Commentary |

on The Gunners, a novel by Rebecca Kauffman

Rebecca Kauffman’s second novel, The Gunners, follows six friends as they proceed from childhood to their early thirties. “Alice, Sally, Lynn, Jimmy and Sam became Mikey’s friends when they were neighbor kids, all living on the same block, all seeking playmates as well as an escape from their own homes,” the unnamed narrator says. “The children claimed one of the abandoned homes on Ingram Street as their official meeting place, and the rusted mailbox mounted to the front door of the house read THE GUNNERS in gold Mylar stickers.” This is Lackawanna, New York, just south of Buffalo, a working-class town with a shuttered steel plant. As the sentence above implies, the narrative leans toward Mikey who is one year younger than the others, respected for his kindness but otherwise unremarkable, and slowly going blind from macular degeneration.

KauffmanCover.jpegA reunion of the friends takes place at the center of the novel. After years of maintaining ties through email, the group gathers at a roomy lakeside house arranged by Jimmy, a math-whiz now financially successful. Alice and Lynn are accompanied by their partners. The triggering event: Sally has killed herself, having jumped off Buffalo’s Skyway bridge. It is the evening after her funeral. At the end of their junior year of high school, Sally had suddenly and inexplicably spurned her friends. But this is an exceptionally tight knit group; Sally’s presence is not only keenly missed, but each of her friends speculates movingly about her rejection of the group and the cause of death.

Food and drink, confessions and revelations: their common history breaks down not into explanations but into images and story fragments. Some of their experiences have been harsh. These are people who are familiar with deprivation. If each one has developed a certain talent for living with it, then how will each of them portray this communal and private loss? Presenting the dinner as a kind of ensemble act, Kauffman gives us one of the most memorable and spirited sequences in recent fiction. I can easily imagine this extended, brilliantly modulated scene produced for film. The garrulously outspoken Alice, a towering lesbian, provokes and prods the others into life.

Considered as a Bildungsroman, The Gunners may be appreciated for its plotting, characterizations and thematics. The writing plays out confidently through dialogue and the companionable voice of the narrator. An implied question continuously directs one’s attention: What is the actual nature of friendship? Attuned to her market, Kauffman allows for the possibility of consolation and gratification in her characters’ lives, and the reader may depart with a satisfied sense of closure.

But The Gunners is shrewdly streaked with unsuspected complexities – and its embedded question rejects its answers just as Sally rejected the intimacies of her friends. In the early stages of drafting, Kauffman made a critical decision that would make or break her efforts – namely, to situate the narrator next to Mikey. His life-story, enshadowed by encroaching blindness, has few components: he never knew his mother, he receives no affection from his sullen father, he lives alone in Lackawanna and apparently has never loved or been loved, and he works at the General Mills plant. On the other hand, a dense fiction could be written about such a person. No, what comprises Kauffman’s risk is Mikey’s profound reserve and struggle to conceptualize his experience. He is not only at a loss but seems to embody loss and vacancy. He gives off a child-like whiff (he is named ‘Mikey’ after all) and has practically nothing of interest to say.

13Aliu-superJumbo.jpgKauffman achieves her main effects through a strict regulation of diction and tone – unembellished and precisely unanalytical in the first case, and abidingly temperate and patient in the latter. Speaking like a privileged member of the group, she (?) ventures to state what the characters wonder and worry about. In short, it is the narrator’s vision of friendship that we are witnessing. Just as Mikey proceeds with his fears and doubts by enacting an almost pious sweetness, the narrator finds a matching mode of expression. When the narrator says, “Mikey had become so skillful at concealing his true self in his father’s presence, it was as if he had sewn himself in under his own skin,” it is meant to sound poignant – even if “true self” also sounds simplistic or even banal.

Here’s an example. Back in high school, Sam had a crush on Sally:

“Sam pruned his grandmother’s shrubs and collected recyclables from street trash, which were worth five cents apiece if he took them to the center. He had his eye on a little gold ring with an emerald heart that he had seen at JCPenney’s – green was Sally’s favorite color. Sam worked and saved and worked and saved, and finally earned the fifty-eight dollars needed to purchase the ring. It came in a beautiful red velvet box that was as soft and warm as a baby animal.”

Diction and tone here begin to remind one of young adult fiction — worked and saved and worked and saved — though certainly most of The Gunners doesn’t suggest juvenility. But this, again, is Kauffman’s risk – to employ language and sound that reveal ignorance as well as comprehension, the wish for happiness as well as the brusqueness of the actual. Our unending childlike existence. The person speaking the paragraph above is an innocent who nevertheless knows how things turn out.

Kauffman knows exactly when to flip the switch and darken the stage – and she does it without betraying the narrative’s more hopefully sonorous values. Secrets yielded at the reunion may generate other acknowledgements. Love flickers in the world. But darkness is Mikey’s true fate and ground of his meditations:

bflo-harbor-kayak.jpg“Sally, even now that she was gone, felt too close. He couldn’t explain it. And he was fearful that if he found himself up on that soaring overpass, if he pictured a slim, pale body dropping straight like a nail to the river a hundred feet below, if he even began to imagine the sort of darkness that could overtake a person, that could take them to a place that was so far away and so alone … When Mikey pictured this scene, sometimes he wasn’t sure if it was Sally in it, or himself. Mikey felt as if now that Sally had taken her own life, he understood her better than he ever had before.”

Ultimately, The Gunners is about how we understand more than what we understand. At the reunion, Alice asks Jimmy to tell a story. He responds, “Once upon a time, there were six best friends … They were all different, but they fit together very nicely.” They fit together very nicely in the artful tale called The Gunners. But the pattern they make is laid upon a dark abyss. And the darkness shows through.

 

[Published by Counterpoint March 20, 2018. 260 pages, $26.00 hardcover]

Contributor
Ron Slate

Ron Slate is the host and editor of On The Seawall.

Posted in Commentary

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