The Term Between by Brady Harrison (review)
2023; University of Nebraska Press; Volume: 44; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1353/abr.2023.a906498
ISSN2153-4578
Autores Tópico(s)Short Stories in Global Literature
ResumoReviewed by: The Term Between by Brady Harrison Amy Penne (bio) THE TERM BETWEEN Brady Harrison Twelve Winters Press https://twelvewinters.com/press/ 242 pages; Print, $10.00 What draws us to stories now, in this erratic transitional moment that won't transition already? COVID to the left of us, Ukraine to the right. Here we are stuck in the middle with midterm election anxiety. What country will Putin want next? Do we want to escape to the closest space station or sink into nostalgia and pretend it was better when . . . ? Brady Harrison's recent collection of short fiction, The Term Between, invites the reader to be ready: ready to pack for a weekend hike in his beloved Montana mountains, to hide out in some truck stop between here and there, or to grab a buddy and tackle the nearest roaring river by kayak. Just keep moving. Maybe that's how we get through this transitional moment that won't budge. We hunker down and read. Harrison's stories don't go in for sucker punches or easy endings. People die in this collection. Lots of people. But even the dead, it seems, are resilient. These supple stories push the reader, carrying the residue of trauma but they are—thankfully—free of the taint of "The Trauma Narrative." Harrison's characters suffer trauma: in war, on vacation, in a kayak, on a kill floor, and at the shared family table. But the assortment of narrators, narrative styles, and the array of locations rescues us from the weight of memoir/memory that has dragged down many a work of short fiction in recent years. Made up of eleven short stories and ending with his prize-winning novella, [End Page 76] The Dying Albertan, Harrison's work embodies paradoxical positions. These are adventure stories, but they ain't your grandma's Jack London. They can sweep through the deserts between Pakistan and Afghanistan or yank the reader to "make the sudden left turn into the first zig of El Mezclador" on a kayak in "It's Not Like You Think," while simultaneously centering the reader inside of bodies in time, past and present. Harrison writes about bodies. He grabs us in his opening work, "The Guest," with a human body lodged in a car's windshield hidden in a garage (a story I truly hope gets picked up by an astute filmmaker; it was born to be a Hulu Original). Following that, in "Stones," Harrison gives us an Arthur Miller–esque family coming to terms with mortality in the shape of a stone. In this story, we encounter Harrison's penchant for intimate narrative detail. He felt his mother's hand settle gently on his arm and he looked away from the photograph and turned toward her. Her eyes still held the same expectant look, mingled now, he could see, with thoughts of Hugh. He had been everyone's favorite, always smiling, just a little sly, the baby of the family, fifteen years younger than Darragh. Siobhan looked away from the image, and then at Darragh. Harrison doesn't shy away from the violence done to bodies as his characters navigate a standoff on the kill floor of a meatpacking plant in one of my favorite stories in the collection, "Robbie." One of the things I liked about Robbie was that he talked even less than I did. If the foreman gave him instructions, or somebody asked him to lend a hand, he usually just nodded and did what he was told. If someone said something funny, he would grin, but he never joined in the jokes. For lunch, he usually ate by himself, sitting high on the fence gazing down at the cattle or hogs in the pens, munching on his sandwich, sipping his Coke, keeping his own counsel, staying apart from the others in the tiny break room. Harrison's first-person narrators offer us the strongest voices and stories in the collection. They expose inner landscapes in bursts, then open to a wide-lens examination of the contours of the physical landscapes the characters inhabit. [End Page 77] The collection is propelled by the energy of the story segue...
Referência(s)