Dangling Man
Where You Are. By Michael Burns.
Somerville, Maine: All Things That Matter Press
(allthingsthatmatterpress.com), 2009.
246 pages. $16.99.
Let’s face it—marital bliss is overrated. If you believe in Cinderella, Where You Are isn’t that book. But if you read literature in order to transport or transcend, Michael Burns’s latest work will take you there.
In the author’s second novel (Gemini, published by Poncha Press in 2001, was his first), Paul Embry is mired in discontent. Its murky undertones resonate throughout the book. Novels that begin with a happy couple usually end with a predictable schism. Burns twists a new marriage upside down by separating the newlyweds, Paul and Laura Embry, on page one. What happens next is anyone’s guess. This opening propels the book forward. The protagonist doesn’t see it coming. When he reads a note his wife left him, he’s forced to take notice. “I can’t take it anymore. Love, L.”
Embry is glued to the depressed New Hampshire mill town like the greasy film covering the meat counter in Archie’s store. Archie’s is the nexus where Paul’s friends—all flawed characters with a penchant for booze and broads—gather. The news of Laura’s departure is met with an inevitable malaise. No one seems to care. Got a beer? Have a smoke. Join me on the recliner for an evening of debauchery. Wash, rinse, repeat. The life cycle in this town inches along like its polluted river toward some unseen watershed.
Embry’s estranged wife comes and goes from the telephone receiver with capriciousness, leaving Paul at home to care for a cockatiel named J. Alfred Prufrock and beloved cat named Honcho. These pets are the couple’s only children. When Honcho ironically goes missing on the same day Laura heads to San Francisco, she chides her husband for his ambivalence. “You don’t sense anything. You’re perfectly content to…” she says, not finishing her thought. “You are so…irresponsible.”
“Right,” Paul counters. “I should take your lead. If the going gets tough I should just take off, leave my problems behind for someone else to deal with. Right?”
Love in this novel is visible only in the dark where the grit and desperation hide from the glare of working-class reality. Most of the female characters are predatory. They appear to take things from their men who are at cross-purposes with their wives or mistresses, but too weak-willed or passive to resist temptation. The “Black Dahlia” wants something from Paul he’s unwilling to give. This raven-haired floozy is Defoe’s Moll Flanders in hot pants and thick mascara. She offers her sex to anyone in Archie’s store willing to further her circumstances, while Noelle, the married stand-in who beds a reluctant Embry, searches for a way up and out.
Burns makes these women rakes at heart; they are the antithesis to Wycherley’s hypocritical aristocrats, Lady Fidget and Dainty Fidget, who hide their inner Dahlias behind 17th-century petticoats. None of the Garrison femme fatales become reformed characters. You can almost hear them as they turn to leave the novel: you pathetic people. Most of the characters have no history outside Garrison. They are born there, work in its shoe factories, procreate, multiply, divide and fester all within a few square miles. The exception is Embry himself, who explored the world during his stint in the service but willingly returned to a familiar key punch cadence in an auto supply store, the mill’s rhythm, and a town’s people ticking slowly forward like second hands. These are Paul’s anchor and his wife’s albatross. His rootedness opposes her restlessness.
The author’s consistent tone and pacing are evocative of Embry’s emotional quagmire. Though time occasionally appears to stand still in Where You Are, the prose travels like Garrison’s meandering river, delineating class and culture from one side of the mill banks to the other. Burns’s words are earnest, uncompromising, and rough in places like the people who slog through their days in Garrison. Raw and spare, but soulful—in other words, like the city itself—Where You Are is a fine novel from Michael Burns.
