Alan Heathcock, Volt
The stories in Alan Heathcock’s debut collection Volt don’t just share a setting—the fictional American small town of Krafton. They also share characters, when necessary, and even deploy the exact same kinds of metaphors. It’s not hard to see why. These are men and women who’ve spent their lives staring at the exact same broken-down objects, the same freight yards and ominously rustling cornfields. When trouble comes knocking, you draw from what you know.
And in a place as brutal and stark as Krafton, “trouble” is putting it lightly. Trouble is a group of teenagers hurling bowling balls down the empty main street of the next town over, smashing everything in sight. Trouble is punching the local sheriff in the throat, for no good reason at all. Trouble is dead body after dead body after dead body: sons accidentally caught under tractors, strangers belted with tire irons.
Volt is an extremely strong collection, by any metric. Most of these stories were previously published in literary journals, and their careful, finely chiseled sensibility shines through on every page.
But Heathcock, a native of Chicago, turns out to have done more than simply write eight good stories. Volt’s true effect is cumulative; each new story adds new flavours and complicates old ones, until, by the end, you’re left with a surprisingly nuanced—and surprisingly sympathetic—picture of Krafton as a living, breathing entity. What might initially feel like lower-class voyeurism becomes an altogether more tangled response.
In “The Staying Freight,” a farmer doesn’t hear his son approaching, “hands filled with meatloaf and sweet corn wrapped in foil,” and accidentally backs over him with the tractor. There’s a brief appearance by the local pastor near the end—the same pastor, it turns out, who will later adopt and raise a runaway son in “Smoke,” and who will console another grieving family member in “The Daughter.” A grown-up version of that runaway son, in turn, is the focus of “Lazarus.” By the time the sheriff—a former grocery store manager who also makes several appearances—surveys the outskirts of town in search of a fugitive in the title story, you could pretty much sketch a map of Krafton from memory.
Crafting these stories into a collection, and not a full-fledged novel—which Volt could easily have become—is also, I think, a canny move on Heathcock’s part. Rather than give us a unified theory of Krafton and its residents, we instead get eight individual dots; it’s our job as readers to connect them. As a result, the town retains fundamentally unknowable. We have all kinds of firsthand experience, but how to extrapolate from it?
Heathcock’s characters give us a few possible choices. The son in “Smoke,” after reluctantly helping his father cover his criminal tracks by setting a dead body on fire, looks to the sky and wonders where all those fumes wind up. He takes a breath, “and his insides burned, and Vernon knew all that smoke was now just the air we breathe.” Here, and Vernon is far from alone in feeling this way, to remain in one place is to slowly suffocate.
A slightly more uplifting reading comes in a later story, where a woman and her daughter share a quiet embrace after a similarly devastating event shakes Krafton once again. Heathcock writes, “[I]t felt like victory, for they remained. They were still here while others were gone.”
In a place where survival is far from a given, maybe surviving is good enough.
Graywolf, 208 pp, $17.50, paperback
(review originally appeared, in a slightly different format, in The Edmonton Journal, May 8, 2011)
May 7, 2011