Luke B. Goebel, Fourteen Stories, None of Them are Yours, Fiction Collective 2, 2014.
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Luke B. Goebel: Tough Beauty
lukebgoebel.com/
In this dazzling debut about life after loss, Luke B. Goebel’s heart-hurt, ultra-adrenalized alter ego, H. Roc, leads us on a raucous RV romp across what’s left of postmodern America and beyond. Whether it’s gobbling magic cacti at a native ceremony in Northern California, burning bad manuscripts in a backyard bonfire in East Texas, or travelling at top speed to an infamous editor’s office in Manhattan (with a burnt-out barista and an illegal bald eagle as companions), scene by scene, story by story, Goebel plunges us into a madly original fictional realm characterized by heartbroken psychedelic cowboys on the brink––lonely men who wrestle wild dogs on cheap beaches and kick horses in the face to get ahead.
“I would call this, fey as it sounds, ‘American bard yawp,’ not so much concerned with what it means as whether I have stolen it or not, and I would hazard that this Luke Goebel feller, if we may pretend for a itty bit the word is not exactly pejorative, is ‘insane.’ We have here the fine coherence of the not-deliberately incoherent, a proud-standing mess, like a Faulkner mess. It’s after the ‘the giant American heart’ that Kerouac and Kesey were wafter in their Neal Cassidys, you have Burroughs and Bukoswki rants, Ashbery misconnections, Hannah whiskey whistling, and spinning up from it once in a while the fist of the perfectly put. If this is a work of non-fiction, it is a miracle that its author is alive. If it is fiction, it is the miracle. By my eye, it is not made up. It is received, has been done to its author, like a beating, and he is not unhappy at how he’s taken the beating.”—Padgett Powell
“About twenty pages into Luke B. Goebel’s Fourteen Stories: None of Them Are Yours, I realized I was reading with one hand holding my forehead and one balled at my waist, kind of clenched and gazing down into the paper, like a man soon to be converged upon. Goebel’s testimony comes on like that: engrossing, fanatical, full of private grief, and yet, at the same time, charismatic, tender, and intrepid, aglow with more spirit than most Americans have the right to wield.”—Blake Butler
“I’m in love with language again, because Luke B. Goebel is not afraid to take us back through the gullet of loss into the chaos of words. Someone burns a manuscript in Texas; someone’s speed sets a life on fire; a heart is beaten nearly to death, the road itself is the trip, a man is decreated back to his animal past—better, beyond ego, beautiful, and look: there’s an American dreamscape left. There’s a reason to go on.”—Lidia Yuknavitch
“Luke may be one of the last few geniuses we have left in this life. I mean that. He’s a good boy with a lot of pain in his heart.”—Scott McClanahan
“The protagonist of Fourteen Stories: None of Them Are Yours doesn’t make it easy for us, channeling as he does Barry Hannah and Denis Johnson by way of Rick Bass and Dennis Hopper, and self-presenting as yet another damaged romantic who thinks it’s always time to play the cowboy, skating in and out of sense. He can’t see right, and he’s haunted by nearly everything. He’s trying to open up or shut himself down or at least get a hold of himself. He’s trying to make do with what he’s done, while he reminds us that we’re all, one way or another, in that position.”—Jim Shepard
Goddamn, Luke B. Goebel is an American writer. And not in the often-hijacked, flag-waving definition of the word – but rather, someone whose stories feel like they were grown from the bones of Faulkner, of Whitman, plus the flung-off brow sweat of Denis Johnson and Joy Williams. Goebel is also that other now-lost American thing, an anarchist artist; an anarchist of a poet of a storyteller. In this appropriately titled novel-in-stories, Goebel lays out a language made of blood and guts and leather and a little bit of peyote, a language that speaks the closest thing to some sort of American myth making that I’ve come across in a long time.
But put that aside for a second, because maybe that’s a lot to live up to for a book you haven’t read yet. Maybe we should step back into the landscape. Let me take you through it bit by bit, ease you into it. Draw you a map.
