The End of Abstraction - Justin Taylor’s ‘Everything Here Is the Best Thing Ever’
The title of Taylor’s book, Everything Here Is the Best Thing Ever, seems like the latest in the trend of pronominal jests (or homages) that have no referents but the hyper-relative, pluralistic, twitterfied era in which we live, the era of post- (modern, feminist, ironic, etc.). It is and it isn’t this. Taylor’s work is a product of its time, but it takes the overwhelming contextuality of modern life, and the abstraction it encourages, and puts them in the service of honest human experience.
Taylor is not always on—there are a few experiments in this collection that scrape like a worn down flint in a Zippo—but when is he on, sparks fly. It is difficult to pull out the best lines from a Justin Taylor story, for they are, more often than not, contextually dependent. These sentences are like powerful machines, computer processors, that are inert outside the structure of the larger apparatus. Take the end of “Somewhere I Have Heard This Before:”
It wasn’t his play on the jukebox yet, but all he had to do was wait. All he could do was wait. When he heard the opening chords—certainly, at the latest by the bridge—knowledge would rise up inside like water seeping into a basement or an unfurling rose—or better yet, it would arrive in his mind fully formed, ex nihilo, like how when somebody calls you with bad news your first thought is always “I already knew that, I have always known.” The words a lie at the moment you first think them, they immediately become true and stay true forever, just like the lyrics to any song.
Out of context, this is merely beautiful. But in the story, it serves as the culmination of a subtle chain of referents, a hidden and central mechanism driven by a dependent series of gears.
Taylor treats his characters as worlds in and of themselves. Their minute thoughts and actions become abstracted in a form of high-level emotional reasoning.
The principal elements are introduced early on—the characters’ motivations, fears, the invisible elephants they sit with—and the story plays out in an opera of abstraction. Taylor often reaches a point where he can say something meaningful or moving with only a handful of pronouns and indeterminate adjectives.
He is both the watchmaker god starting the universe of the story with a bang, and Aquinas taking some subtle bit of syntax—the veins of a leaf—and finding in it evidence of creation. And yet, at times, these moments of abstraction are atheistic. They are separate from creation, from the impetus of the story, from the referent of the pronoun, and they are beautiful in their humanness, not their divinity. In their physicality, their carnality. Earlier in the same story:
He tried to imagine what the thing he touched looked like based on what it felt like but everything he thought of seemed insane. It made no sense for anything like what he was thinking to be a thing that was part of a person.
Perhaps Taylor is able to get away with such abstract and pronoun dense sentences as the one above because his sense of the body is rooted in such abstraction. Consider that line in the context: a paragraph before, a fifteen year old girl takes an eleven year old boys’ hands and sticks them into her clothes, saying, “I’m going to teach you something today. When you’re older your girlfriends will thank me.”
There is often an uneasiness with the physical, as in “The New Life,” where the narrator describes (again, layers of mediation) how his friend views a fat goth girl. “She had never learned to molt, and seeing her in the sweaty cage of her body unearthed the worst of what he had struggled to bury.” This sense of the body is perhaps best summed up in a word Taylor is fond of: thereness. These stories get close to you, they nestle in your heart and in your pants, not unwelcome, though sometimes uncomfortable—like, as a character in “Go Down Swinging” imagines, the “weird thereness of the cup in his underwear.”
When the speaker is totally comfortable in his body, there is delight in protracting time. “I touch her speckled shoulders, graze my fingers down her fleshy upper arms, the light hairs of her forearms, the backs of her hands, until our fingers touch: tips to tips: I lean in to kiss her. We kiss.” This sense of protraction also leads Taylor to the humor and social acuity of Larry David or Nicholson Baker, as in “A House in Our Arms:”
Am I going to laugh at this? He’s laughing.
Okay, I’m laughing.
We laugh.
