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Themes
of alienation and media saturation abound in Dave Reidy's
Captive Audience, his debut collection of short stories.
Characters who can only relate to others while in front of
an audience strive for attention and redemption but can only
connect through shared pop cultural experiences. At its best,
Captive Audience delivers on a promise of quirky, thoughtful
short stories, but it sometimes falls into the trap of using
cultural reference points as shorthand for real ideas.
With
a book chock full of references to which just about any contemporary
North American can relate, Reidy uses pop culture to convey
mood when longer, more descriptive prose might weigh the stories
down. But some of Reidy's references don't work. When, in
the story "The Regular," a music snob gets caught having a
karaoke tape of himself singing Journey's "Faithfully," most
readers will be able to relate to his extreme embarrassment.
But when his friend counters with a pitch-perfect rendition
of the talking guitar in Peter Frampton's "Do You Feel Like
We Do." It may be hard for readers to relate to the character's
wonderment. Is the talking guitar really that hard to imitate?
Some
of the stories in Captive Audience also hint at secrets
that remain undiscovered, to the detriment of the stories.
"The Regular" has an undercurrent of unrequited love that
is never fully explored. In the titular story, a man who rarely
leaves the house listens to the bad stand up comics who frequent
the open mike at the comedy club downstairs from his apartment,
but Reidy only hints at the man's reasons for being house-bound.
For most of the story, readers have no idea why he doesn't
leave his apartment. A little bit more about this would have
gone a long way in creating a more sympathetic character,
but rather than get more into the character's phobias and
alienation Reidy chooses to regale the reader with pages and
pages of bad stand-up routines that fail to advance the story.
The strangest,
and one of the more successful stories in the collection,
is "In Memoriam," an imagining of the actor Abe Vigoda musing
about his own death. Vigoda goes about his day, getting coffee
and thinking about having to see his doctor about chest pains
while he thinks about the funerals of his friends, and his
relationship to fellow actor James Caan. Perhaps because Vigoda
is a real person, it's easier to fill in the blanks of what's
left out of the story. However, "In Memoriam" could be about
any 80-year-old thinking about his life and mortality; this
one just happens to have some movie trivia thrown in.
And that's
the case with most of the stories. There's no clear reason
why someone would memorize Bob Newhart comedy records or why
Abe Vigoda is musing about death or why R.E.M. is featured
prominently in one story. There's no arcane meaning.
But when
Reidy gets it right, he really gets it right. In "Thingless,"
a boy entering high school named Kyle tries to come up with
something that will easily identify him as someone with a
purpose. So he takes up guitar. Throughout the story, he discovers
some hard truths about his next door neighbor, Starlee, a
girl a few years ahead of him in school, whom he sort of idolizes.
She had a thing, dance squad, but she was cut from the team
and depression set in. But when he hears loud music coming
from her house during summer afternoons, he learns how to
play the songs he thinks she loves in an effort to connect
with her and cheer her up. What happens in this story is tough
and authentic and shows what Reidy is capable of writing.
The main
character in "Look and Feel" is a graphic artist with synesthesia—he
sees sounds. He starts making posters for bands that reflect
his esoteric visions that manage to interpret music visually
in such a way that it attracts just the right sort of audiences
to the bands' shows. They're nothing magical going on here,
but Reidy explores how the senses interacting within one person
can reach many others.
Ultimately
many of the stories seem slightly soulless, as do his characters
but this collection does offer some good, solid short stories.
It's clear that Reidy is a talented writer with vast cultural
knowledge; it will be interesting to see how he progresses
as a writer.
(June,
2009)
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