American Masculine by Shann Ray

The Bakeless Prize has rockstar taste. Last year they published Belle Boggs’ “Mattaponi Queen,” which went on to garner a bouquet of accolades, and this year they’re publishing the astonishing “American Masculine” by Shann Ray, a frontrunner for my favorite book of the year.

“American Masculine” is the perfect title. The stories are rough and raw, though not without a strong dose of heart. There are Native American characters coming and going off the rez, with names like Elias Pretty Horse and and Benjamin Killsnight, and rodeo riders so tough they break the back of bulls, and violent fathers locking horns with stubborn sons, and suicides, many suicides. Yet despite this depressing subject material, or maybe because of it, the stories end on hopeful notes: the eagles in “How We Fall” serve as a metaphor for the characters that it is time to stop falling and start rising, father and son find forgiveness in “In the Half Light,” and an alcoholic makes the right choice in “The Way Home.”

Those endings, the way the stories arc up from the valleys of life into highlands of reconciliation, forgiveness, and peace, are one sign of a religious theme leavening these stories, but not the only one. Several bear epigraphs of Bible verses, and it seems that a half dozen characters are 33 years old. Boys are torn between fathers who want them to fight and scripture-quoting mothers encouraging them toward holiness. There are encounters with the holy as well, even in unexpected places like a snowy basketball court: “A sweet jumper finds the mark, he thought, a feeling of completion and the chance to be face-to-face not with the mundane but with the holy.”

Many writers make me aware of their attention to the warp and weft of sentences, but Ray makes me pay attention to the shape of his paragraphs. He treats paragraphs with the same consistency and unity of purpose as a sentence, powering through with a single strong aim, making them cumulate in a fireball or orbit around a core feeling. His paragraphs feel whole, immutable, knapped into ideal shapes.

But his sentences are excellent as well. The cover blurb belongs to Dave Eggers, who likens Shann Ray’s prose to Cormac McCarthy. The comparison actually covers the span of voices in the book. The first half of “American Masculine” leans toward the McCarthy of “Blood Meridian,” while the second half leans more toward the plain-spoken “No Country for Old Men.” In the first half of the book, polysyndetonic clauses cascade over each other, accumulating in strings until they become something larger than themselves. For instance, this excerpt:

“Weston, alone and in their father’s car, sped from the edge of that highway in darkness and blew out the metal guardrail and warped the steel so it reached after the car like a strange hand through which the known world passes, the heavy dark Chevelle like a shot star, headlights that put beams in the night until the chassis turned and the car became an untethered creature that fell and broke itself on the valley floor. The moment sticks in Shale’s mind, always has, no one having seen anything but the aftermath and silence, and down inside the wreckage a pale arm from the window, almost translucent, like a thread leading back to what was forsaken.”

Just as McCarthy teeters on the edge of grandiloquence (as Michiko Kakutani notes), Ray uses grandiose language which that could be overdone, but I think this is a high-wire act without a misstep, as demonstrated by “The Great Divide”:

“He works the train and travels to places he has not yet known, where day is buoyant and darkness gone, and when death comes seeking like the hand of an enemy he gives himself over, for it is death he desires, and death he welcomes, and the spirit of his good body is a vessel borne to the eternal.”

Compare those examples to the terse, taciturn prose of “The Miracles of Vincent Van Gogh,” the last story in the collection which won the Ruminate Short Story Prize:

“He woke, stumbled back to bed. Night sifting the sediment of dreams. Dark animal, solitary, full of speed. Light. Morning. Glass of water. Toast. No TV, no radio. No sound.”

Despite the varieties of prose in these stories, they all adhere together. The sentence pacing is kinetic, whether stacattoed by periods or propelled by commas. The voice drums inside your head.

Given the sheer heft of his talent, Ray is underpublished. Yes, he’s got belt notches from McSweeney’s and Narrative, but most of these stories come from the byways and backways of the literary fiefdom, journals like Montana Quarterly, Big Sky Journal, Aethlon, Talking River Review, and South Dakota Review. Bet on seeing him in heavyweight journals in the future, although not frequently — the stories here were published over a seven year span, starting in 2003, which means they were likely written over more than a decade. Speedy he’s not, although it’s easy to forgive him given the cut and carat of these stories.

These stories wreck me in the best way. They make me pity those who have drunk-driven their lives and mangled those they love, not pity them in a Nietzschean way because I see myself as better than them, but because I know I’m prone to the same tragedy of errors. This is a book that made me a better human being. I don’t know of any higher praise.

Other Reviews:

• High Country News review
• Open Letter Monthly review
• Bark offers an interview