Kyle Coma-Thompson & Tristan Foster, 926
Years, Sublunary Editions, 2020
Through twenty-two linked stories, Tristan Foster and Kyle Coma-Thompson explore the creative potential of people's native estrangement from themselves and each other. Two writers who have never met, who live on opposite sides of the globe--one in Australia, the other in the United States--tracking the pattern of probable lives and fates that co-exist between them, from Korea to England, Senegal to Argentina. Their conclusion/suspicion: imagination is stronger, and subtler, than God, and offers more than mere consolation for the difficulties of living.
"The intimate, globe-spanning microportraits of human crisis in 926 Years are at once sobering and uplifting, clarifying and mystifying. Tristan Foster and Kyle Coma-Thompson's collaboration is a nonpareil of short-form virtuosity." —Gari Lutz
"Entering the world of '926 Years' was really exciting because it felt like anything could happen in these stories. Together, Kyle Coma-Thompson and Tristan Foster have created sharp, seamless prose that guided me through these inventive, unexpected stories full of images that will stay with me long after reading." —Chelsea Hodson
926 Years is a collaboration between Kyle Coma-Thompson and Tristan Foster. The book consists of 22 stories, each a paragraph long, and each paragraph no longer than the front and back of a 4.5″ x 7″ page. Each story is titled after a character plus the character’s age (e.g. “Chaplain Blake, age 60”; “Sebastian, age 30”; “Marty Fantastic, age 81”). (I have not done the math to see if all the ages add up to 926.) Although the characters never meet in the book’s prose, key sentences suggest that they may be connected via the reader’s imagination.
Indeed, the blurb on the back of 926 Years describes the book as “twenty-two linked stories.” After reading it twice, I don’t see 926 Years so much as a collection of connected tales, but rather as a kind of successful experimental novel, a novel that subtly and reflexively signals back to its own collaborative origin. Coma-Thompson lives in Louisville, Kentucky and Foster lives in Sydney, New South Wales. They’ve never met in person. And yet they share a common language, of course, and other common cultural forces surely shape their prose. (Melville’s Ishmael refers to Australia as “That great America on the other side of the sphere” in Ch. 24 of Moby-Dick.)
The book’s prose offers a consistency to the apparently discontinuous narrative pieces that comprise 926 Years. My first assumption was that Coma-Thompson and Foster traded narratives, but as I read and re-read, the prose’s stylistic consistency struck me more as a work of synthesis, of two writers tuning to each other and humming a new frequency. The sentences of 926 Years are predominantly short, and often fall into fragmentation, or elide their grammatical subject. Here’s an example from “Shelley Valentine, age 34”:
A flare of sansho pepper on the tongue tip. Catch the tree at the right time of year and the fruit bursts, raining peppercorns down. Maybe like the season when pistachios open, the night snapping like broken locust song. Used for seasoning eel. Sansho leaves for garnishing fish. Clap it between the hands for aroma, make a wish, the finishing touch to the perfect soup. In Korea, the unripe fruit was used for fishing. Poisonous to the smallest ones. That was cheating wasn’t it? Or was pulling up the fish all that mattered?
Eventually we can attribute these fragmented thoughts to Shelley Valentine, now well out of her magic twenties, drinking sansho-peppered gin and tonics in a “New bar, same lost , of course.” She’ll leave alone.
The characters in 926 Years move between isolation and connection, between fragmentation and re-integration. Here’s Larry Hoavis (age 47, by the way), sitting in a lawn chair in his rural backyard:
Why does it feel lonely, sitting and watching? Nature in its subtle power and monotony, pre-Internet to the core, unconscious of its enormity. No one. No one knows he’s even here. The house at his back. Divorced. His ex elsewhere, how he loved her, hurt her, himself. Why’s it beautiful, why’s it comforting, that no one knows?
Hoavis’s lonely transcendental private (and tequila-tinged) reverie of disconnection reinforces 926 Years’ themes of interconnection coupled with disintegration. In one of my favorite tales, “Lew Wade Wiley, age 55,” we learn of the “Spoiled heir of the Prudential fortune” who collects other people’s lives. He has them brought to his Boston penthouse to offer
…their worst fears, desires, the messy embarrassments of their commonalities…these he worked into undead monotone prose, the diary of Lew Wade Wiley, and so lived fuller than anyone who’d opened a newspaper to read those advertisements, wrote to that listed address, knocked at his penthouse door.