There is, first of all, language. Ecstatic and weirded and braided through the strangeness of the world – a mirror held up to the American way of being utterly, joyfully divided. Goebel’s narrator is a troubled, grateful soul, and the feral, full-of-marvelous-pain syntax and structure in these stories shadows that. Here, for example, the narrator gives us backstory as a hymn, as a wild prayer:
I went to the San Diego Jesuit University church this morning and wept and wept and wept, reaching into the celestial heavens…and with this dirty story you’re going to read; me in church with my spirit Indian non-Indian nonhuman self in church thinking the wrong words, from moment to moment in California, on a hill and a great cathedral, in an architectural heavenly kingdom of Spanish-y mission buildings and gardens, hearing the wrong words in church, the old crazy in me of the old lunatic in me who has seen much with his eyes and heart open and his head miss wired and the things I see are tilted to one side and then another and I cannot see straight lines, firing too fast in all lines, but still I reached up into the celestial heavens of the creator of the universe, and then had a $50 brunch of crab legs and brought oysters and roasted meat and drink sparkling water orange juice and walked around a graduation ceremony and lived through the families and couples.
And of course, the language does something else very American – it’s darkly funny as hell. Much of that comes from the narrator’s outsider status – he’s an observer, even if he’s a little off, or more especially if he’s a little off, and that disconnect leads to some intentional and unintentional humor. “She talks of Anus Parade Nursing Homes,” says our narrator of his old lady neighbor, strung out and half crazed as he is in a hospital bed listening and mis-listening to all the language around him.
As a wanderer, a sort of cowboy without the cattle, the narrator becomes something else – a seeker. He’s seeking what is lost – a girlfriend, a brother – but more than that, he’s seeking some elusive truth in this modern era that does not love drifters, even the purposeful kind.
“But all I want is to be off this planet,” Goebel writes, “in the next world and the next. I’ve never been comfortable. Except on a wild tear, like you’re about to hear with this finding the feather business.”
Here’s the part on the map where we turn the corner, where we round the bend, come back to the streambed. Here’s where we talk about the crux of this book, of its American-ness, of its uniqueness, of Goebel’s talent for jarring and just perfect dissonance. Because the soul of this country has always been a joyful pain; a hard-fought, hard-won optimism bloodied with our newish, devilish history.
All countries struggle with a past, but Goebel seems to write the way we struggle here – so hopefully our hearts begin to break almost as soon as we are born, and we never stop being glad for it. As he writes, “I have always been glad to be in the world. I have always felt like I’m getting away with something being alive.” - Amber Sparks
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The “stories” are not discrete fictional units as much as variations on different themes that recur as we move through the narrative. One theme is the narrator’s love of Catherine, who’s moved on both literally and figuratively, for she went to Paris and fell in love with a Spaniard, Manuelo. The narrator’s love for her is both intense and desperate, and he’s never quite gotten over her loss. Another leitmotif is the death of the narrator’s older brother, Carl, an event clearly even more traumatic than the loss of Catherine. The narrator’s agony over this death pervades many of the stories but especially “Before Carl Left.” The central character in the novel, however, is the narrator himself. Having been jailed and gone to rehab, and having had bizarre episodes following his participation in a peyote ritual, the narrator seems lucky to be alive. Even his turn at wearing a shirt and tie and teaching freshman composition at a small college in eastern Texas doesn’t domesticate him, as he lives close to the bone on a ranch he rents from Squeaky, a gay rodeo roper. In a final bit of ironic exuberance, the narrator urges us to “Find God. Find love, Find America” rather than read a book—especially the one we’re holding in our hands.
This is a fierce, untamed, riotous book—and from the first page you’ll know you’re not reading Jane Austen. - Kirkus Reviews
Luke B. Goebel's Fourteen Stories None of Them Are Yours (Fiction Collective Two) is a thunderous, fantastical debut novel. Told by a narrator who blends his life with legends of Native Americans, drunks, college professors, and heartbreaking girls, Goebel expertly writes the line between reality and the myths we create in our minds. Goebel's book is rambling but focused, with a rebel beat intensity and bleeding empathy that is touching without being overly sentimental. From cross country RV trips, to dude ranch debacles, to wild drunk love on the streets of New York City, to firefights in Afghanistan, Goebel's narrator is driven by deep love for his dead older brother and Catherine, a woman who has become his everything only to leave him with almost nothing. Ultimately Goebel's novel is about triumph of the spirit, of storytelling, and the hugeness of life and love even after it has abandoned us, leaving us to retell over and over again our heartbreak. We spoke with Goebel about making lives into legends, truths, performance, East Texas, and why love is the ultimate escape. more: Luke B. Goebel's Chaos Theories b
“I feel the ink,” Luke B. Goebel writes toward the beginning of this terrific jalopy of a debut. He’s describing a medical procedure in the hospital; the ink is the dye IVed into him to uncover whatever’s wrong on his insides. It’s an apt analogy for what Goebel is doing throughout the entirety of the book. In Fourteen Stories, None of Them are Yours, the ink Goebel spills is diagnostic; lost loves and joys are his condition, language a way to self-medicate toward recovery.
