[exhibit gray]

 

Literature of the Quirky has become something of its own generic subset in the past decade and a half. The works of writers like Ben Marcus, Aimee Bender, and, when she writes prose, Mary Ruefle, while experimental in nature, cast off—or simply ignore—the lessons of their postmodern experimental forebears; they are not explicitly concerned with notions of marginalized narrative, discursive gaps, or subjectivity. Despite Quirk’s departure from realism proper due to Quirk’s surreal juxtapositions, improbable plots, and occasional violence and grotesquerie, it is still very much invested in the contemporary realist short story project of the quotidian, the small moments of freedom won in the mundanity of modern life. In this sense, Quirk does not depart from what both Charles Baxter and Michael Chabon have more or less termed the epiphany genre, the perceived non-genre, the highbrow creative writing that supposedly exists outside the realm of the generic and has for some time been the dominant force in the literary short story world. However, the Quirkists do have one marked difference from their strict realist brethren, and it is their at least surface rejection of epiphany story plot material. If there is one high commandment Quirk abides by, it is this: Be not predictable.
Enter Amelia Gray, the author of AM/PM, whose recent story collection Museum of the Weird exhibits through twenty-four short pieces an elegant interplay of humor, confusion, the grotesque, and mental fixation. The opening story, “Babies,” is a two-pager about a woman who, having previously shown no signs of pregnancy, gives birth overnight. She informs her wary boyfriend that she’s keeping the child. The next day she gives birth again, and the boyfriend decides he loves the babies after all. The story ends with a succession of births and gives us no indication the trend will stop. This combination of a realistic relationship conflict with the fantastical plot serves as a model for the entire book: the world of Gray’s stories looks much like our own, but with one not-so-small twist thrown in.
Gray invites, because of her subdued, matter-of-fact tone and offbeat plots, a comparison to Aimee Bender, though the overall comparison is less apt than it would seem at first. While both write humorously about oddities, with the humor resulting mostly from their respective characters’ casual acceptance of and acclimation to the oddities, Bender’s are ultimately more explicitly rooted in the subjects of gender, sexuality, desire; her images are more apparently symbolic of an argument being made. Gray, though not necessarily shying away from the sexual, is certainly less interested in grappling with it. The stories in Museum of the Weird are more concerned with offsetting the quotidian, using foreign objects as catalysts for contemplation of a situation, though the contemplation and analysis her characters engage in do not in themselves restore the situation to a state of order. The characters consider these disturbances with a surprising combination of objectivity and obtuseness, like people in a museum attempting to comprehend some ancient artifact, and we in turn consider the characters considering the disturbances, finding these people as odd as the disturbances they are finding so odd. Unlike Bender, in whose fiction the signs and symbols point to an underlying thematic order, a fairly clear intellectual structure beneath the chaos, Museum leaves the reader thinking, “Well, this must be a metaphor for something.”
Gray’s “The Cube” serves as an apt example of this. One day during a group picnic, the children find an iron cube, “a massive monolith, wider than it was tall and taller than anyone could reach, wavering like an oasis in the heat.” Aside from the fact that the size of the cube is unclear, there exists a logical problem. If the cube is a cube, how can it be wider than it is tall? The story premise already frustrates analysis. Regardless, like Kubrick’s apes, one child touches the cube. He burns his hand and his screams bring the parents. At first they attempt to solve the riddle of how the cube got there: “It was too big to have been carted in on a pickup truck. It would be too large for the open bed of an eighteen-wheeler, and even then there were no tire marks in the area … It was as if the block had been cast in its spot and destined to remain.” There is no panic. There is no wonder. There is no “What the hell?” moment. Then they notice the inscription on the cube, “printed text, sized no larger than a half inch.” It reads, “EVERYTHING MUST EVENTUALLY SINK.” Amusingly, the parents forget the issue of the cube itself, instead wondering if in fact everything must eventually sink, if there is anything that does not necessarily sink. They come up with many things that do sink, and soon their interest in the issue does as well, their thoughts returning to their children and the coming days. The cube represents then a kind of freedom from the mundane. Its strangeness, its inexplicability frees the characters, if only for a moment, even if their consideration of the mystery in the end leads them nowhere.
In the same vein, “Diary of the Blockage” chronicles, in journal form, two weeks in the life of a protagonist who, after battling a stomach virus, finds herself with a piece of food stuck in her throat. At first the offending piece offers only pain and inconvenience, but slowly the protagonist grows accustomed to it before finding it oddly comforting. Eventually, she tries to expel it, resulting in bleeding and more pain. As with the aforementioned cube, she grows familiar and comfortable with the mystery, even with her torments. The subdued description of the character’s journey with the piece of food is darkly funny, which is the saving grace of many of the stories in Museum, since, like the objects in the stories themselves, we grow used to the quirky structure: a bizarrely detached narrator describes life change catalyzed by oddity, grows used to it, and the future is wide open. But the comedy keeps the pieces from becoming redundant even when the shock wears off.
However, one story in the collection does meaningfully invert the structure we’ve come to expect. “The Pit,” narrated in loose screenplay format, portrays a post-apocalyptic world reduced to a thinly populated gravel pit. Two men discuss whether or not the figure approaching slowly from the distance is in fact a woman who was involved in a year-long sex orgy in which they also took part. When she arrives, the conversation turns from small talk to an argument about whether or not Bogart actually says the words “Play it again, Sam.” She leaves for a vague appointment taking place in a couple weeks somewhere far away in the boundless gravel pit. Instead of a world we more or less recognize, Gray unmoors us from the beginning and then defamiliarizes us further by inserting something mundane: a chance encounter, an argument over a line of dialogue from Casablanca. It is a lighthearted take on the relativity of what constitutes the offbeat and weird and what is normal.
And that is ultimately what the book offers. In spite of its essential similarities with the realist camp, in spite of the fact that it is ultimately not a game-changer of a collection, it is itself an object belonging in the museum it creates: a curious object, one worth spending time gazing at, contemplating the nature of normality and what it means to have something unexpected come along and fuck things up for a moment. Something quirky. Something, you know, like this book.