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The most important word in the title of John Jodzio’s debut, If You Lived Here You’d Already Be Home is not “home.” It’s not even ”lived” or ”already” or even ”here.” It’s ”if.” Every character in Jodzio’s collection of short stories is some place, but none of the characters live there. They all want the same thing, too: to be home. They want to change that subjunctive ”if” to a simple declarative. Sadly for them, they can’t, and Jodzio’s collection resonates with their ache and yearning to find some place they belong.
Composed of short stories, If You Lived Here is short itself: 21 stories spread over only 180 pages. The shortest story is a brief two pages, while the longest is only 16. More than half are over eight, however, and this is a good thing. The stories work best when they’re longer, when Jodzio has enough time to build sympathy and interest in the lives he's showing to us. "If You Lived Here You'd Already Be Home,” one of the book’s longest stories, introduces us to some of the collection’s most memorable characters: Ricky, an adolescent in love with Little League; his nuanced, possibly mentally challenged or autistic younger brother Carl; and a girl named Lily Buns, who cries as she seduces. Ricky and Carl’s coach has recently committed suicide due to his team’s repeated losses to a neighboring town, Buena Vista, and the story centers on Ricky’s attempts to seek revenge. The length of the story—16 pages—allows it to bloom slowly, to unfold at a comfortable pace. We are eased into these aching, wounded lives, and we acclimate to the sometimes odd twists of character or plot.
Jodzio’s shorter stories, however, lack this time to bloom. "Inventory" is a fast-paced oddity about a baby who swallows quite literally everything in sight, but there is no build-up, no time to adjust, and the utter absurdity stings like ice water to a skinny-dipper. In the longer stories, the absurdity hits us with less force because the characters have more time to develop: even though the very first sentence of “Barnacle” is rather absurd—“My brother’s girlfriend came home with a barnacle stuck to her butt cheek”—we spend another ten pages with the narrator and his family, and by the time we finish the story, the barnacle doesn’t seem quite so absurd. In “Inventory,” that black-hole baby is absurd from beginning to end, and that absurdity feels like a gimmick—absurdity for absurdity’s sake—whereas the absurdity of “Barnacle” feels organic, natural, like an everyday, commonplace absurdity, if such a thing exists.
Jodzio does manage to salvage some of his super-shorts. "The Dojo," for instance, is barely three pages, but it feels complete and self-sufficient. It is the surprisingly touching story about a petty pickpocket who connects with one of his victims. It, like all the stories, focuses on a broken person trying to find somewhere to belong or connect, and it leaves those people still broken, still yearning, still unfulfilled. But what it does differently from some of the other stories (like “Inventory,” for instance) is what allows it to succeed: It leaves its characters closer to the holy grail of home than they were at the start. It’s that slight nudge, that vague approach, that makes Jodzio’s most successful stories sing. It’s that little tremor of hope that makes some of the most frightening, most upsetting stories—like one about a couple trying to recover from infidelity and a fetish-induced paralysis (“Gravity”) or another about a surgically traumatized cat, an under-the-counter veterinarian, and his suicidal daughter ("Whiskers")—become some of the most uplifting and bizarrely comforting stories in the book.
Jodzio’s stories contain the most pathetic, battered characters in the most deplorable and hopeless situations, and yet they still manage to find some way to be encouraging, hopeful, and quite often funny. Whether he’s writing in the first, second, or third person, past or present tense, with complex or with simple syntax, these stories are new, original, and engrossing. The absurdity in them assures that we, like the characters themselves, never feel quite at home, but by the time we finish their strangely encouraging failures, we feel a little bit closer to it.
(March, 2010)
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