We start with pain scales and flashbacks. First, the hospital bed, where our first person hero enjoys something like a deathbed catharsis, but in a scalpel-ly meticulous language to die for. He tells us of best lovers and best lost ones. We meet Catherine, the girlfriend, who left our hero for a European; Carl, the brother who passed away; the “old Indian Jew nut” teacher and proxy father figure who, in helping this narrator find a voice in his writing, guided him through his living.
There is little divide between life and writing for Goebel’s narrator. From the beginning of the book onward, ink, literally, is in his blood. But just as ink needs a page, Goebel’s heart needs a body to beat for. The book is most successful in the story-chapters that explore moments of remembered relationships.
We return again and again to Catherine, the lost love whose “name is like space and what there is unto itself that I saw out there.” Who is “a beauty full of brains and a good heart.” She leaves the narrator physically, for “a Spanish man named Manuelo who’d she met in Paris,” but by writing them he keeps the best moments alive. We see her losing half a tooth on their first date again. Naked in his bed again. Holding him again. When she leaves him again, we start over. We rewrite to relive.
Remembered alongside Catherine there is/was Carl, the older brother, whose early death is returned to over and over and leaves an absence as large as Catherine’s. Carl directs the narrator’s ink-filled heart to spew forth, even in reincarnating revisions:
…Neil Young was in the room over on the record wheel. (I hadn’t lost my brother, Carl, yet. Carl left us a few weeks ago. Over two months ago. (Over one year ago.) Carl is gone. Carl died in his bed. [Two years ago.] There isn’t any more Carl on this planet we are stuck to. Not here, in terms of a body, in terms of our living Carl. In terms of that Carl is my only brother. My older brother.
Life and nature work toward a balance; blood and ink, like water, take the shape of their container. Goebel’s heart takes us on manic trips through America with the heart-filling Jewely, a “part Husky (Dingo really)” companion. We go eagle feather-hunting for the old teacher in New York City: “My father (or not my father, but the great man I am speaking of as is he is my father).” And we take linguistic trips into the third person, even if not really: “It was time to play the cowboy. One got a ranch…One was he. (He was me, why pretend?) He (why say he again? I’ll tell you why: to give the “I” word a break.)”
His heart keeps pumping, the page keeps filling, we can’t stop reading. The book is above all new and unique. Goebel’s voice spills out as if he can’t control it, a kind of peyote trip on the page, but never does he cross the line in a way that leaves the reader feeling lost. For all the “crazy” (and actual peyote) in the book, you follow eagerly, hungrily, to find what’s next.
And that’s where the book’s few failures appear. The conflicting title of the book—“Fourteen stories, but a novel?”—betrays a kind of conflicting assemblage of the story-chapters. Three of these stick out as better suited to the former label than the latter. “Apache,” for instance, previously published in the Green Mountains Review, fits thematically in the book, but is outside the larger scope of the narrative heart (there is no Catherine, no Carl, no teacher, no Jewely). In this way, “Apache” feels more like a footnote to the larger novel, an aside that says, “Oh, since I’m telling you all this about writing, here’re some examples of other stories I wrote.”
Really, though, the pleasures of Fourteen Stories, None of Them Are Yours come so fast and frequent you’ll even overlook that there are, actually, only thirteen stories in the table of contents. That is, until the end, when our hero makes the point he’s been getting at all along: “Here’s the last story: Books are over. Don’t read a book, don’t read any book. Don’t read this book.” In other words, don’t read: write.
In other words, live. - Joseph Riippi
Sometimes not knowing exactly what’s going on, or what will come next, is a very good thing. In Luke B. Goebel’s Fourteen Stories, None of Them Are Yours, the reader is thrown into a maelstrom of situations, emotions, places, and language that clash against each other at breakneck speed and form unique narratives that are held together by Goebel’s strangely rhythmic voice and knack for conveying strong feelings without trying to define or explain them. This literary frenzy removes all sense of security and prevents prognostication, and that sense of surprise makes for truly exciting reading.
