http://www.mwektaehtabr.com
Hybrid Creatures, Matthew Baker’s sharp and innovative
collection, follows four very different protagonists as they search
for, and struggle with, connection: an amateur hacker attempts to
track down his vanished mentor; a math prodigy, the child of divorced
parents, struggles with being torn between his two families; a
composer takes a spontaneous trip to Nashville while mourning his
husband’s death and gets trapped on a hotel rooftop with a hipster;
and a wayward philosopher accepts a job working for an industrial
farming corporation. Through-out, Baker explores the inner dialogue
of failed, floundering, and successful bonds between strangers, among
family and friends, and even within a person.
Pairing the
emotional pursuit of connection with multiple forms of communication,
Baker weaves the languages of HTML, mathematics, mu-sical notations,
and propositional logic into the storytelling in order to unveil
nuances of experiences and emotions. This poignant formal invention
articulates loneliness, grief, doubt, and comfort in ways that are
inaccessible through traditional language alone.
In both form and
content, Baker captures the complexities of breaking and forming
connections with other people, and the various lan-guages we use to
navigate this inescapable human need―resulting in a moving
exploration of interpersonal bonds.
No one writes quite
like Matthew Baker, and Hybrid Creatures is an astonishingly unique
collection. Through the language of coding, mathematics, and musical
notation, the characters in these stories analyze their worlds
through ordered systems of logic that attempt to make sense of the
inexplicability of grief and loss. This is a beautiful book from an
observant and talented writer. I couldn’t put it down. -- Anne
Valente
Oh damn, Matthew
Baker has outdone himself. Hybrid Creatures is a deep dive into some
of the most fascinating character-minds in fiction. A hacker, a
mathematically gifted child, a composer, and a philosopher each
process the world through their field's systems of notation. And yet
feeling rules every page. Emotionally intimate, bursting with longing
and humor, these stories disarm, delight, and surprise. Baker is a
literary innovator^genius. -- Kelly Luce
In Hybrid Creatures,
a character asserts that ‘there were no superior or inferior
forms,’ but these are fantastic, fearless stories that I could not
imagine until Baker, with such care and control, led me toward
something altogether a superior form. An amazing discovery. -- Kevin
Wilson
Matthew Baker’s
characters nurture obsessions. In his story collection Hybrid
Creatures (126 pages; Louisiana State University Press), each of his
protagonists carries a passion for a particular field, whether it’s
mathematics or music, to the point that their fixations bleed through
into the text of their stories. The narrator of “Movements” is so
buoyed by his love of the symphony he can’t wake up to a morning
cityscape in Nashville without experiencing it in musical terms:
“…a
shopkeeper in cowboy boots heaved a security shutter up with a crash
{piano}, somewhere a jackhammer was slugging {mezzo-forte} pavement,
a sheet of metal covering a pothole in the street clapped
{pianissimo} when run over by a taxi, somebody was periodically
flinging objects made of glass, maybe bottles, into an empty
dumpster, where the glass would shatter {staccato}…”
Tryg, the young boy
and math prodigy at the heart of the story “The Golden Mean,”
processes the emotional fallout of his parents’ divorce, and the
ensuing time he must divide between both family members, through the
unfailing laws of mathematics: “On average, 4.3 days per week
with Family A, 2.7 days per week with Family B.”
These and other more
unusual (and complicated typographic) ways of illustrating his
characters’ preoccupations appear throughout the collection, such
that Baker takes the time in the Acknowledgements to thank the crew
at the printer, who “worked spiritedly and tirelessly to
accommodate all of the special formatting and symbols in this book.
Baker’s stories
read as crisp and minimalist, dictated to the page with a precision
not unlike those same mathematical principles Tryg is so fond of. The
opening piece, “Coder,” re-contextualizes computer hacking for
the martial arts genre, as a younger hacker goes in search of his
mentor—or “Sensei”—who has gone missing, ramping up the mood
of paranoia so prevalent in stories about data and surveillance.
“Coder” contains
more action than the rest of Hybrid Creatures in that the activity
moves from one location to another; more often, Baker places his
characters in a static milieu—locked on a hotel rooftop overnight
or wandering the hallways at a crowded family gathering—as they
face some kind of internal dilemma: The narrator of “Movements”
must rediscover the meaning behind life’s cacophony of sounds after
the death of his long-term partner, while Tryg tries to savor the
last few hours with his mother and her new family in the suburbs
before being shuttled back to his father’s farm.
