“The Continental Divide,” Bob Johnson’s debut collection of 14 stories, begins with an epigraph from Jeremiah: “The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked; who can know it?”
Epigraphs can be forgotten, if read at all, but this one continued to resonate after the tour de force title story that opens the book. As one potent story segued into another, alternative epigraphs started occurring to me. From Blake: “Some are Born to sweet delight/Some are Born to Endless Night.” Johnson’s stories dwell in the latter. From Flannery O’Connor: “She would of been a good woman … if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life.” That iconic story, “A Good Man Is Hard to Find,” ends with the kind of violence that is a go-to in several of Johnson’s stories. Think Flannery O’Connor meets Quentin Tarantino.
There’s an entertaining cinematic quality to these narratives. Several generate physical action that, besides wickedness, is driven by rage — fights, accidents, assaults, pederasty, filicide, matricide. Johnson’s way with action and dialogue is skillful enough to be a stylistic signature. It’s taut, visceral, and yet doesn’t cross (as Hollywood can) into carnography.
But then his invention on several levels, including language, could be singled out. Take similes: “He went to pull her close again but felt a rumble off her skin, like when a cat has had enough petting and is thinking of biting you.” Or: “His eyes look like somebody blew matches out in them.”
There’s a short-story axiom: Begin in medias res. These stories open already wound tight, demanding release. Characterization doesn’t necessarily account for the situations his protagonists are caught in; their situations often define them. A sense of the inevitable fuels the stories’ momentum.
“Plucked From the Lame and Afflicted,” a story about a teenage boy whose father has recently died, begins: “There was only one vacancy, a room with a double bed, when Nelson and Pastor Snow checked into the motel.” Whatever you’re thinking may happen next, it ends up being still more grotesque. A story with a title like “Please, Mister, Please” needs only to begin, “Fulkerson was nearly upon the car when he saw it,” to launch a Hitchcockian, macabre tale about a loan officer who stalks the night highways of Indiana.
There’s a subgenre of story collections linked by place that are more than the sum of their parts: Joyce’s “Dubliners” and Sherwood Anderson’s seminal “Winesburg, Ohio” are among the famous ones. Like “Winesburg,” Johnson’s book is set in a fictional Midwestern town. One-stoplight Mount Moriah, Ind., is named for the mountain in Genesis where Abraham bound Isaac for sacrifice, inspiring the thread of conflicts between parents and children through these stories.
Published in 1919, “Winesburg” still reads like a correction to American hypocrisy. Rather than community, there’s betrayal, repression and isolation founded in secrets that distort its citizens’ inner lives. Johnson’s book reads not like an imitation of Anderson, but as a fellow traveler. Secrets and betrayals remain prominent, although interiority is less integral than it is in “Winesburg.” In Johnson’s Indiana, psychic pain manifests as physical violence, while wickedness assumes the shape of a psychopathic lack of empathy.
Johnson’s inventive, assured writing delivers what one hopes for in a first book, pages that breathe with life, and the introduction to a writer who has absorbed the echoes of iconic storytellers, but whose already identifiable voice is his own.
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