Fourteen Stories, None of Them Are Yours’ main character is Goebel’s alter ego, H. Roc, a passionate, smart man whose experiences seem to have stripped him bare, leaving every hypersensible inch of his being exposed to the elements, other people, and himself. Through a series of vignettes, H. Roc recounts a variety of crucial moments in his life, all of which are told in a prose that dances between the commonplace and the fantastic. Instead of a straightforward biography or a fictionalized biographical narrative with a regular arc, the book is made up of interrelated short pieces that crisscross the country and adhere only loosely to chronological order. The stories range from the sad silence of a hospital in which H. is diagnosed with pancreatitis and wild horse races that lead to blood and mutilation in Texas to a peyote-infused ceremony in Northern California and a hasty trip to an editor’s office in Manhattan in the company of some very strange allies.
While each story works well by itself, the cumulative effect is a strong pull that plunges both reader and author deep into a quirky fictional universe in which tales from the real world take on bizarre shapes. This real/fantastic juxtaposition somehow enriches the narratives instead of sidetracking them with uncanny elements. The combination of too-real feelings and outlandishness could be too strange to digest if it came from less capable hands, but Goebel’s peculiar and oddly lyrical prose make it work beautifully.
For a short book, Fourteen Stories, None of Them Are Yours is a very satisfying read, and most of that sense of fulfillment comes from the author’s style. While uniquely his, Goebel’s writing brings a plethora of literary giants to mind in the span of a single chapter. Short sentences are followed by half-page, single-sentence paragraphs that read like David Foster Wallace channeling Hunter S. Thompson. From stream of consciousness and short dialogue that borders on curtness to feverish passages that read like a peyote dream, the prose morphs as much as the tone and setting:
Newsflash! I’ve done the white man peyote walk for seven years plus. Meaning I can’t see right and I’m haunted by things that I do not understand, having blown my head and flesh wide open on the peyote paste with Indians circled around me in a teepee with feathers in hair and hand drums and old ancient chants which I think is just crying and getting it back together, and the grey ash of creation spinning out around the fire in timeless time pretime on the paste with the spinning ash like star matter making the universe—OH and fear—I will walk and talk and write and dress in a coat and tie and teach University English classes as Assistant Professor in Baptist country Texas.
Much like the main character, the reader will sometimes feel lost in a good way, adrift in a world that doesn’t always make sense. Despite the disorientation, every narrative provides anchors that serve as the book’s cohesive elements and allow the reader to remember that this is all part of a single, very personal story: grief, madness, beauty, love of language, and love of nature. This last element, much like grief, is one that permeates the text. However, unlike grief, all that comes from it is stunning. With eyes that seem to simultaneously see the here and now as well as that which lies beyond, Goebel emerges from this text as a frenzied, unapologetically religious, and very contemporary Gary Snyder who looks at Americana the same way he looks at deer:
Sitting in the motel wingback, I could feel through the walls—the sun and sky. Pure peace and meditation. The sort of blue the sky was I was feeling out into the redwoods of the valley, sensing bridges trembling in traffic in the golden city, and the old veterans in bushes near the hill, like bears, like wildmen keeping the country going even still, maddogging the old city, growling, shouting around about remembering Fort Knox, live generals, field armies, air strikes, Marilyn Monroe, terrifying us all, and I could happily hear a tit or two harden in valleys between here and NYC, of Midwestern girls and their mothers, in training bras and big silk braziers with hooks and straps and eyelets and lace trimming and big pads, as nothing was beyond me…
Fourteen Stories, None of Them Are Yours is about being; about lost love, travelling, fear, suffering, pain, animals, escaping, honesty, peyote, and desire. It is a novel in fragments and a thinly veiled autobiography of a man whose prose proves he has tapped into the magic the earth has to offer and is willing to share that magic with all of us. - Gabino Iglesias
Calling Luke B. Goebel’s Fourteen Stories, None of Them Are Yours a novel seems too one-dimensional for the sophisticated, innovative fiction in these pages. Like the Beat writings to which Goebel alludes, Fourteen Stories is a captivating and complicated read—a work that’s impossible to breeze through and difficult to summarize. It’s a book I carried around for weeks and whose pages, which I often returned to again and again, are rippled, dog-eared, and covered in ink and underlines.
