Visigoth

Gary Amdahl's collection *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 eight stories 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 these men experience is practically the dictionary definition of "postmodern plight" (if there were such an entry; I think there should be). 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 story because it's the most humorous and human—an ice hockey player thinks of the male figure skater whose ass 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 prairies 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, and 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 up by the editorializing Amdahl occasionally indulges in. In the middle of the otherwise wonderful "The Flight From California" we get this: "California is a state of high anxiety, and it lies everywhere upon the earth. Like Montaigne's ‘black care,' it squats behind the parting horseman, troll hands resting lightly on the rider's shoulders." No, thanks. If I'd been the one wielding the red pencil this never would have made the cut.

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.

Incidentally (or not), the play on words in the title of "The Flight From California" kept me waiting for a good few pages for the guy to get a plane, which he never did do: the flight was a biblical one, a frenzied escape from the nothing desert of California. It's meaningful, this pun. It shows us that what looks modern is often, in reality, ancient, and driven by the most primal of emotions. Contained in these stories is a horrifying not-looking-away: from violence, from a nihilism we live with every day and try to ignore, from the ugly impulses in all of us.

Plus, it bears remembering that our California guy is the same character who lovingly cleaned up after his elderly cat every time she vomited in the back seat of his car, who merrily reminded himself *and* the cat of a line from Monty Python and the Holy Grail: "Not dead yet!" I like it when the fellows in these stories get knocked down only to spring back up, like those inflatable punching bag toys: Weebles wobble but they don't fall down! It doesn't happen every time, as it doesn't in life. And there is another of Amdahl's strengths: his fiction tells the truth.