The centerpiece of
Hybrid Creatures, and arguably its most accomplished work, arrives
last with “Proof of the Century,” a story that follows a
curmudgeonly grandfather, Willis, navigating a party where his large
family has gathered. The character, who has made a career in
industrial agriculture, comes to the painful realization he may be
suffering from dementia, and that he has not only lost some of his
mental faculties but perhaps his beloved wife as well. Refreshingly,
Baker treats this revelation not as a dramatic plot twist, but as a
quietly devastating unveiling. He displays further deftness in how he
weaves overheard conversations throughout the house into the story,
often to add humor or to contrast the guests’ self-absorbedness
with Willis’s determined mission to locate his wife.
His lifelong belief
in the overriding Logic of the universe hinges on finding her, but
that belief is threatened by not just the possibility of his wife’s
absence but by a dawning understanding that Willis’s work may have
had a disastrous effect on the environment. Again and again in Hybrid
Creatures, we see that the pursuits in life that edify and elevate
us, which help shape our daily routines and provide a sense of
purpose, rarely prepare us to face life’s greatest hardships. That
we must do, like so many things, on our own. - Zack Ravas
https://www.zyzzyva.org/2018/03/29/the-symphony-of-life-hybrid-creatures-by-matthew-baker/
8:03 p.m.
Matthew Baker’s
Hybrid Creatures is a short story collection about connection, about
the ways we do and do not communicate, about the usage and necessity
for alternative expression.
I am currently
listening to the sound Matthew Baker’s keys make as he types. Maybe
he is writing a story, maybe he is emailing. I cannot be certain.
Occasionally, we glance at each other. Our faces are distorted by the
smudges in our respective lenses. He does not know I’m writing
this.
I live with him.
When we speak to one another, it is in a hybrid of languages we know
to varying degrees—English, French, Spanish and Japanese—but
right now we sit in silence. Tonight, we are sharing the same
physical space but not speaking. We’re silent in the way one of the
book’s narrators, a hacker, describes, when sitting in a café with
someone he digitally follows: “For me, there [is] something very
powerful about the experience. Some days this [is] my ‘reason for
living.’ Just spending time together, quietly, in the same room.
</html>”
8:14 p.m.:
In the collection’s
first story, HTML serves as an intermediary for our culture’s
passionate relationship with technology; in the second, mathematics
demonstrates our universal desire to organize the incomprehensible;
in the third, musical notation mimics the sonic experience of grief;
in the fourth, propositional logic serves to make sense of failing
mental capacity.
These four stories
are consumed with loneliness, with a yearning for intimacy of
different extents; not necessarily to be held, but to be seen. Often,
it is that which we have the most difficulty articulating that we
most badly want to convey. And often, we fail. We are human. Hybrid
Creatures presents its readers with the opportunity to see the world
with an additional dimension. This is the beauty of experimentation.
It is not faultless, but here it opens up the possibility for
emotional and intellectual deepening.
In our home, when
Baker greets me, he says: Bonsoir, Mademoiselle. Sometimes he says
this in the afternoon. Occasionally, it is followed up by an intended
compliment, that is instead inverted. Rather than tell me I am
beautiful, he says: Je suis le plus belle. To me, this will always
mean more.
Sometimes we
communicate without words. I’ve just placed a plate of pastries and
a heaping dollop of whipped cream in front of him. I’ll let you
know how he responds.
8:37 p.m.:
The recent success
and fascination with Black Mirror, the British sci-fi series
concerned with the possibilities and pitfalls of futuristic
technology, speaks to our hunger for connectivity. While the
supposition around modernity is seclusion, it is within the
grandiosity of revolutionary conceits that our most basic human needs
are revealed. Hybrid Creatures plays with similar chess pieces.
Instead of imagined high-tech innovation, the collection works with
what is already present.
In one of the
collection’s most striking stories, “The Golden Mean,”
mathematical equations are used to make sense of the protagonist’s
existence in two separate families. The division is gut-wrenching.
Divorce is commonplace, but it is rare that we see it rendered so
poignantly, from the perspective of a child torn between not just
single parents, but siblings, whole separate families; constructions
of one’s own identity.