Comprised of thirteen spastic, horrific, heartbreaking, and humorous chapters weaved into one narrative, Fourteen Stories gives us the deepest thoughts of Goebel’s alter ego, H. Roc, on an RV journey across America. While the themes of Americana, exploration, spirituality, and psychedelics are a hat-tip to Kerouac, the prose (and often long-winded rants) reads more like Burroughs. It’s energetic, fragmented, and rhythmic in a way that’s almost dangerously tempting to read quickly. Each sentence is loaded with complex ideas that need to be slowed down and analyzed, about identity, life after death, and the real and the imagined.
The strength of Fourteen Stories lies in its characters, many of whom are extensions of Goebel himself. We’re introduced to characters like “the Kid,” “the new cowboy,” and sometimes just pronouns like “one”: “One was he. (He was me, why pretend?) He (why say he again? I’ll tell you why: to give the old ‘I’ word a break).” Whether he’s describing himself or anyone else, Goebel’s descriptions remain gritty and visceral. Take his description of “the Kid,” from the beginning of a chapter called “Apache”:
Half a hand was that hand. Three fingers and a crust of dead stump, but what was there, there was plenty for a boy needing to become a man in the West. No, not boy, but the Kid; the real Apache man with the half hand called him Kid, though Kid’s name it was not yet. Not earned, and not three fingers but two old fingers and half a thumb was that hand.
Luke B. Goebel
I’ve done the white man peyote walk for seven years plus. Meaning I can’t see right and I’m haunted by things that I do not understand, having blown my head and flesh wide open on the peyote paste with Indians circled around me in a teepee with feathers in hair and hand drums and old ancient chants which I think is just crying and getting it back… Once you’ve lost someone like we have, you go on despite it. You make due without your due. You find holiness in the holes where time cuts you a break.
Goebel is masterful at controlling complicated timeframes and manipulating the way we read. Many of his chapters are long-winded and complicated—like “Out There,” a sixteen-page story written in one paragraph and almost entirely in parentheticals—but Goebel is able to slow us down and bring us back to real time. From the beginning of “Out There:”
Out there (out there, out there—I am going to level with you. Worst story in the book is this story in the book. So I am going to spruce it out, spur it up, add some kitchen spice. Hey, I’m back. The spice is in the RV here, at my table, in the motor coach, overlooking the old Cliff House in San Francisco at Land’s End…)
Goebel reminds us not only of where we are along his journey, but that we’re right there with him, experiencing these stories at the same time that he tells them, and processing them simultaneously. He opens his feeling directly to us, the reader, his “Yours Truly.” “You want to know how dumb I am, Yours Truly?” he writes, “You want to have any idea what sort of… it’s embarrassing. It is. I am ashamed.”
After all of the pain, misery, and grief, I was surprised that I was left with hope. Hope for H. Roc and Goebel, but also hope for the future of short fiction. With Fourteen Stories, None of Them Are Yours, Goebel re-introduces a genre—the gonzo American travelogue—that many of us tend to think is dwindling, and proves that his voice deserves to be recognized. - Rebecca Schultz
In this too-brief debut novel-in-stories, “Fourteen Stories, None Of Them Are Yours,” Luke B. Goebel’s first-person narrator is raucously heartbreaking as he finds his way through his grief over the loss of his older brother Carl and the leaving of his great love Catherine into an equally uncertain place that is frighteningly prodigious, one where the young artist is hell-bent on proving himself to an indifferent society, where he gains the soul-flattening understanding that you’ll never love like you did the first time around, as deep as you did, but a place nonetheless where he persists in his fool’s quest, hits open road to find at the end of all his searching that “there is nothing outside of America.”
The existentially-sickened narrator in “Insides” casts odd light on his sickness (which may be real, or maybe not, either way it’s Heartbreak) with lines like “I always feel like a little guy trying to prove I can,” and “I have always felt like I’m getting away with something being alive.” And this is why we like him, the underdog, and also because he is untrammeled by his own failure in love, damning himself to play victim to his own inclinations toward proving his battered heart true to anyone that will listen. In a world where you can buy anything, what’s the value in trying to love someone if all you have known of love has been pain?
In “Drunk and Naked as He Was,” the narrator turns his attention beyond diagnosing his pain to the more intellectually demanding (and consequently more provocative to read) problem of what it means. He slips into a boisterously Beckettian questioning of, if not complete fascination with, the idea that one can hardly ever tell anything other than lies while still somehow – and for Goebel, this is the real miracle – telling the truth. Or, as he takes it another way, the truth is better told in lies, one of the novelist’s old verities and means of maintaining, in however small degree, what Conrad called the artist’s requisite “invincible conviction.”
