Add This to the List of Things That You Are
Chris Fink
University of Wisconsin Press $26.95
Reviewed by Otis Roffman
Chris Fink’s latest book, Add This to the List of Things That You Are, is a collection of stories with compelling characters that undergo agony, confusion, alienation, rejection, and fleeting joy.
The collection begins with Timothy, a rural Wisconsonite who’s since educated himself away from the life of his family. Timothy (black sheep that he is) returns to the (rented) farmstead, late for his sister’s (second) wedding. His displaced perspective has alienated himself from his relatives. Timothy sees a grotesqueness to the wedding and its celebratory shoat-roast, the flowing beer and hyper-masculine tension, the sorrow in its desire to be true.
Timothy would like to think he’s beyond these people, but in truth these are his people. Timothy is just as much a part of the family as the rest. At the same time, he is inescapably an outsider now, even if, wandering around with a beer in his hand, this distance only exists within himself.
From here, the collection branches out into a progression of thirteen separate stories, voices, and places. Most often these stories focus on Midwestern men and women in a state of alienation. “Three Ps” explores the experience of an American photographer in Italy deliberating whether to have sex with a man for the first time. In “High Hope for Fatalists Everywhere,” the one-armed Big Coyote kills cats for the trailer-park elderly. An outbreak of painful spots ruptures an uncertain honeymoon in the anxious “Trollway”. “Lazy B” focuses on Danny, a half-Mexican man who appears white, who must consider whether or not he should say something in response to his barber’s racist quips, made in confidence.
Add This to the List of Things That You Are is certainly an impressive and well-rendered collection of short works—distinct, varied, and unlinked by contrived threads. But there is an entirety to its construction. Each story feels both a complete body and a separate organ.
This effect is achieved by Fink’s decisions at the sentence level. He has forgone punctuations designed to distinguish between external and internal dialogue, narration, and spoken moment. Instead, all words and sentences exist on the same plane of prose, arranged in a demented steadiness, a stiffened lyricism that bumps and jolts against itself as much as it flows with disconcerting ease. The voice is omnipresent yet entirely versatile, at once several others and uniquely its own. It is like the stories are contained together as the stemmed connections between lobes.
Vulnerable and anatomical, Add This to the List of Things That You Are resonates from threaded fractures, twined issues of external presentation and internal ambiguity, of doubt and sexuality, of race and notions of nationality, of decay and renewal.
Otis Roffman is a writer and cartoonist from Yonkers. His work has appeared in Arlington Literary Journal and elsewhere. Roffman is currently based in Minneapolis, where he spends his time writing and being manipulated by two cats at a pet supply store.