The adjective “undead” above fits into a resurrection motif that floats through 926 Years, whether it be the lifeforce of currency or the proverbial powers of cats to cheat death. Sometimes the resurrection is a kind of inspiriting force, as one character, overwhelmed by aesthetic possibility that “knocked the air out of him” experiences: “It had reminded him of a moment in a childhood that wasn’t his.”
Elsewhere, we see resurrection at a genetic level, as in “Mrs. Anderson, age 67,” whose psychologist describes to her the “cherry blossom” experiment, the results of which suggest that fear and anxiety to specific aesthetic stimuli can be passed down from generation to generation.
Reincarnation becomes both figurative and literal in the case of the lounge star Marty Fantastic, “Eighty-one-year-old darling with ten faces (one for each lift)…The plague of identities—who to be tonight, Peggy Lee, Rod Stewart, Cole Porter, Journey?” The oldest (and penultimate) character in 926 Years, Marty reflects on his own death as he gazes at his audience: “The songs of their future–what about those? They lyrics set in stone, the melodies: unknown.” The lovely little couplet suggest a complex relationship of aesthetic substance and aesthetic spirit.
The final piece in 926 Years–well, I won’t spoil it, I’ll simply say it kept me thinking, made me happy in a strange, nervous way. It features the youngest character in the book, and it points clearly if subtly to the book’s affirmation of imaginative and aesthetic possibility as a kind of crucial lifeforce. I’ll close instead with something from the book’s third tale, a little moment early on when 926 Years clicked for me:
Much as the geese and other such birds at the beginning of winter months fly south towards more temperate climates, it’s the nature of human beings to move in unconscious arrow formation as well. They take turns, leading the pack. The burden of cutting resistance through the air, something they share. Others fly, you see, in the wake; and that is why they form a V. The wake makes for easy flying, particularly at the furthest, outermost edges. The ones in the rear work less, conserve strength, eventually make their way towards the top of the V, tip of the arrow, then when it’s time and the leader has tired, assume the vanguard position. It is written into them by instinct to share the effort, burrowing southwards through the sky; that nevertheless sky we all live below. - https://biblioklept.org/2020/01/30/that-nevertheless-sky-we-all-live-below-a-review-of-kyle-coma-thompson-and-tristan-fosters-926-years/
926 years is a collaborative project by two writers who have purportedly only met via email & in the 17th issue of The White Review: the Louisville-based Kyle Coma-Thompson, & the Sydney-based Tristan Foster. According to the book’s witty annotation, between the two of them, the writers “track the pattern of probable lives and fates that co-exist between them, from Korea to England, Senegal to Argentina.” Their conclusion: imagination “offers more than mere consolation for the difficulties of living.”
926 Years takes its motto from a January 1, 1942 diary entry by Victor Klemperer: “It is said children still have a sense of wonder, later one becomes blunted.—Nonsense. A child takes things for granted, and most people get no further; only an old person, who thinks, is aware of the wondrous.” The slim book contains 22 single-page-long pieces of micro-fiction which sketch situations—as meaningful as banal, both repetitive & unique—in the lives of 22 different characters, with the name & age of each protagonist providing their titles (e.g. “Chaplain Blake, age 60”; “Sebastian, age 30”; “Marty Fantastic, age 81”). The ages—if one does do the math—adding up to a total of 926 years. In Joseph Schreiber’s words, this book is “a sideways glance into 926 cumulative years of human existence”.
To call the stories, as does the annotation, “linked” is to speak conceptually rather than in the literary terms of plotline connections or thematic analogies. These 22 characters have never met, lead very different lives, & face situations of a highly variegated kind. They are as disconnected by place (geographic location) & time (age) as they can be: perhaps these vignettes take place simultaneously, perhaps sequentially, perhaps partly both. Perhaps they are all set in the weirdly distanced & isolated year of 2020, perhaps they are atemporal.
