
Book Review: Everyone Was There: Stories by Anthony Varallo
Reviewed by Charles Holdefer
Everyone Was There: Stories
Fiction by Anthony Varallo
Elixir Press, May 2017
$19.00; 168 pp.
ISBN-13: 978-1932418637
Winner of the Elixir Press Fiction Award, Everyone Was There, Anthony Varallo’s fourth collection of short fiction, displays a probing, curious mind. These stories evince a sense of wonder at the world and a suspicion of lazy understandings of what is supposedly ordinary. The author frequently breaks with literary realism in order to pursue other pathways of the imagination.
Varallo often employs a deadpan delivery about an extraordinary situation. Consider the opening lines of “The Boy”:
The boy’s parents often told him that if he didn’t stop misbehaving they’d leave the house without him. And one day, they did. “We tried to tell you,” they said. They closed the front door and pulled out of the driveway. They neglected to wave goodbye. The boy watched them out the window.
This premise sets in motion a strange but satisfying tale of a parentless child leading a well-behaved life in a suburban setting. Years pass. The ending of the story is painful and absurd and rings absolutely true. It is also representative of Varallo’s method: it was necessary to come unmoored from conventional realism in order to glimpse this truth.
Most of the stories are only two or three pages in length. Often they start with an intriguing situation or turn of phrase, upon which a narrator performs a riff. What if you really could talk to squirrels? What if you compared a can opener to Mahler’s Fifth Symphony? What if a pinball could speak? All rather odd questions, but the stories avoid being arbitrary or merely whimsical because they also make bold associations. In “The Pinball Speaks,” a pinball observes, “I was in darkness, then sped toward the light. I careened, I caromed; I dropped into darkness again. A pinball sees the religious in everything.”
Other stories focus on the domestic, and on how what is seemingly commonplace contains elements of the inexplicable or sinister. In “Theft,” the tendency for a married couple to resemble each other over time becomes a source of paranoia, unspoken resentment, and dark conjectures. “What Did We Do to the Hardings?” is a tone-perfect study of the mystery of next-door neighbors, and the chilling limits of social graces. Should the bewildered narrator feel guilty? Where does complicity begin when something is sensed as being seriously amiss but remains unaddressed? At issue in Varallo’s sensibility are not plot points of a “whodunit” but varieties of self-knowledge or deception, and how they get packaged in the ways we speak to each other.
Stories like “What a Night Sky” are explicitly metafictional excursions in what Martin Amis described as the “war on cliché.” Varallo seems acutely aware that it is not enough to avoid clichéd turns of phrase; characters are tested against clichés of heart and mind, which are internalized and more challenging to overcome. Despite this wariness of habits of seeing and thinking, these stories do not shy away from moral experience, either. In “Bad Car,” a man’s family and community and even nature itself inexplicably turn against a recently acquired automobile. The events are humorous but also full of menace, with echoes of Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery” bizarrely reconfigured in a consumer society.
Flash pieces like “7-Eleven,” “All Very Surprising” and “The Bottom of This” show that even within the constraints of microfiction, it is possible to have a tightly-constructed, even dense, plot. “7-Eleven” recounts the surreal dissolution of a family and an entire social fabric in the space of two pages. “All Very Surprising” features a precocious talking infant attune to his mother’s distress and capable of taking a long view of the tragic ironies of his own life. “The Bottom of This” takes a familiar situation—a child misbehaving at school—and creates a world that is thoroughly unnerving. These highly original stories, with their magical twists, are among the strongest in the volume, and feel like signature pieces of the author.
Everyone Was There confirms Anthony Varallo as one of the most inventive and entertaining short story writers today.
Charles Holdefer is an American writer currently based in Brussels. His work has appeared in The New England Review, Chicago Quarterly Review and Slice. His recent books include a story collection Dick Cheney in Shorts (2017) and a forthcoming nonfiction volume, Bookmarked: George Saunders’ Pastoralia. His short story “The Raptor” also appears in the 2017 Pushcart Prize anthology. More information is available at www.charlesholdefer.com.
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