Book Review: The Hook and the Haymaker by Jared Yates Sexton

The Hook and the Haymaker
Short Stories by Jared Yates Sexton
Split Lip Press, January 2015
ISBN-13: 978-0990903529
$16.00; 200pp.
Reviewed by Edmund Zagorin

Sexton’s newest collection of twenty-three stories offers a striking example of working-class prose squarely in the vein of Raymod Carver. Indeed, Carver’s own definition of the sub-genre that his writing revamped and re-popularized is useful in understanding the knotted violence lacing through Sexton’s prose: “…it’s the things that are left out, that are implied, the landscape just under the smooth, but sometimes broken and unsettled, surface of things.” (Quoted in Kristin Dota, Raymond Carver Life & Work hosted online by Youngstown Stat University’s Center for Working Class Studies, http://cwcs.ysu.edu/resources/literature/raymond-carver-life-and-works). There’s a lot more drinking than boxing, but Sexton’s prose throughout is one of extreme physical and emotional pain.

What is fascinating about the comparison to Carver is Sexton’s almost devotional consistency to Carver’s minimalist style, characters, and even use of mise-en-scène. There’s even a full nod to one of Ray’s early gems from Will You Please Be Quiet, Please? in “Live Off The Land,” where Alice asks, “Wait…what time is it in Alaska?” (Carver’s story is called “What’s In Alaska?”)

Like Carver, Sexton’s male narrators and protagonists are jealous, opportunistic drunks coping with a lifetime of barely-submerged financial desperation and unrepentant lusts. This coping variously takes the form of failed or failing romances, drinking cheap beer, whiskey or cocktails, and basically enacting all the catatonically humdrum rhythms of white American existence. And very much like Carver, Sexton’s women are fleshy props victimized as property, objects of male sexual desire and empty spaces of territory defined by the borders of male conquest. Consider for example the story aptly titled “It Comes With The Territory,” where Les’s wife Eve makes an appearance only as “a fine piece of ass,” “a knockout,” and a tearful, self-blaming pawn in her husband’s unmotivated vindictiveness. Or, in “Outlaws,” where the protagonist’s girlfriend Faye is literally won in a card game from her then-boyfriend Todd by the narrator and abandoned just as quickly to the affections of a predatory motel manager. Are we supposed to find this repulsive? It is unclear, as the story’s point-of-view pulls the car away and heads off in search of greener pastures.

Without fail Sexton’s women are wives, girlfriends, or daughters. None fare very well. The wives of The Hook and the Haymaker are a particularly doomed lot, cursed for failing to fill the ice cube trays, for being adulterous (or insufficiently adulterous), and for requesting that Sexton’s men do anything other than drink one cheap beer after another. Halfway through the collection one realizes that many of Sexton’s stories could have been written forty-plus years ago, in most cases without altering a single jot or tittle. This revelation will either evoke a sense of literary nostalgia, or more likely, a sense of profound revulsion.

However, the fact that Sexton’s prose—changeless as it is—still somehow feels absolutely contemporary signals that, as Julian Barnes once wryly noted in The Sense of an Ending, simply because it was the 1960s in certain places doesn’t mean that it stopped being the 1950s everywhere else. In Sexton’s locales of 2015, just as in Carver’s of the ’70s and ’80s,, things have remained pretty much as they were during all those years of quiet desperation. Such places are not per se geographically discrete but interpenetrate the America that Sexton’s many characters inhabit, carried onto the next generation by cycles of poverty, alcoholism and abuse. Sexton neither invented these cycles, nor does he sugarcoat their devastation.

Against such a backdrop, Sexton asks, what can a man really want? Well, Sexton’s men want to drink, fight and fuck. The quintessence of their masculine desire is revealed in the story “Coming Home,” where the protagonist’s wife tells him, upon uncovering an adulterous relationship, “Either go run around with that slut and sow whatever oats you’ve still got, or come home and be a husband and a father. You can’t have both.” To which ultimatum the character un-ironically replies, “But I wanted both.” (It is unclear, upon the story’s ending, whether or not he gets it). Is the reader supposed to identify with such utterly selfish desires? This, too, is left unclear.

Sexton’s men rarely, if ever, encounter repudiation or even complications as they pursue said appetites—their lusts are rendered as just-the-way-things-are within the very short arcs of the collection’s many stories. It’s worth noting that the sole moment of female sexual agency, found in daughter Wendy of “Volcano” who commits some sort of illicit sex act with the school boys, is literally treated as a medical pathology by Wendy’s parents and the school’s higher-ups. This while the story’s father hurries off to purge his daughter’s sins with the redemption of a righteous arson. Such flourishes of gratuitous masculinity become almost a form of self-parody in “How A Man Lives,” where the narrator and his four messy cats receive a visit from landlord Brad. Does Brad want the cats gone? Sure he does, but all is ultimately settled over a few manly beers as Brad observes that a man “…does what he has to do,” messy cats and all.

Roberto Bolaño and his contemporaries of the 1970s wrote in their manifesto a line that loosely translates as “The proletariat doesn’t have parties. Only rhythmic funerals.” Sexton clearly has a talent for the kind of Carverish prose that men are supposed to write, and he’s got a knack for vivid, repulsive dialogue (e.g. “You Have to Have Somebody”). Readers may even find Sexton as a true master of the down-and-out storyteller’s voice, which suffuses many of his tales with the cigarette smoke of authenticity. Nevertheless, it is clear that the rhythmic funerals here are only for Sexton’s men. The women of The Hook and the Haymaker never achieve a sufficient measure of life to become tragic, let alone grievable. This is cruel prose. And how, really, are we to feel about that?

Edmund Zagorin‘s work has appeared in Joyland, Chicago Literati and the anthology Writing That Risks (Redbridge Press, 2013). This Fall he will begin an MFA at CalArts’ School of Critical Studies. @storiesbymail