List: A Novel - Softcover

Roberson, Matthew

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1573661775 ISBN 13: 9781573661775

Verlag: F2C, 2014

Inhaltsangabe

In these glimpses of middle America, lists guide the stories - ordering the characters' lives, capturing their obsessions, cataloguing their complaints, accounting for their desires, and serving as prayers toward ways of life that might work.

Here the man, the woman, the boy, and the girl struggle through the home improvement projects, the conflicts at work and school, the job loss, the illesses, and the confrontations with ageing that constitutes their claustrophobic days. Their lives revolve around gadgets, mad cleanliness, bland vans, and deadly entropies that make up the suburban middle class.

The man digression-addled, searches in vain for a screw with which to hang a single print. The woman packs her family off to a water-park vacatio to escape from her illness. The boy starts speaking his mind at school. The girl hangs on behind the scenes. They try to convince themselves something can always change, but the narratives they inhabit prove it can't, it doesn't, things will just keep on, and with a decided list.

List's sections are variations - spare, quietly comic, haunting, and addictively readable - often written in short declarative sentences, and all about gaps, about what isn't said between people, about developments that never transpire, about white spaces on the page that make those absences present.

When all is said and done, List is a curative mix of satire and sympathy. While the stories empty out the ambitions and materialism of the middle class, they also create an emotional landscape replete with the hilarity and humility of very human vulnerability. The great gift of these stories is their alchemy of innovation, judgment and commiseration.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Matthew Roberson is the author of two novels, 1998.6 and Impotent, both published by FC2, and is the editor of a critical book, Musing the Mosaic. His short fiction has appeared in journals such as Fourteen Hills, Fiction International, and Western Humanities Review. He teaches at Central Michigan University, in Mount Pleasant, Michigan.

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list

a novel

By MATTHEW ROBERSON

THE UNIVERSITY OF ALABAMA PRESS

Copyright © 2014 Matthew Roberson
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-57366-177-5

CHAPTER 1

WAYS TO DIE

Way one:

They'd been at the depot, wandering the aisles.

The man wanted a new drill, and new gloves, and a tool shed,but they ended up buying a paint scraper and a long pole, and apack of gum for the boy.

It was almost summer, and the house needed painting.

The man figured anyone can scrape a wall and slap on paint, sowhy not him? The first floor, at least, and some of the second,and he'd leave the hard spots for their handyman, who couldhandle the height.

The boy wanted to help, and the man could find things. Maybesome drilling, and hammering, and the caulk gun. When it cametime to paint, the boy could spread it on as high as he couldreach.

And he could learn from their handyman the manly advantagesof the shank nail.

Or he could play Nintendo, or read, and there'd be day camp forJuly. He would fill time fighting with his sister.

Way one, in the wagon: The new extension pole was tipped overthe backseat and angled forward, and aimed, the man noticed,so that if he stopped fast it would proceed at original speed untilmeeting some meaty opposition like, say, his, the man's, head.

Way one would be quick, though not painless.

* * *

The woman never spent more than they made, so they lived in acottage, which felt fine, for a while. And then they wanted morethan to eat in one room and watch TV in another.

What they did:

The boy postered his bedroom walls and bought a beanbag chairand read upstairs, and the girl's room had all her music and electronics.The woman filled their guest room with sewing, and theman migrated to the basement, where he set up a space heaterfor winter and a dehumidifier for summer, and his old stereo,and a door over sawhorses.

On his table the man painted tiny metal figures—knights andsoldiers and goblins and, eventually, an entire village of hobbits,all of whom he named.

He listened through his entire set of LPs, methodically, in alphabeticalorder, starting with The A's and ending with StevieWonder.

He accumulated garbage—a birdcage, a manual typewriter, abike rim.

He carried down his laptop and surfed Internet porn.

He bought a bench grinder, and a belt sander, and a set of woodchisels, but never touched them, which seemed for the best.

When the woman came down, she turned one way and then theother, as if she expected to be assaulted.

* * *

The woman didn't think much of mops and scrubbed floorson her hands and knees, as she'd done long before meeting theman.

When they had met, she flinched when his dirty shoes hit thecarpet in her car.

