Gary Amdahl’s “Visigoth,” which won the Milkweed National Fiction Prize, tells a handful of stories about individuals, as short-story collections generally do. But these have a strangely zeitgeisty feel.
Two of the eight have first-person narrators who are never even named, and you wouldn’t be blamed for thinking that these “I’s” want to be representative of something bigger than themselves.
To be sure, the stuff the men in all of these stories experience is practically the dictionary definition of what one might call “postmodern plight.” The lead character of “The Flight From California” watches “some hapless millionaire nitwit” on the “blaring TV” in a convenience store. He tells us he’s on “Prozac – or whatever the hell it is I’m taking now – the letters and numbers stamped on each pill, I can tell you, suggest a smiley face.”
This guy (one of the not-named ones) is running from something, while some of the guys in the other stories seem as stuck in their circumstances as if the suburbs were made of quicksand. Either way, we get the idea: The way we live now is too civilized, too far from the garden (or the Paleolithic cave, or whatever) for modern men to know what to do with all their extraneous rage.
Sometimes, they’re just funny about it. In “Visigoth” – my favorite because it’s the most humorous and human – an ice hockey player thinks of the male figure skater whose butt he’s about to kick as “my boy,” as in “My boy flung his arms majestically about and shook his fanny to the tune.”
Other times, Amdahl breaks our hearts with bleak depictions of modernity. In “Narrow Road to the Deep North” the narrator tells us that the high grasses of the South Dakota prairie are often described as oceanic, but “of that ocean nothing remains, as if ten million years have elapsed from the time my great-grandparents appeared on its shore – geologic time, time enough for an ocean to vanish, exposing a bed infamously flat, across which, in pesticide dispersal grids, immense machines move.” Far from the garden, indeed.
In Amdahl’s world, there are few arenas where men can still get down to primal, primate business, but one is the sporting arena.
Hockey gets the most play time, as many of these stories are set in frozen Minnesota, where the violent clash worthy of a Visigoth is considered a fine pastime for 8-year-olds. It’s all very “Fight Club.” Sounds pretty vital, and for the most part it is. But the action gets stopped by the editorializing Amdahl occasionally indulges in.
And yet, much of this book feels as though Amdahl wrote it when he was in an excruciatingly sensitive state, like a French existentialist whose very contemplation of the bodily and the human makes him want to weep, or puke.
The politician at the center of the longest story, “The Free Fall,” is descended from a line of Minnesota farmers, and his desire to think of himself as one is described this way: ” … the truth was that the family farm was dead, long dead, and that his wish to spend time with livestock was in fact a yearning to die. …” Yikes. This is powerful stuff.
And therein lies one of Amdahl’s strengths: His fiction tells the truth.
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Visigoth
By Gary Amdahl
Milkweed, 212 pages, $15.95
