Review: View by Glen Pourciau

Reviewed by Charlotte Kupsh

View
Stories by Glen Pourciau
Four Way Books, March 2017
$17.95, 168 pp.
ISBN-13: 978-1935536895

Glen Pourciau’s second collection of short stories, View, offers a vivid and remarkably interior portrait of the minds of average, anxious, and altogether ordinary people. Pourciau’s sixteen stories focus on small, everyday moments that readers may recognize from their own lives: the mental gymnastics of a narrator worrying what others think of him, odd conversations that a character cannot let go, and, above all, an ever-present, ominous feeling that something just isn’t right. Pourciau skillfully blends the normal with the abnormal, blurring the lines between reader and narrator to create stories that readers will find painfully relatable and, ultimately, deeply engrossing.

Constantly shifting between benign and bizarre, Pourciau’s plotlines are simultaneously regular and riveting. The narrators of these self-contained stories are distinct from one another, but they share common traits: thoughtfulness to the point of obsession, a rapt attention to detail, and an intense social awareness that borders on anxiety, even paranoia. Some stories reflect the simple anxieties and obsessions of their narrators, like “Mercy,” in which a man on vacation with his wife is tortured by the possibility that a notoriously nosy neighbor might be planning a burglary. In the end, it seems his fears are unfounded, but readers frequently find that a narrator’s paranoia is warranted. Take, for example, “Worm,” where a new widower reluctantly attends an acquaintance’s house party only to find himself dogged by a man who pretends to know the narrator. True to life, at times the people these narrators encounter are genuinely suspicious or outright ill-intentioned, but at other times, they are simply other ordinary people. Thus, each story in Pourciau’s collection presents a challenge to the reader, as they must distinguish the menacing from the merely misunderstood.

The true beauty of Pourciau’s cunning mix of ordinary and bizarre situations is that, once the reader is several stories deep, they can no longer distinguish between the two. The anxiety of the narrators seeps through to the reader, to the point where extreme situations seem normal, even likely. “Is he going to bite me? Am I going to bite him?” the narrator of “Nose” asks after spending several harrowing, nearly hallucinogenic hours sitting behind her ex-boyfriend in a movie theater. The narrator does not know, and neither does the reader. In the web of emotion, suspense, and pure anxiety that Pourciau has woven, the reader nearly loses their own sense of reality—in these stories, it feels like anything is possible.

Pourciau’s writing, too, is carefully wrought. Each story is incredibly—almost overwhelmingly—interior, using the first-person to call attention to the narrator’s every observation and thought. No detail is held back: readers experience the same unpunctuated anxiety as the narrator of “Claim” when caught in traffic: “Lots of people going too fast and others too slow and the fast people switching lanes all over the place to get around the slow people.” The narrators are aware of everything, from a hitch in the breath of another character to the precise layout of a department store. The effect of Pourciau’s writing is startling, forcing readers uncomfortably close to each detail. “No matter how hard you try you can’t get away from people,” the narrator of “Hounds” bemoans. “They’re all over the place, bumping into you, filling up the road with their fumes and trampling down sidewalks and hallways.” Readers will agree with him, because at times, the weight of all the information Pourciau’s narrators provide is almost claustrophobic—but of course, this only serves to make the narrators’ experiences all the more relatable. Here, again, reader and narrator blend together.

It is this relatability that draws readers into Pourciau’s world. Despite their often embarrassing, bumbling, and self-conscious outlooks on life, the narrators of View are undeniably familiar. It is not hard for readers to accept the oddities that these characters encounter because they are the same oddities that, deep down, we are all afraid of. “I don’t want to let her see me cry, not now,” the narrator of the collection’s final and titular piece reflects when he meets his ex after many years apart. “Or to let her to hear me howling, nor do I want to hear myself howling, and something like faraway howling is going on inside me.” Indeed, readers will find that View gives voice to the faraway howling going on inside all of us.

Charlotte Kupsh is a graduate student in writing at the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire. You can read her other reviews and short fiction in Pleiades and The Madison Review.