The book’s best meat comes cut from its middle, the pair of stories “Tough Beauty” and “Apache.” The success of these stories comes by dint of their incredibly heartfelt ruminations on the possibilities of full living and dying while simultaneously masquerading in an endlessly entertaining road-weathered rebel’s narrative voice reminiscent of the best stories of Barry Hannah, Barry Gifford and Peter Christopher. They cover us, through gorgeous displays of linguistic inventiveness, with honest to God feelings of transgression, only to lift that imagined veil to show us “the art of being here to watch the ones you love go away from you, and die – and one’s self slip away.” And to ask, “If there’s more, why can’t we know? Why stay, if we are to be cowards, most of all?” Goebel seems to have an answer – to the second question at least, a conviction to which the book itself is evidence – but one he chooses to keep mysterious throughout the rest of the book’s unfolding.
Luke B. Goebel drives his stories with consciousness-crowding performances of language: a voice prime green and bluefire-tinged, lonely and howling out against the crimes of cool logic and unloving lovers. His voice is more frantic than seductive, which is not to say there’s not an element of seduction at play here, Goebel is after all a master of the type of sentence that demands the reader’s empathy, if not entire implication. He doggedly sticks to the hard, brown, nut-like word, to use the purely Barthelmean. His broken syntax, shifting perspectives, and mixed fantasies clang together to sustain what feels like a novel pitch in literature. These frenzied, peyote-enlightened visions proceed in such a pleasing rush, something like Coleridge gone through rehab and come back to prophesy of love lost and taken away and brought back again, effectively novelizing his peculiar vision of America.
And it’s with such strange powers of speech that Goebel, more toward book’s end, eschews more mimetic affectations and easy categorizations of time and memory in favor of the figurative or seemingly purely random, which is really no hiccup because one gets the sense the author has lived these stories. Whether or not he did doesn’t seem to matter because the stories are told sans arrière-pensée and as if they should have happened. Here, in the language, in the sentences themselves, the most ambitious themes of the book are pressurized and most realized – isolation at its most intense and directly felt, desire to break through the constraints of language and tap into a consciousness more pure and eloquent than the one we’ve got -and here also it is apparent that Goebel has announced himself as a proud new talent and of stronger voice than most of the writers working, bless them, to further the forms of the novel.
Luke B. Goebel is the recipient of the Ronald Sukenick Prize for Innovative Fiction from FC2 and the Joan Scott Memorial Fiction Award. He earned a BA from the University of San Francisco and an MFA in English from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. He is an assistant professor of Creative Writing at the University of Texas at Tyler. He was born in Ohio and grew up in Portland, Oregon. - Gary Sheppard
The crazy lyric energy of Luke Goebel's novel, Fourteen Stories, None of Them Are Yours, hooks you. Its halting fragments and winding, keening, searching sentences disclose a man confessing the pain and shame of his life, the fictions of his dreams. It's the intimacy of his "talking mind [speaking] something, something big, something wild and free and in the music of myself, something utterly new in utterance," that binds the digressions and asides and interjections of the text into a whole, and transforms the real-life heartbreak and the made-up stuff of the mind into the beautiful stability of love.
Though there are characters in Goebel's novel, they are, importantly, extensions of Goebel himself. "Other," "the new cowboy" and "The Kid" are like alternate personal pronouns, ways of referring himself and his experience indirectly. "One got a ranch," he writes. "One was he. (He was me, why pretend?) He (why say he again? I'll tell you why: to give the old 'I' word a break)." Characters and narrative perspective focus the ideas of the novel, all of which revolve around the author himself.
It's Luke Goebel then who says:
I've done the white man peyote walk for seven years plus. Meaning I can't see right and I'm haunted by things that I do not understand, having blown my head and flesh wide open on the peyote paste with Indians circled around me in a teepee with feathers in hair and hand drums and old ancient chants which I think is just crying and getting it back together [. . .] [O]nce you've lost someone like we have, you go on despite it. You make due without your due. You find holiness in the holes where time cuts you a break.