Distanced & isolated is the 47 year-old Larry Hoavis, pondering in the backyard of his native town the looming radio towers, darkly distant:
Why does it feel lonely, sitting and watching? Nature in its subtle power and monotony, pre-Internet to the core, unconscious of its enormity. No one. No one even knows he’s here. The house at his back. Divorced. His ex elsewhere , how he loved her, hurt her, himself. Why’s it beautiful, why’s it comforting, that no one knows? The crickets bleeping in the grass around him, the corn growing before him. Far lights pulsing like heartbeats, waiting for lives and bodies to grow around. Loneliness, it’s inarguable isn’t it? Crowns a person like some kind of common wisdom. Then overthrows him. (16)
Some stories are thusly wistful & poignant, others are informed by a Lynchian surreal humour, as in the “Minda, age 35” vignette, which concerns a couple of hippies who after the birth of their child eat its afterbirth, only to find out that due to a mix-up they ate the “wrong slime,” becoming “cannibals” thereby (19). Following a victory in a year-long suit, they get “the rights to the afterbirth, which, by this time, mind you, is A YEAR OLD” (20). Laugh-out-loud stuff.
Many stories are thematically engaged with the subject-as-multitude motif. “G.W.W., age 54” concerns a woman who spends a lifetime getting engaged to prison inmates, just at when she has reached her fortieth engagement, with forty different purses containing forty different ID’s & identities. “Lew Wade Wiley, age 55,” tells the tale of the suicide of a Prudentia company heir who collects other people’s lives by having them brought to his suite & relate
…their worst fears, desires, the messy embarrassments of their commonalities…these he worked into undead monotone prose, the diary of Lew Wade Wiley, and so lived fuller than anyone who’d opened a newspaper to read those advertisements, wrote to that listed address, knocked at his penthouse door. (27)
Reviewing 926 Years for Biblioklept, Edwin Turner notes how the adjective “undead” in the passage above fits into “a resurrection motif that floats through 926 Years, whether it be the lifeforce of currency or the proverbial powers of cats to cheat death.”
These multiple narratives of a “multiple-personality order” reach a literalised climax in the penultimate instalment with “Marty Fantastic, 81”, described as “eighty-one-year-old darling with ten faces (one for each lift)” & who is “plagued by identities—who to be tonight, Peggy Lee, Rod Stewart, Cole Porter, Journey?” (51) Marty “do the police in many voices”, but his own death is only one & his. But perhaps not, perhaps it points elsewhere, connecting to another place.
When searching for the stories’ interlinkage, Schreiber was similarly at a loss:
One imagines each author taking turns, challenging the other, triggering the next effort. Perhaps there were complex rules, elaborate algorithms. Perhaps a roll of the dice or a measure of blind faith. […] Entering one world after another, spaces filled with souls that seem somehow disconnected from their lives—from their jobs, their relationships, their health, or from the simpler beings around them—a curious reader might be inclined to look for points of reference loosely linking one story to the next.
Turner even summoned the ghost of the novel:
After reading it twice, I don’t see 926 Years so much as a collection of connected tales, but rather as a kind of successful experimental novel, a novel that subtly and reflexively signals back to its own collaborative origin. [… The two authors] have never met in person. And yet they share a common language, of course, and other common cultural forces surely shape their prose.
One kind of these stories’ cohesion is the stylistic one: “the same melancholy voice seems to narrate all these pieces” (Mario Galeano). The sentences of these vignettes are short, & usually spring from the first-/third-person sphere of the free-indirect-discourse. Another kind of cohesion is the pragmatic one: the “effect” of this stories leaves one humbled, aware that “there are 7.8 billion live people in the world, each with their own story” (Jyoti Verma).
