The View From Iowa City

Books | Review of: The View From the Seventh Layer

By SAM MUNSON
March 19, 2008

There are few less promising pursuits in contemporary prose than attempts at lyricism. Kevin Brockmeier, whose well-regarded "The Brief History of the Dead" (2006) brought him one or two cycles of literary attention, is perhaps the model of the lyrical contemporary writer. The opening passage of "A Fable Ending in the Sound of a Thousand Parakeets," the first story of his new collection, "The View From the Seventh Layer" (Pantheon, 267 pages, $21.95), should, however, dispel any illusions about the merit of that distinction:

Once there was a city where everyone had the gift of song. Gardeners sang as they clipped their flowers. Husbands and wives sang each other to sleep at night. Groups of children waiting for the school bell to ring raced through the verses of the latest pop songs to get to the pure spun sugar of the choruses.

And with this we are off. There are four such "Fables" interleaved throughout this strangely static collection, each given an equally precious title. But it is difficult to see what gnomic wisdom they are meant to impart, and what sets them apart from their fellows, other than their use of an undifferentiated "storybook" diction. Narrative time, hampered and even stilled by Mr. Brockmeier's forced, writerly observations and his love of ornate simile, passes just as lugubriously in the stories not designated as fables. The story from which the book draws its title, for instance, takes an intriguing premise — a schizophrenic young woman living with her father, perhaps also her molester, in an isolated resort town — and reduces it to a dispiriting explanation of the protagonist's meager inner life:

Minute after minute, hour after hour, she turned her thoughts to the day when the entity would come back for her in its vessel. It would whisper to her with its tremendous musical breathing sound. It would burn her with the soft touch of its fingers. It would say her name, and it would carry her into the sky, and the two of them would set out from the island together, driven through the layers of space by a radiant dream of the way things could be.

The book's showiest story, "The Human Soul as a Rube Goldberg Device," does nothing to excite the reader's interest further. Mr. Brockmeier's riff on choose-your-own-adventure books, one of the truest and most solipsistic pleasures of an American reading childhood, leads inevitably to an explosion of gentle bathos. The story takes you (in the McInernian second person) through the banal and slightly ominous routines of a suburban morning — mild interactions with girlfriend, clerk, and neighborhood boy. But the instruction to "Turn to page 146" crops up with increasing, claustrophobic frequency at the bottoms of pages (an effect far more convincing than any particular effort of Mr. Brockmeier's actual prose) only to lead you, ultimately, here:

From some infinite distance, ten thousand twists of light are suddenly projected into your eyes. You watch as they shimmer and tighten together like the hooks of metal in a tangle of barbed wire. More and more of them appear, filling the gaps one by one, and soon you are conscious of nothing else. What would the sky be like if there were nothing to see but stars? You know that you will never experience anything so beautiful again.

No matter what the subject at hand may be, Mr. Brockmeier wraps it in this asphyxiating prose. It ensures that his stories never reach beyond themselves, for epiphanies large or small. He's clearly well-schooled in the art of plot construction as a purely mechanical exercise: "The View" is filled with gambits and premises that, in the hands of a stylist more daring and an intelligence more penetrating, might offer something strange, graceful, and illuminating to readers. "Home Videos" details the surreal and slightly miserable life of one employee of a family-friendly TV show. "Father John Melby and the Ghost of Amy Elizabeth" shows us a priest suffering from the romantic and erotic demands of a ghost. "Lady with Pet Tribble," Mr. Brockmeier's recasting of Anton Chekhov's epochal, shattering story of love lost and precariously regained, leads us nowhere beyond a pun built on the fact that a character on the original "Star Trek" was also named Chekhov. Such stories, which must open into odd, vivid, off-kilter worlds if they are to succeed, remain closed, limp — merely descriptive of the surreal events they concern themselves with.

And, I might add, despite Mr. Brockmeier's apparent efforts at humor, they are not at all funny. Well-schooled is, perhaps, the adjective most descriptive of Mr. Brockmeier's sensibility. His work is careful, methodical, morally timid, and inescapably self-contained. The stories are stable and soundly constructed: Mr. Brockmeier commits only a few of the atrocities against English usage and idiom so common in contemporary prose. Yet his work imparts a troubling and saddening awareness of a central problem in contemporary fiction: the professionalization of the writer. Mr. Brockmeier is a product of the renowned Iowa Writers' Workshop, and its stamp is indelibly visible in his work. Reading him throws into relief the fact that any number of graduate education programs train any number of writers in the basics of plot and in a certain becalmed style and voice, as well as providing these students ample opportunity for career development, to say nothing of adventures in careerism. The writing of fiction has become, as a result, an enterprise in many ways akin to dentistry or middle-management, with conferences and seminars, orderly in its progression and subject to the machinery of regulation.

Without question, these stories have this particular polish, though Mr. Brockmeier left Iowa behind more than a decade ago. But just as unquestionably, the thirteen stories in "The View from the Seventh Layer" are imbued with what seems to be the inevitable concomitant of this professional gloss: utter quietude.

Mr. Munson is online editor of Commentary.