Between Life and Death

On Tom Howard’s ‘Invisibilia’

Beatriz Milhazes, Head of a Woman, 1996, Screenprint

The short story collection is a difficult and awkward form. It lacks the unity of the novel, and unlike a narrative that stands alone in a literary or cultural magazine, each story seems as if it should somehow be connected to the other stories around it. This, of course, is despite the fact that many of the stories in the collection will have already been published separately in the aforementioned magazines and journals. Elif Batuman, in her memorable essay in n+1 on the Best American Short Story anthologies, claimed that the American short story is “a dead form”; Chad Harbach, in his seminal essay “MFA vs. NYC,” noted that “no one reads short stories” (except for MFA students, who only read short stories); and more recently, Laura McGrath, in her new book on publishing and literary agents, Middlemen, writes that short story collections are the most difficult work for an agent to sell, and that, compared to other genres, conventional wisdom holds that “there are few readers of short story collections.”

At the same time, most readers will have a few stories that exist in their own personal canons, and they may even have their own favorite collections (two that come to mind for me are Alice Munro’s The View from Castle Rock and Claire-Louise Bennet’s Pond). A fantastic short story, because it can be read in one sitting, achieves a different feat than a novel, and a successful collection of stories, because of the inherent challenges involved, can be a mark of distinction for a writer — McGrath notes that short story collections are overrepresented on literary prize lists and that an agent who focuses on selling short fiction is thought to have “refined tastes,” an “appreciation of fine craftsmanship,” and is “a literary literary agent.” The writer who attempts a short story collection, then, undertakes a thankless and daunting task. Tom Howard has done it twice.

The stories in his new collection, Invisibilia, could be thought of as variations on a theme. Each story exists as an individual, self-contained unit — characters and worlds rarely recur — but taken together certain topics and concerns emerge. Most stories are about families and their possible dissolution. “Heart of Gold” (one of the collection’s best) and “Babel” are written from the point of view of wives who are estranged from their husbands, their relationships mediated by the presence (or absence) of a child. “Invisibilia” and “Cary Grant at the Orpheum Theatre” are told from the perspective of teenagers whose parents are divorced or almost divorced. “The Night Parade” follows a father whose teenage and video-game-addicted son is staying with him for the weekend, away from his mother and stepfather. Other stories — “Disappearing Act,” “Metamorphosis,” and “Swan Song” — are about childless, middle-aged men and their wives or girlfriends who either leave or stay.

These stories could be written in a straightforward, realist style — the material is compelling enough — but Howard likes to sprinkle in elements of magical realism. “Babel,” rather than simply being about a mother’s sense of displacement as an immigrant and her inability to communicate with her taciturn son, insists on analogizing these themes. Petra, the mother, wanders through a spooky apartment building that serves as a portal to a seemingly parallel reality, while her son, Del, and the other kids at school begin to paint their nails, dress in rags, and eventually swap houses with one another before absconding from town altogether. By then the town has transformed from nondescript suburbia into a bombed-out wasteland. It’s a lot to cover in 15 pages. “Invisibilia” performs a similar trick as a couple, attempting to salvage their marriage for the sake of their children, begins to literally disappear: the mother starts to become transparent while the father gradually shrinks to the size of a “large dragonfly.” A collection of preserved butterflies in the father’s shed comes to life and fly away, too. The meaning, I suppose, is that the parents who stay together for their kids end up diminishing themselves, and certain things can’t be preserved but need to be set free. A fine theme for a story, but for this reader, the unreal aspects detracted from the story instead of deepening its effects. “Metamorphosis” opens with the narrator discovering that his eyes have changed from brown to green — rather than turning into an insect, as in Kafka — before the man loses all his body hair. At the same time, his wife is dying from cancer, and the town they live in is rapidly (magically) transforming into New York City, as the events of the story merge with the memories of the dying wife and her past.

These stories are well written, exceedingly readable, and they often make use of clever literary techniques. If the goal of fiction is to convince readers to turn the page and keep reading, then Invisibilia passes the test. At the same time, I kept wondering if many of the stories would have benefitted from playing it straight rather than resorting to magical flourishes. Howard’s “Metamorphosis” invites comparisons to Kafka’s, and while it’s unfair to criticize a writer for not being Kafka, putting the two stories side by side is revealing. It’s impossible to imagine a version of The Metamorphosis where Gregor Samsa is anything but an insect, and even though his transformation is easily read as a metaphor for the inhuman condition to which drudgery can reduce a person, the story is so well constructed that the unreal transformation and its symbolic meaning are inseparable. On the other hand, it is relatively easy to imagine the narrator of Howard’s “Metamorphosis” with brown eyes and body hair, with little change in the overall meaning of the story. In some cases, the magical elements feel like fairy dust sprinkled atop a story that could stand on its own, rather than as integral and essential to the story itself.

