Elliot-edited Stumbling and Raging: Politically Inspired Fiction

I read Stephen Elliott’s edited collection of “politically inspired fiction,” Stumbling and Raging, a while ago but am finally getting around to writing about it now. (Honestly, since I subscribed to the New York Times, my book reading has gone down a large drain. Still, it’s much healthier for me to read a newspaper than fiction on the way to work in the mornings – it doesn’t stick me in an alternate reality where answer-that-email imperatives lose out to daydreaming.) In the introduction, Elliott writes, “Fiction can get closer to truth because it can follow events to their natural conclusions and exhibit case histories in a unique way with access to the participants’ inner voice. And I believe that writers are the voice and thoughts of their time…”

There were a couple of stories I really enjoyed. One is “How little we know about cast polymers, and about life” by Ben Greenman. It’s a lightly absurdist story narrated by a man on an assassination mission pretending to be a traveling cast polymer manufacturer. The mood is conspiratorial and silly, there are unexpected players in the game, and eventually the narrator falls into a trap as well (this in the course of four pages.) As his adventure is unfolding, Terri Schiavo is being battled over on television, and the story models its rarefied irrationality on public discourse around the woman.

Greenman does a really good job juggling the two storylines while smashing them into one story bit by bit. For example, after describing the Schiavo case, he throws in the ridiculous details of his narrator’s persona: “I can’t say any more, to be perfectly honest. I may have information about the case, or a person or persons involved in the case, that would reflect badly on other people – people in power – and that’s why I’m relieved that I have at least something to report from that long day of traveling. It’s a distraction, a story about traveling, but it can be a compelling distraction, especially when it could possibly involve a man clasping his hands together, saying “Madre de Dios,” humming a snatch of Carmina Burana, and then moving his hands to the back of his head, where instinct led him to believe that he might catch whatever blew out.”

Together, the two stories reinforce each other’s nonsensical content, but the result is not heavy-handed, as are often parodies of political discourse, and the construct holds up really well. Makes me want to write a story using the same structural skeleton (though given my stylistic ability, it’ll probably be called “How little we know about writing.”)