But if the socially-distanced 2020, happening in quarantine & via Zoom for so many of us, was the year of “distance connections” & of “connecting the unconnected,” of loneliness en masse hitherto unseen, the great connector among these might indeed be their exploration of “the creative potential of people’s native estrangement from themselves and each other.” Wildly imaginative, complexly interlinked, & generically innovative, 926 Years offers an arresting image for this loneliness in multitude & connectedness in distance early on, in story no. 3:
Much as the geese and other such birds at the beginning of winter months fly south towards more temperate climates, it’s the nature of human beings to move in unconscious arrow formation as well. They take turns, leading the pack. The burden of cutting resistance through the air, something they share. Others fly, you see, in the wake; and that is why they form a V. The wake makes for easy flying, particularly at the furthest, outermost edges. The ones in the rear work less, conserve strength, eventually make their way towards the top of the V, tip of the arrow, then when it’s time and the leader has tired, assume the vanguard position. It is written into them by instinct to share the effort, burrowing southwards through the sky; that nevertheless sky we all live below. (5) - David Vichnar
The universe is a big empty space, small clusters of stars and planets stretch across impossible horizons and, even if you are lucky enough to find yourself on one of the statistically unlikely chunks of rock that might just support (apparently) intelligent life, the chances that you will gather around yourself a few precious like-minded souls to nourish your own creative dreams and endeavours within spitting distance is another statistical unlikelihood, though much less unlikely than finding enough oxygen and water available to allow for your own existential possibility. Period.
Imagine, then, the good fortune that led one somewhat cynical Australian writer in Sydney to chance upon the work of an American (sorry but I have no idea what his temperamental tendencies are) writer from Louisville, Kentucky in the 17th issue of The White Review. What started as writerly admiration grew, thanks to the magic of email, into a friendship and now, some three years or so later a book-shaped collaboration. Twenty-two pieces of micro fiction. A literary game of call and response. A sideways glance into 926 cumulative years of human existence.
Each story, or vignette, is titled after the central character and his or her age. One imagines each author taking turns, challenging the other, triggering the next effort. Perhaps there were complex rules, elaborate algorithms. Perhaps a roll of the dice or a measure of blind faith. I don’t know. Entering one world after another, spaces filled with souls that seem somehow disconnected from their lives—from their jobs, their relationships, their health, or from the simpler beings around them—a curious reader (okay, I’m guilty) might be inclined to look for points of reference loosely linking one story to the next. Yet, the opportunity to slip in and out of a variety of experiences is its own reward. A connection to the unconnected. Like 47 year-old Larry Hoavis, sitting in his rural backyard, reflecting on the radio towers in the distance, their lights flashing in the darkness:
Why does it feel lonely, sitting and watching? Nature in its subtle power and monotony, pre-Internet to the core, unconscious of its enormity. No one. No one even knows he’s here. The house at his back. Divorced. His ex elsewhere , how he loved her, hurt her, himself. Why’s it beautiful, why’s it comforting, that no one knows? The crickets bleeping in the grass around him, the corn growing before him. Far lights pulsing like heartbeats, waiting for lives and bodies to grow around. Loneliness, it’s inarguable isn’t it? Crowns a person like some kind of common wisdom. Then overthrows him.
Each moment, painful, precious, perfect.
926 Years by Kyle-Coma Thompson and Tristan Foster, the American and Australian co-conspirators, is the second small book to emerge from Joshua Rothes’ Sublunary Editions (I reviewed the first, Falstaff: Apotheosis here, and interviewed Rothes for 3:AM Magazine here). The collaborative effort—not just between the authors but with the editor/publisher—gives this project its energy and sets a wonderfully realistic and realizable model for creating literature that is fresh and original. One that invites and encourages other like-minded spirits to imagine their own projects and help make this lonely habitable rock a little less lonely. - https://roughghosts.com/2020/01/22/older-than-yesterday-younger-than-god-926-years-by-kyle-coma-thompson-and-tristan-foster/
This month on the podcast, we’re featuring a conversation betweenTristan Foster and Kyle Coma-Thompson, co-authors of the new book 926 Years, a series of twenty-two linked stories ruminating on imagination and god and life. It goes deep. It goes there.
Kyle Coma-Thompson is the author of the short story collections The Lucky Body and Night in the Sun. His work has been anthologized in New American Stories (Vintage, 2015) and Twenty-Five Rooms (Dostoyevsky Wannabe, 2019). He lives in Louisville, Kentucky.
Tristan Foster is a writer from Sydney, Australia. His short story collection Letter to the Author of the Letter to the Father was published by Transmission Press.
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