And she seemed sensitive to the smallest smells.

When they moved in together, she insisted they replace theirtoothbrushes every third week.

That their towels be folded in half and then again in thirds, perfectlycorner to corner, so the closet wouldn't look a mess. Thatthe sink be scrubbed and then dried.

Before the boy was born, the baby room had to be sanitized to thesmallest crack in the floor. Then, poopy diapers went to the linedgarbage can by the garage. Then all the same again for the girl.

The tub she bleached after every bath and then rinsed twice.

She didn't let the man wash their clothes, because he confusedthe fabric cycles.

And so on.

The man never gave it a second thought. When the woman worried,she put things in order, which seemed perfectly normal,and made him a little aroused.

* * *

Way two:

This courtesy of the mailman, who stood on the driveway,shorts to his knees, with socks as high, and an explorer's hat likea garbage lid.

He wouldn't approach the house while the man scraped.

Number one, he said: Lead paint makes you dumb as a post.

B: Deadly for your organs.

Not to mention you can go sterile, he said.

Real bad for your kids.

He said, That cheap mask won't help when you get sanding. Notwith those layers of paint.

Thanks, the man said, before retrieving his mail, and running ahand through his hair to loosen paint chips, and driving back tothe depot to buy a respirator, which strapped over his head, withgas canisters under the chin.

I look like a praying mantis, the man said.

The woman said, What?

A praying mantis, he said. He clasped his hands in supplicationand bowed to her. Praying, he shouted. A mantis.

She shook her head. Take it off, she said. I can't hear.

She said, I don't want one speck of lead paint in the house. Notnear the boy. Not near the girl.

I don't want your work clothes in the house.

The chips will to get in the mulch, she said. We're going to haveto replace the mulch.

Is the lead going to get in the grass, she asked. Is it going to getin the ground?

She said, Ask the handyman if it's safe.

Ask the handyman, the man said.

You want me to take my clothes off in the garage, the man asked.

* * *

During the school year, the man got up at six, and woke the boyand the girl and fed them, and tugged clean socks on their feetbefore driving to preschool, and, eventually, elementary school.

Then to the high school, himself, five minutes without traffic,and into his homeroom to start a day of bells and bathroompasses and telling first this boy, and then that girl to get it togetheror else.

The man lodged his chalk in the muzzle of a metal holder, becausehe hated the feel of dust.

He put his students in a circle, for discussion, though they saidit was the gayest thing ever.

He used the Internet's endless supply of relevant videos, and,when his video projector burned out a bulb, with no money toreplace it, he bought a new one himself.

He wondered how many students become teachers because theyhad one good instructor.

The man liked the kids, even when they behaved badly, even thegood kids, who studied just to get ahead.

Something hopeful about them.

Sometimes the man worried that people teach because of achildish need to stay in school.

Mostly the man just taught his subject four times a day, sometimesto the state test, sometimes not, and felt good about projectsthe students liked, and hated the class for whom nothingwould do, and took lunch in the fifth period and supervised atleast one study hall.

The final bell always rang at twenty past two, but the man left atfive, after grading, or supervising the Future Leaders of America,or checking in with Mrs. Brooks, her arm stained green fromoverhead ink, a sign of her Luddite refusals.

And he went to pick up his boy and girl, who would be in theman's high school in six short years.

Dinner, when the woman got home. Hot dogs or noodles.

The woman forbade fast food, because she knew better, becauseshe worked in the business, though she never saw any actual food.

She was in middle management and brought home all the bestpromotional toys, meaning the boy had a wicked set of Pokémonfigures. The girl had many little ponies.

* * *

The man sometimes wondered when career plans became acareer.

The woman had known since school that she would launch marketingprojects for one corporation or another.

Though she said every company trained you to its own specificends, and ways, and means.

And she said business depends on people that can put up withother people. On people who got on well in high school andjoined fraternities in college. People who could absorb...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: F2C
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2014
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1573661775
• ISBN 13: 9781573661775
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 209
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Mare Nostrum Group B.V.; gpsr@mare-nostrum.co.uk; ; Doelen 72; Breda; 4831 GR; Niederlande