

As the Greyhound drove me away from Manhattan, I counted my

money and put it in my wallet. I still had almost two hundred dollars. It

was Friday. I was still nineteen. I didn't know at all what I was feeling,

except that I didn't feel alone anymore. Or free. I watched the ships,

pushing down the Hudson, silver lines of froth slanting across their

hulls, and then the rows of dark waves racing away. I stared at the

surface of the water for a long time before I closed my eyes and finally

slept. Only sunlight danced upon it.

The narrator is a young hitchhiker at the end of an unsettling road movie. He has driven cross-country in a "shiny" white Cadillac with the gentle, freakish couple of the title. Dixie, a twentysomething midget and virgin, knows what she knows through old Silver Screen magazines while Walt, tall, white-haired and illiterate, is buoyantly and a little grimly optimistic. Yet while they have been drawn confidently you sense a featurelessness to Walt and Dixie that gives the story energy without particular direction. That leaves it to the author-narrator to inject all the interest. And he manages it with some nice touches. In the passage quoted, the narrator remembers to note that he counted his money and put it in his wallet. That's about right, and maybe nicer in its way than the more lyric phrase "silver lines of froth slanting across their hulls." The two final sentences point to yet another reflective body that neither perfectly reveals nor conceals the narrator's condition--they are thoughtful, if free of real surprise.

The abiding strain in the stories is fathers and fatherlessness. The best of them, "Starkweather's Eyes" and "River Street" (which open and close the book) are painful accounts of young men whose fathers have vanished early in their lives. Both stories take place in midwestern towns that are rendered in a black-and-white kind of prose where sizzled neon fights on a town's outskirts are continuous with the broad-leaved trees in town that filter sunlight and melancholy in about equal degrees. In "Starkweather's Eyes," the narrator jump-cuts across memories of the days and weeks around his Omaha boyhood in the 1950s when his father's disappearance coincided with the appearance of the notorious killer Charles Starkweather. Split into short, fragmentary sections, the story is meant to resemble a mind darting over snapshots, looking to cross-wire a past back to full life. It never does. Nicely flat in places, the prose just lies down in others. The story takes inchoate life as its organizational model, but Condon injudiciously mashes elements together, including a hint or two of early adolescent sexuality that he never rolls into the story's broader theme of a mysterious, violent universe. The result is a tale about a young man haunted by the hulls of incoherent images. He might have learned from "Walt and Dixie" how to pick up the frothy light around them.

"Starkweather's Eyes" closes with another suddenly focused, slightly forced paragraph. Now an adult, the young man has returned to Omaha for his mother's funeral. The last lines find him wandering out to a familiar ballpark: "Tall, dark clouds were banking up off to the east, promising relief from the humid April afternoon. I made straight for the very center of center field, as far from a tree or building as I could get, watching those clouds arrange and rearrange themselves beneath my gaze." The lines put a solidly literary finish on the story, especially the last phrase, which believably recreates vertigo. But the sentences also furnish the story with an end-note ballast that the author never quite earns for it.