David Means is at home in a short story. Where other writers chafe against the form or distract with stylistic acrobatics, Means — in his fifth collection, Instructions for a Funeral — draws power from the single moment, and man’s infinite cerebral capacity. The men in Means’ short stories are of varying stripes — from fathers to homeless men to those who fight, trick, and win — but in each story, Means deftly builds a mechanism for their rumination. Means’ stories are mostly moments of potential; they ask us to grasp the effects of love and loss, to swallow dichotomies whole.
A Means story is a literary equivalent of zooming in to view a picture on your phone: a concentrated gesture that allows the eye to examine myriad details otherwise overlooked. His stories cover topics ranging from parenthood to grief and doubt; he writes of men imagining better futures and lamenting the truth of their pasts. “Treeline, Kansas” details the boredom and thrill of an FBI stakeout. “Carver & Cobain,” a diptych about the two troubled artists, speculates about the ribbons of their connection. “Two Ruminations on a Homeless Brother” shows how perspective can change both opinion and story. Means’ agile prose celebrates introspection above complications of plot, but the author builds tension out of pregnant moments.
Means opens the work with “Confessions” of a writer/narrator. (Is it Means? Who cares?) Stories, this narrator writes, are “a gut feeling, a need to reveal something.” “Confessions” sets the tone for the work to come, priming the reader both to accept the lacuna between her conception of each story and the reality of Means’ ideas, and his yen to communicate those ideas anyway. “I attempt, to say the least,” he writes, “to respect whatever each story seems to want … an expression of a particular axe I must grind … a voice that needs to say what it says or else (and I feel this, really, I do) it’ll be lost forever to the void.” With this opening disclosure, the narrator calls to mind the ephemeral nature of life. Means’ stories are essential, yet each one had the potential to escape into the forgotten landscape of time, had it not been lassoed, harnessed in prose, and penned in by the page.
Means utilizes the short story to stop time, to reverse and expand it. Whether pausing to recall a homeless brother or untangle the fears and hopes of a stay-at-home dad, Means stories reveal the ability of narrative to communicate a story and to mess with our temporal identity. In “Fightfight, Sacramento, August 1950,” the author writes of a lifelong bond forged between two men when they fight one night behind a bar. He writes that “[t]ime lives retrospectively inside a fight. It doesn’t slow down. It tightens so that one move locates a relation to the moves before it. The point of a fight like this was to reverse the flow of time, to reduce everything to an effect and cause, and in doing so to erase the everyday tedium of time.” The two men fight simply because one calls the other an Okie, yet the match takes on greater significance as they age. The fight exists in Means’ story as much as it does in the men’s minds, but as each man spins it repetitively into a yarn, they have a chance to revise their actions’ import and meaning within the context of their own identity. Through their recursive storytelling, they become linked.
Means’ characters are often waiting; the author draws both potential and anxiety from this, testing them. As characters pass the time, their memories, anxieties, and doubts become pages of contemplation. Stories like “Farewell, My Brother,” which describes a group of men watching ice shift on the Hudson as they smoke behind a halfway house, evoke an Absurdist awareness of expectation and the folly of human action. In “Farewell,” Means calls this both a “hopeful moment of grace” and a projection. His narrator anticipates his naysayers, writing:
“They might say: Who is he to draw so much from a single moment while the rest of the world roils and rolls forward … Who is he to take a moment between a few fuckup men on the edge of a parking lot and pin it to the great spin of the cosmos, to the circular nature of addictive conditions that, at this particular moment, seemed to stop completely?
And I might say: Who are you to deny these men their moment of pure quietude?”
Means’ narrators often interrupt these stories with their own observations, questions, and second-guesses. They’re not gods, directing each character’s action with a lightning bolt, but artists stepping back to squint at their art. What works better here? How do I guide the eye to what matters? Means is keenly aware of metaphor as an illusory tool. He writes:
“I’d written about the town before in one form or another, and I knew that if I put too much of myself in the story it would become somewhat sentimental, because I found it hard to look upon a landscape without drawing a vestal sense, an obligation to hope that came not from the people–who, for the most part, had given up–but from the grandeur in the lovely fretwork that decorated the upper reaches of many of the houses, the sweeping front porches that seemed to be awaiting warm summer evenings and strollers with nothing to do but nod and call greetings. But there was more than that, of course, because the river itself, stretching beyond the men, beyond the trees, had no other choice but to represent the constant, eternal flow of time itself, and yet it was what it was and nothing else, just one more dogleg of the sea, its channel deep enough to let the salty tide slide up and back from day to day, running past the Battery, where, years ago, the towers fell and the dust rose and then, following the same pathway, drifted up past my brother and me as we stood in his yard smoking and talking and watching the kids.”
Means’ narrators’ resistance to the tools of storytelling illuminates how we use narrative to make meaning out of our existence. If it’s constructed meaning, is it any less significant? Means theorizes that it isn’t, that narrative can be fallible or false, and still allow us to process our lives. Stories “[testify] to the glory of our pretense of control.”
“If I could get even a fraction of this down in some kind of pure form,” Means writes, “I would be able to lean back, rest, and simply live in the world.” His stories in Instructions for a Funeral illustrate the paradox of story: it’s as necessary as it is able to be forsaken, but it gives us agency and an ability to hold our most complicated thoughts. It allows us to feel. Fiction, Means postulates, is better than shouting into the void, for “expressions of discontent… no matter how beautiful, never solve the riddle of the world, or bring the banality of sequential reality to a location of deeper grace.”
[Published March 5, 2019 by Farrar Straus & Giroux. 208 pages, $25.00 hardcover]