Read Indies: Gordon Hill Press

RECENT READ: Aaron Schneider’s What We Think We Know (2021)

Aaron was responsible for wrangling the longest book review I ever wrote; I’ve been grateful for his editorial eye on many an occasion. We know each other well enough for me to tell him that I think he’s smarter than I am; we don’t know each other well enough for him to agree (at least, not outwardly!).

But when one of the promotional events for his new story collection used the word ‘positionality’, I knew I was right. And that was cold consolation because I had already determined to read it, so I reconciled myself to feeling inferior for 218 pages (the author’s note and bio seemed accessible).

Earlier this month, after a dramatic tumble on a city sidewalk, leaving me stuck in a horizontal position for more than twenty-three hours of each day (and grateful for the small amount of time I devote to fitness, which I credit for my “good falling”) for three days, What We Think We Know was on my bedside table, and I didn’t think that I could feel much worse about myself, so I started to read.

What I can’t do, now, is define ‘positionality’ for you. But I can tell you that—even though I am stubbornly dedicated to traditional forms, and even though these stories are formed in unconventional ways—I could not stop reading these stories. I broke my Gallant rule and read them all in a burst, over just two days. (And, before you ask, no pain medication was involved.)

A glance at the titles (below) will probably give you some idea of whether you’d respond the same way to stories with simultaneously low (e.g. With whom, exactly, has Cara had sex, when and where and how?) and high stakes (e.g. Has she managed to find any lasting love in her lifetime, or has she remained preoccupied by her losses?).

In theory, a satisfying fiction contains a balance between specificity and universality but here, with overwhelming detail (sometimes in the story proper, sometimes in other formats that hold/present the possibility of narrative), I wanted to collect and dissect every granular fact, to reflect on the shallowest (possibly least relevant) data point.

These characters are observed, quantified even; the writer has intimate knowledge that I lack, but seems to share all of that so freely, that soon I feel as though I am more of a writer than a reader. Together we know these things and, because of the structure of some of these stories, I can trace the decisions made about how things are going to be told, can recognise the juncture at which some details were either included in the story or, instead, presented as a series of footnotes, which contextualize and create a scene out of a handful of “facts.”

For me, what appeals here, so strongly, is that the idea of our wanting to know someone is fundamentally flawed, misplaced even—that nobody is know-able, even we ourselves are not know-able—and, at the same time, there are so many routes we can take in the direction of knowing.

How we define what’s important (say, with a data set, like the images on the cover) and how we view relationships and how we can circle, around and around and again, and never fully arrive: somewhere in here, in the simple motion of it all, I found something hopeful. Or maybe it was just a sense of company. I’m not sure. But reading this collection, just in this particular way—it’s one of those reading experiences that feels like it will stick.

Contents: Cara’s Men (As Told to You in Confidence); Sex (With Footnotes); Appendix C Happiness and related Scalars; Dugouts; Rembrandt’s Etchings; Tuesday All Day: Metastases; RO Values; The Death and Possible Life of Daan de Wees; Weather Patterns; What We Think We Know about the Life and Career of Kathleen Scholler; 107 Missiles An Autofiction in Fragments; The House North of Owen Sound