Blue-collar angst, erratically drawn
Rear View: Stories
By Pete Duval
Mariner, 176 pp., paperback, $10
In this intriguing but uneven first collection, Duval is clearly in love with older writers, classic and otherwise, and in search of his authentic material and voice. His characters are flawed, failed, unhappy at work, often French Canadian from New Bedford, and usually male and sexually anxious.
In the title story, ''Rear View," for instance, two yuppie brothers-in-law visiting Denver for a wedding are cruising the late-night streets together in a Nissan Pathfinder while their wives sleep in a motel. They compare notes on ''insidious domestication" and drunkenly fancy themselves ''drifter existentialists," but when a threesome of rowdy hitchhikers calls their bluff, they are humiliated.
If the precedent for such bleak comedy is Raymond Carver, the bizarre humor in ''Fun With Mammals" recalls films by the Coen brothers. Ostensibly, the narrator, a simple-minded lout, Pete, has been hired by an inept lawyer for a Westport, Conn., drug king to transport a 3,000-pound narwhal on a flatbed trailer to an oceanarium in Nova Scotia. Under indictment and targeted by his cartel for fear of plea bargaining, the client has vanished. The client had kept the whale in an underground tank so he could watch it through his transparent bedroom wall. As they drive, another man is supposed to keep the whale sedated, splash water on it, and rub it with salve. The men are racing against time, to keep the whale alive. Mishaps ensue. Once Pete is put in charge, he feels movements in the whale and has them stop in Vermont. They think the whale is giving birth. Phil, the lawyer, gives the whale another hypo, then orders Pete to help as he ''reaches into the birthing canal of the sedated cetacean." He pulls out his client, Earl, wearing a wet suit, scuba mask, and snorkel; Earl had hoped to escape to Canada. Pete, however, thinks to save the whale, and the others rally to his lead. They drive across New Hampshire to the shore and wait for the whale to wake up, at which point Pete will drive the rig off a pier into the water; for all this seamy crew, this is a call to decency, chastened by the mystery of nature: ''her great bulk undulant and crying out for the healing salve of the sea."
Duval is the master of convincing details. Venturing into magical realism in ''Cellular," he casually introduces a talking dog, who speaks like Jiminy Cricket to his 72-year-old master, a retired mailman who has a demented wife and who sets out to destroy a phone tower that obstructs the view.
The richest and most memorable of the stories, however, is the novella, ''Bakery," set in an industrial bakery, and centered on a conflict between the newcomer Gus, a married but childless 28-year-old who has lost a house-painting business, and the bully next in line to be foreman, Red, who lives alone in a trailer, has no woman, and whose idea of fun is feeding pigeons dough, so that ''when the dough expanded in their stomachs, the birds couldn't fly" and they spin down to ''pop on the pavement below."
The story alternates between Red's and Gus's point of view. Gus objects to Red's persecuting Prak and Lok, two young Cambodian brothers on the job. At this point, the story broadens to introduce issues in Gus's marriage. When he takes his troubled conscience home, his wife, Pam, doesn't want to hear about Lok, in the face of her own sacrifices and having to quit community college to waitress. She leaves for work, and just as Gus tries to sleep, roofers start to bang and pound (a complication that provides a surprise payoff at the ending). Continuing back at the bakery, Red invites Gus for a beer and awkwardly attempts friendship, but Gus keeps his distance and escapes when Pam picks him up. That night, he and Pam have protected sex, but sounds of wailing in the funeral parlor downstairs distract him.
Again, back at work, in a penultimate, mean prank, Red slips a bag over Prak's head: ''Gus could see the Cambodian's face through the bag. Prak was looking right at him, his eyes bulging as the plastic billowed out and in with his breathing." Gus yells at Red to quit, then sees the slicing machine jamming up with rolls and mangles his hand trying to clear them. He has time to see Prak's brother claw Red's eyes before his own wound overcomes him and he passes out. Duval carries this powerful, tough realism still further. In the emergency room, Red with bandaged eyes blames Prak, and Gus with bandaged hands tells Red: ''You're out of line!" Blindness hasn't lent Red insight. At that, they grapple, and Gus is beating Red's face and riding his belly in a parody of sex, just as Pam walks in. Gus tells Pam on the way home, ''He had it coming. . . . You should see what he does to those birds," but she is horrified.
At the end, Red is blind, helpless, and jobless back in his trailer, wondering ''who will take over bird duty for him," while Gus feels newly empowered, though Pam pushes him away as a monster. He gets drunk, sleeps on the couch, wakes in the middle of the night, and on an impulse climbs naked up into the attic, where he realizes that the roof is gone, open to the sky; where all they own is stored, including ''a crib his father had given them when they were thinking of having kids"; and where he realizes that sleeping birds are roosting. He is alone in his marriage and jobless, and yet the story's symbolism emphasizes hope.
Two other notable stories are the Carveresque ''Scissors," about a 31-year-old man returning to New Bedford after a divorce and lost job and finding communion with the barber of his youth who is dying of cancer; and the sharply focused ''Something Like Shame," about a clerk in his mid-40s being humiliated by his druggist boss for skimming from the cash register to help his ailing mother.
Duval is a restless, gifted writer, yet he falls short of his models. Too often, his claims to serious feeling fail to bear weight, and his most complex truths remain buried in the symbolism.
DeWitt Henry is author of ''The Marriage of Anna Maye Potts" and ''Breaking Into Print." He teaches at Emerson College.
