Summer is like the apocalypse, “a fiery brightness that fills the world, a limitless wave, jellying up the street toward us.” Confined indoors, a young man finds an old Nintendo and plays Tetris, which “has muted colors and I can mute the music, thus exercising forms, degrees, of control.” His naked girlfriend, meanwhile, thumbs a Bible and gets angry when he refuses to discuss it with her. This is “Tetris,” a short story by Justin Taylor. But it’s also Taylor’s stories in miniature. The ’80s debris, the sex that’s not happening, the specter of religion, the potential for disaster outside—they recur throughout this debut story collection. Taylor sums up his book nicely: “Weird lights in the sky and nobody sure what was happening, if it was God or the government responsible, i.e. who to praise or blame.”
Everything in Everything Here is the Best Thing Ever may not be the best thing ever, but it’s the best debut fiction in years. Still in his twenties, Taylor is both practiced at the art of storytelling and fresh enough to make it feel new. Like Martin Amis with The Rachel Papers and Bret Easton Ellis with Less Than Zero, he turns a fiercely contemporary way of speaking and thinking into a literary voice. In ”Jewels Flashing in the Night of Time,” he writes:
We both hate the classic rock that 101.9 plays, but it’s the only station our crappy radio gets. And that’s a lame thing to hate, probably, but it’s what we have in common, and it is good, finally, to just pass minutes with music—any kind—because in silence you fall out of time. No. It’s the other way. You don’t fall out, you fall in. You get stuck, like running through a field and you twist your ankle on a rock. And you just lay there.
In Taylor’s stories, money is always tight, religion and morality are birthrights that nobody asked for, and sex—confused sex, phone sex, brutal sex, bi-curious sex, incestual sex—becomes an open-ended question rather than the answer it appeared to be.
His sympathies lie with misfits and anarchists, teens and losers, people who feel uncomfortable in their own bodies and bewildered by anyone else’s. The little boy in “Somewhere I Have Heard This Before” goes mental when his cousin forces him to touch her beneath her clothes. “He tried to imagine what the thing he touched look like based on what it felt like but everything he thought of seemed insane. It made no sense for anything like what he was thinking to be a thing that was part of a person.” Disgusted with themselves, the characters grope each other, only to find new reasons to be disgusted. And then they get over themselves.
What makes these predicaments real is the way Taylor inhabits his characters’ most ambivalent feelings. Here is Taylor introducing a main character in ”Whistle Through Your Teeth and Spit”: “Tim, thirty-one, was just starting a relationship with Kim, when his long-time friend Natalie, twenty-nine, told him she was maybe finally ready to give him and her the real chance they’d both always sort of known he secretly believed they had.” After the specifics—names, ages, the bland colloquialism of “starting a relationship”—the sentence almost gets lost in the compound uncertainty of “maybe,” “sort of,” and “secretly.” These characters doubt their own doubts, and by the time they reach a fight-or-flight moment, Taylor is ready either to cut and run with them or to stand firm—whatever they choose.
Although each piece is easy to read, Taylor encourages his readers to be open-minded about the short story form. The narrator of “Jewels Flashing in the Night of Time” is always hearing the reports about sexual abuse at Abu Ghraib prison, and he’s strangely aroused by them. The story splices his routine thoughts with the grisly text of the report. “In My Heart I Am Already Gone” proceeds straight ahead until the final paragraphs, when the narrator’s aunt catches him stealing her daughter’s panties. Then it flashes forward, as the narrator imagines moving on and forgetting all about this incident. But nobody is going to forget it, and the story pulls him back and strands him there, in that shameful moment.
As the formal tricks show a willingness to experiment, the progression of stories in the collection shows a deepening of Taylor’s themes. His most mature characters and emotionally complex subjects turn up toward the end, in two New York stories. That’s where Taylor currently lives. He’s working on a novel. But for now, Everything Here is the Best Thing Ever is the best thing out there.
(March, 2010)
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