When Howard does hew closer to narrative realism, as he does in “Heart of Gold,” the results are compelling. Here there is no magical shark jumping, but a slow burn as the story grows darker and creepier, the strangeness of real life providing the necessary intrigue. Howard displays his literary chops, too, incorporating both an unreliable narrator and metafiction to trick us into trusting a flawed character, who eventually kidnaps a young girl to replace the daughter she herself has lost. By the time you realize what is happening — after thinking that this couldn’t possibly be happening — it’s too late. Darkness runs through many of these stories, and nowhere more than in “Homecoming,” which follows the return of a young soldier from Vietnam and the atrocities committed there. The supernatural isn’t needed, as the real world is terrible enough. These two stories end on slightly surreal notes, closer in style to Cheever’s “The Swimmer” than Kafka’s The Metamorphosis.

Another story, “The Night Parade,” reads as Howard’s take on Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery,” as a father and his estranged son attempt to bond by participating in a town ritual in which drug addicts and criminals are rounded up, dressed in black cloaks, and beaten by the townspeople. Howard’s story is an intriguing dramatization of the darkness hiding in quaint small-town America, but it’s juxtaposed with another narrative, that of the father desperately trying to connect with his son by going camping and recreating an experience he had with his own father, as well as an immigration subplot, a meteor shower, and an electrocution. These stories are action-packed, the pace never lagging, but I wouldn’t have minded taking a breather every now and again. This is, of course, one of the main challenges of short stories and an occupational hazard for anyone writing them. Many contemporary stories, as Elif Batuman has noted, are “really novelistic plots crammed into twenty pages.” Howard avoids this trap in other stories, where he achieves a slice-of-life realism centering on minor plots: a failed acting audition and a violent altercation for an aging actor in “Swan Song”; a drifter reminiscing about a childhood friend in “Disappearing Act.”

Across the collection, Howard seems interested in evoking a mythical American past located in small towns and suburbs. The places are all relatively anonymous, but they have names: Covington, Petworth, Millwood, Edgewood, Swedesboro, Glendale. These places can’t possibly exist, which is the point. Old movies are another preoccupation: the husband across the street is “a throwback movie star, Paul Newman with broader shoulders”; the dying wife only wants to discuss Hitchcock films; the mother and son fall asleep on the couch “while an old Jimmy Stewart movie plays on television.” One story, “Cary Grant at the Orpheum Theatre,” takes up movies explicitly, with the teenage narrator working at a revival cinema owned by someone who seems to be his stepfather. His mother, who is possibly a ghost, appears intermittently to watch classics like Double Indemnity and North by Northwest, and the narrator’s own life seems to parallel Cary Grant’s, or perhaps that of Grant’s brother, if he hadn’t died as an infant. Nothing is clear; everything is ambiguous. When this works, seemingly disparate details coalesce and resonate with one another, and apparently trivial information becomes meaningful alongside other facts and events. Cary Grant’s biography, doled out piece by piece throughout the story, comes to resemble the narrator’s own.

Other times, the ambiguity seems an affectation, or a way to gesture at the vast mystery of life without doing the hard work of understanding it. Sentences like this abound:

“We’ve fallen in love. In lust. In something, anyway. In any case, we have fallen.”

“He sounded young, she thought, or old.”

“The wind sinks its teeth into me. Or no, it does not. But I wish it would.”

A character approaches the “center of the building or maybe the center of the earth,” and then “she begins to see, or thinks she begins to see. . . .” These sentences are frustrating because at other times, Howard writes compellingly about the gaps between language and external reality. In “Metamorphosis,” a running joke about the “Early Stage,” the “Middle Stage,” and the “Last Stage” of cancer lets us laugh at the ridiculous ways people attempt to order and sanitize the messy realities of life and death. In “The Long Shadows,” a refreshing change of pace in which Howard ditches realism for a Gothic fantasy tale, a nonhuman narrator begins to learn about language and the way words can deepen one’s sense of life. While observing the ritual of hospital visitation, he comments:

A younger woman comes to visit. She stays for only a short time. It feels obligatory to me. This word, obligatory, I don’t know. But I saved it once and I think this is what it means. For someone to come without wanting to come. To say goodbye without actually saying goodbye. And then the young woman is gone. She is relieved to have finished this obligatory thing she has done. She hopes, not unkindly, that the old woman dies.

This is good and true because Howard has done the hard work of thinking through what our habitual language actually means, and the story becomes an exercise in defamiliarization. Ultimately, Invisibilia is a mixed bag, as are most story collections. The form itself, like many of Howard’s characters, is hanging around, caught between life and death, a ghost and an enigma haunting the literary imagination.

Derek Neal is a writer living in Hamilton, Ontario. His writing has appeared in 3 Quarks Daily, The Point, and The Republic of Letters. His Substack can be found here.