Finding Meaning Within the Perplexing: Fiction Mag is "Tough Pill to Swallow"
Two sparkling blurbs at the start of NOON, Issue 15, set the bar high. The Los Angeles Times calls NOON “[a] compendium of unlikely pleasures: short prose… that challenge(s) us to think about meaning and narrative.” The Times Literary Supplement says, “NOON has intellectual weight… (I)t has… pushed the boundaries of, the means and processes of communication.”
Sounds good.
But NOON is perplexing; even, I fear, exasperating. Story after story presents the reader with characters who are either passive, impassive, uncommunicative, unlikeable, or all or several of the above: An overweight, unhappy woman thinks and wishes ill of a crass, mean-spirited older woman she encounters. Ill happens. A waitress voicelessly tolerates her parents’ selfish demands. Two stories by one author feature young men masturbating. A woman who cannot abide the slightest suggestion of abandonment by her fiance cuts him both “accidentally” and “extremely.” A young man thinks about women, hikes a nearby hill and surveys his building. A woman recalls the large penis, and the guy whose penis it was, that she encountered when she was sixteen in Sicily. The guy, and, by extension, the penis, don’t treat her well. She misses him. In two stories by another author, the protagonist is witness to the travails of his parents’ unhappy marriage.
While any of these characters, any of these situations, could be elements of successful stories, in NOON, these are the stories. Though admittedly there is nothing formulaic here, there is also little in the way of narrative arc, mounting tension, crisis, climax or anticlimax; no movement from point A to point B. Instead, the reader gets a glancing, unconcerned description of point A and is left to intuit the implication of its unsuitability. These stories are essentially statements that neither call for nor permit a response. Take that, the authors seem to be saying, sullenly.
NOON will leave you nonplussed and eat away at your complacency. If that is the aim of the magazine, then I suppose it is successful on that level. But to what end? You read the stories a second time, even a third time, hoping to uncover new layers of meaning, hoping for more; and you get more… of the same: people who’ve been tossed out, people who can’t communicate; a humorless, sometimes violent, crude, alienated nihilism; interiority lapsing into solipsism; unremarkable, imprecise language, language pointing only at listlessness, fecklessness, and pointlessness. It’s a tough pill to swallow.
But there are stories that do more than benumb and consternate and it is worth moving from generalities to look at these more closely. First and foremost is “Summer Cleanses” by Rebecca Curtis, a story that really puts the “organ” in organic constitutional cleanses. From “Businesswomen who follow trends and have dirty organs” to “Lawyers with the desire to write screenplays,” Curtis’s “health coach” has a cleanse for everyone. Funny, alive, and irreverent, with a palpable underlying desperation and pathos, “Summer Cleanses” is unlike anything else in NOON 15, and not unlike something you might find in the New Yorker’s “Shouts & Murmurs” column, on a good week. “And what’s the best source of omega-3 fatty acids? Fish? If you guessed 'Fish,' you’re wrong. It’s brains.” This story goes a long way towards redeeming the issue.
In Kim Chinquee’s “The Ho and the Hum,” the narrator’s flight to visit a dying aunt triggers an emotional instability—no doubt already latently there—fraught with dreams, family dysfunction, loss, memories, and an identification with her aunt that becomes something quite peculiar.
In “Second Chance,” by Julio Pecly, translated by Lydia Davis, a man relives a disastrous event in his life, and unlike in most of NOON’s stories, you can feel his grief. It is studied, considered; not just a free-floating, indistinct, behind-the-scenes wound the reader can only assume and obliquely experience the fallout from.
And in “Most Were Happy,” Robert Tindall does a fine job of rendering the impossible inner life of a person whose thoughts just do not cohere, and who consequently has spent much of his life medicated, self-medicated on alcohol and drugs, and/or locked up; all to little avail. Sense, nonsense, and almost-sense spin and tumble through his mind and you can see that it is this psychotic interplay in and out of paranoia that has made up his life: “… he could relax and know the latest smoothness of it which defined his context as a man which he was shown by his own faith in himself that he had more confidence in himself than was right or even tolerable his progression into the method of it had taken some time and I was perfectly willing to learn that I was okay and crazy too…” Okay and crazy too; you can jump into this river of madness almost anywhere: the person-shifts, erratic punctuation, run-on sentences, and cracked syntax all serve to illustrate what this guy’s got to work with. And yet there is a heartbreaking near-lucidity that, when it bubbles up, highlights the self awareness behind the chaos and engenders both empathy and sadness in the reader, unlike with so many of NOON’s other protagonists.
The stories in NOON are quite short, usually just two or three pages, with none longer than ten. There is one longer novel excerpt and one memoir excerpt, some art and photography, and no poetry. NOON appears annually and says it welcomes submissions but gives no indication as to what, specifically, it is looking for. The contributors’ credits vary, but, curiously, almost all of them have contributed to NOON previously; quite a few have contributed a number of times. Further, three of the fiction contributors are on the magazine’s editorial staff. NOON seems to like what it likes, and whom it likes.
NOON will leave you uneasy, perhaps wondering, “Am I missing something here?” You will feel less optimistic about the state of the world and the nature and potential of humans, as well as the state of the contemporary short story. There are moments of inventiveness and lyricism, moments of surprise, but too few. You may enjoy the blunted, undeveloped oddness of most of NOON’s stories more than I did. Though I wouldn’t really know what to make of that, either.