Goebel is a writer who, through much of his early life, fought reality, or transcended it. When his brother dies, though, all of that is thrown off kilter. In its way, Fourteen Stories lets him re-make his life, but with holes cut into it, breaks for the unreal to enter the real, for the true voice at the typewriter to intrude on the big yarn unrolling. He breaks in in the middle of one anecdote to say, "(I hadn't lost my brother, Carl, yet. Carl left us a few weeks ago. Over two months ago. (Over one year ago). Carl is gone. Carl died in his bed. [Two years ago.] There isn't any more Carl on this planet we are stuck to [. . .])."
A few weeks, two months, over one year, two years—that's all real time, and it fills the book with the author's presence, with him working through it, counting time, and feeling. What is he going to do? Who is he going to be? Now that his brother, who was the better part of his definition of himself, is gone from the earth, what's left for Luke of glory and honor, authenticity and masculinity? How but for fiction can he even ask the questions his brother's death raises?
In "Apache," a chapter that, at first, seems plausible enough, Luke heads west, to his mother's dude ranch. She tells him, "This isn't that real. Don't you know what a night here costs? [. . .] This isn't cowboys and Indians!"
The Kid, Goebel's stand-in, lives in an idea of the West, though, so rather than heed his mother's warning, he takes life lessons from an old hand called Apache. "'He's not real Apache,' said Mother. 'Not a true one, no.'" Even so, he teaches the Kid the dark side of horse racing, as if to cure him of sorrow: "'How are you to ride with me with guts without your guts?' he said. [. . .] 'Who cares what hurts you? Who cares what you feel! You have to hate the whole world. You have to hate what's not yours. Then you'll love.'"
The Kid follows Apache's glory-lust to its logical end, ultimately sawing off the old man's hand to save his life, an escalation that seriously, almost farcically, questions the story's verisimilitude. In the scheme of the book, this makes perfect sense. "Apache" doesn't exist for itself as a story, but as a working-through of the book's central themes. There's no easy metaphor connecting Apache's snake-poisoned hand to Carl's early death, but the guilt is there, as is the desire to save another man's life. It's a theatre in which the strangely absent author can figure it out, can allegorize and process.
This point about the power of fiction is most beautifully dramatized in "The Minds of Boys," a chapter that tells the tale of a group of runaways, the leader of whom drowns himself when the others find love and he doesn't. The surviving band of boys and the girls they've brought from the school dance stare into their beach fire, shared joy curdled away to tragedy:
Then a great wind rose up and stole the ash from off the coals, and they glowed hot in their red and cracking shapes. Each one in the party stared into the fire. And they all saw different things, creatures and animals and skulls, swords and ships, teeth and heads and all the forms that have existed now and always, but mostly in the minds of boys.
Imagination resolves the real. Luke runs manically around the American west in an RV, crushed under the weight of his loss. By the time he gets back to East Texas, the unspoken work of these fictions has brought him back down to earth, cleaning balls of tar from his brother's truck: "You give it your all. You keep going. You have more and more power to handle it all. [. . .] You got to show someone who isn't here anymore that you love him . . . you have got to show the whole world you have what it takes to love them."
Scrubbing the truck, the book itself, all the time and feeling that went into it—these things take on ritual dimensions in this earnest ululation of a novel. Its title implies a collection of stories, but the connections throughout, the dependencies between tales, the interjections into them, say more, and are more compelling, than something so formally closed as a bunch of stand-alone fictions. Fourteen Stories knots together the real and the imagined, it transforms pain and loss into love. - Tom DeBeauchamp
Luke B. Goebel's Fourteen Stories None of Them Are Yours (Fiction Collective Two) is a thunderous, fantastical debut novel. Told by a narrator who blends his life with legends of Native Americans, drunks, college professors, and heartbreaking girls, Goebel expertly writes the line between reality and the myths we create in our minds. Goebel's book is rambling but focused, with a rebel beat intensity and bleeding empathy that is touching without being overly sentimental. From cross country RV trips, to dude ranch debacles, to wild drunk love on the streets of New York City, to firefights in Afghanistan, Goebel's narrator is driven by deep love for his dead older brother and Catherine, a woman who has become his everything only to leave him with almost nothing. Ultimately Goebel's novel is about triumph of the spirit, of storytelling, and the hugeness of life and love even after it has abandoned us, leaving us to retell over and over again our heartbreak. We spoke with Goebel about making lives into legends, truths, performance, East Texas, and why love is the ultimate escape. ....
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