And it fits well with his penchant for abstraction (“It takes maybe a minute. I hold him down another minute to be sure, and then I am sure.”). The speaker has just strangled a cat while holding it under water. But the pivotal moment refuses the word “cat” or “strangle” or “dead” and instead uses “it” and “him” and “to be sure.” This use of abstraction suffers somewhat when compressed, as in the two page short “Finding Myself.” At its best, Taylor gives it room to breathe, being hyper specific about the structure of an inherently indeterminate moment, as in this passage from “A House in Our Arms:”
I’m imagining the two of us at a party together, her wearing a black dress with a plunging V neck, me not in anything particular, and she’s talking to some old friend of ours. She’s telling a funny story about something I said on account of having misunderstood something she said, and how we argued until we realized what the original miscommunication had been, and how afterward everything was okay.
Part of the reason these abstract moments work is because Taylor is aware of himself as the author of his characters—he both loves them and mocks them. Knowing his character is incapable of finding the perfect word, he has her thinking “The heart can be funny but the mind can be even funnier. Funny is almost certainly not the right word.”
In “Estrellas Y Rascacielos,” he gives us a group of young anarchists in a hardcore band, and a sample of one of their delightfully atrocious lyrics. The narrator tells us that “The bassist always said he wrote the line in homage to the great Spanish anarchists, such as whoever.” It is hard not to laugh, and to feel pity for these uninformed or misguided youths, all the while knowing that we haven’t figured things out any more than they have.
At other times, when these characters slip into literary reference (speaking of Barthelme or Keats’ “negative capability”), this meta-awareness becomes grating. But those moments are rare, and more than made up for by Taylor’s other gifts.
The fluid movement between the abstract and the concrete make for some achingly good metaphors. From “Tennesee:”
Home is not the place you own, or even where you go back to. Home is the place whose exigencies you most fully comprehend and can account for. I was sitting on the edge of my bed in the dark.
Or from “A House in Our Arms:”
But it’s what goes unsaid between people that builds up like masonry. You have to either knock the bricks out with other things, or let them keep stacking until eventually you are alone in a room. So the important thing is that we are sitting here, together, sharing a silence that is both charged and cozy, working on a fresh round of drinks.
There are writers who leave behind brilliant metaphors like cicada shells; and there are writers whose byzantine inter-dependency and abstraction place you halfway to halfway to halfway to something delicious and urgent that you can’t quite name and that you will only truly know when you’ve lost it forever. (Taylor is more of the latter.) But neither of these gifts guarantee a great story. For many, despite all their skill at the micro, things fall apart at the macro. The fragmentation of modern life has become an excuse for stories and poems and novels that do not cohere; it is as if “almost good” or “contains moments of genius” has become the standard of sufficiency for a great work of art. Taylor’s stories live in their fractured moment in time without abandoning the emotional and narrative order needed to create a great story. They refuse to justify themselves simply on the merits of a few great lines or metaphors. This is all a way of saying that Justin Taylor’s stories know how to end.
You’ll know what I mean, if you read James Wrights’ poem, “Lying in a Hammock at William Duffy’s Farm in Pine Island, Minnesota.” Better yet, take a second and read Cliff Crego’s translation of Rilke’s “The Archaic Torso of Apollo.”
The Archaic Torso of Apollo
We do not know his unheard of head,
in which the seeing of his eyes ripened. But
his trunk still glows like a thousand candles,
in which his looking, only turned down slightly,
continues to shine. Otherwise the thrust of the
breast wouldn’t blind you, and from the light twist
of the loins a smile wouldn’t flow into
that center where the generative power thrived.
Otherwise this stone would stand half disfigured
under the transparent fall of the shoulders,
and wouldn’t shimmer like the skin of a wild animal;
it wouldn’t be breaking out, like a star, on
all its sides: for there is no place on this stone,
that does not see you. You must change your life.
The second story in Taylor’s collection, “In My Heart I Am Already Gone,” ends, like Rilke’s poem, with a psycho-kinetic punch to the xiphoid process. But it’s not ending a story like this that’s hard; what’s hard is writing something that can legitimately justify that end, and all without telegraphing your punch. Justin Taylor can do that, and that’s reason alone to read this book.
