NEAR FLESH: Stories, by Katherine Dunn
While novels can afford to be like marathons — long, arduous and discursive in a way that mirrors a life — short stories work best when they pack a punch. Katherine Dunn, the venerated author of the 1989 novel “Geek Love,” was already an expert in the actual pugilistic arts: For many years she worked as a sportswriter, covering boxing for The Willamette Week in Oregon. With the publication of her first and only story collection, “Near Flesh,” nearly a decade after her death, Dunn proves that she could throw a brisk hook from the page, too.
These stories — like her posthumously published novel, “Toad” (2022) — were gleaned from Dunn’s archive at Lewis & Clark College, and many are appearing in print for the first time. The collection is a welcome reminder that literature can be not only a showcase for polished, refined sentiment but also an arena in which both reader and writer grapple — with imminent challenges, with their own psyches, with the uncertainty of survival.
Dunn’s pieces have an almost irrepressible kinetic energy: Plot and character jostle within the bounds of tight word counts, protagonists come out swinging at obstacles both real and psychological, and situations that other authors might render through internal monologue are expressed as eruptions of action.
“Process,” a story about a painter haunted by a canvas that he can’t seem to get right, takes us through a yearslong blow-by-blow:
He spent two months on the new approach and when it was finished he found it so depressing that he went to a tavern and drank until they threw him into the street. He walked around the same block for hours, crying softly, and wondering about his parents’ death and the murky light at the bottom of the river. He was sick for days and turned the canvas to face the wall.
Dunn’s characters do not act strategically, and they rarely reflect on their drives. Instead they are buffeted around, victims of their conditions or their urges, becoming projectiles in motion.
This gives most stories in the collection a tragic air. Many of them focus on people mired in situations from which they need to extract themselves; they struggle but often only make things worse. In “The Blowtorch,” a woman resents her husband’s devotion to a religious sect that performs “tests of faith” with venomous snakes, chafing at the way he pampers the snakes while neglecting their six children. She finally lashes out, not against her husband but against the reptiles, which are kept warm with firewood that her family desperately needs. Does she set herself free by doing this? Not in the least — but perhaps she has scored a point.
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