What is perhaps even
more remarkable than Baker’s premises is the simplicity of each of
his stories. Behind the elaborate setups, the fanciful hybrid
languages, all four narratives are fairly traditional. That, in
itself, requires a hybrid tongue: the ability to raise the linguistic
nuance, while lowering the complexity of plot.
Baker is now licking
whipped cream off a spoon. He found the pastries. He nods gently in
my direction.
9:00 p.m.
In Jennifer Egan’s
now infamous “PowerPoint passage” from A Visit from the Goon
Squad, the atypical form allows the reader to access a child’s
psyche. Alex McElroy’s recent chapbook Daddy Issues began with a
flow chart. Beyond their novelty, these techniques work because of
their ability to share something that would previously have been
unshareable. They add beauty and dimensionality.
Hybrid Creatures
takes it a step further. Baker infuses hybridity in every story,
meticulously structuring each narrative accordingly. It is through
HTML that his coding narrator comes to recognize the fact of his own
body and the vulnerabilities of the bodies around him. In the
collection’s final story, “Proof of the Century,” the aging
protagonist is able to access aching memories of his wife embedded
within propositional logic.
These are not
gimmicks, they are, in all senses of the word, creatures. The
atypical forms of the stories allow us to understand the characters
and, in turn, ourselves, more deeply. In “Movements,” after two
strangers share a moment of sustained, sudden intimacy, the narrator
asks his companion whether she has told anyone else her story:
“‘Basically anybody who will listen,’ Mel said {piano}.” This
rupture, punctuated with musical notation, stings brilliantly, as it
subverts the sentimentality of the connection, reminding us that it
does not exist in singularity.
In the final story,
this transcendence is felt when the aging protagonist recalls
discovering philosophy: “[He] was struck by a flash of recognition.
The realization that here was the language he had been trying and
failing to communicate in all along. And that there were actually
people who were fluent.”
That is what Hybrid
Creatures does; it creates tiny openings in the hearts and minds of
its characters and, subsequently, in its readers. Baker renders
objects and memories with scrupulous accuracy. At times this led to
my feeling the author’s precision hovering too strongly. But even
in its precisely constructed, calculated form, Hybrid Creatures
succeeds at bringing to life complex portraits of human beings that
are far more than well-constructed ideas.
Of course, the book
is filled with unanswered questions, loose ends, spindling passages
of description that a dutiful reader might cling to, only to be left
disappointed by the absence of reward or sense of resolve at the
finish. But Hybrid Creatures isn’t interested in firm resolution.
If anything, the stories, which are connected only by formal
experimentation, pose their own inquiries. What ties them together?
Do they exist in the same world? Why are they being presented here? I
believe the answer is simple. These are narratives of longing, of
people experiencing the world singularly and wishing to be joined
with another. In a magnificent way, by pairing the stories in this
book, Baker is uniting them.
9:17 p.m.
In the past, I’ve
found that the habit of texting can cheapen language. Enter Baker, to
disrupt this notion. Now that we are under the same ceiling, we use
our disjointed, butchered concoctions of Japanese, French, Spanish,
and English to get closer to the things we actually mean. But for a
while, when we were long-distance, we used emoji and Apple’s
Digital Touch feature to express our missing. A hand drawn lemon
meant more to either of us than the words: I miss you. Lemons were
present at the inception of our connection, they signify our learning
to care for one another. I miss you is a bit like the story told in
“Movements,” a story, the speaker reveals, that has been told
countless times, to countless listeners. The phrase has lost some of
its meaning. For us, lemons, another hybrid tongue, encompass more of
our authentic feelings. The stories in Hybrid Creatures do the same.
Now Baker is
standing in front of me. The plate of pastries is empty. He looks
down at my laptop then looks back up at me. J’adore ton cerveux, he
says, and I smile because he’s gotten the French right, but has no
idea what I’ve been writing. - Jenessa Abrams
https://www.guernicamag.com/house-speak-hybrid-tongues-review-told-course-evening-author-dont-speak/
Artificial
Languages: An Interview with Matthew Baker by K.C. Mead-Brewer
The writer on his
short story collection, Hybrid Creatures, and using mathematical
equations, HTML code, music symbols, and propositional logic to build
narratives.
Matthew Baker’s debut story collection Hybrid Creatures (LSU Press)
folds together mathematical equations, HTML, music, and propositional
logic into four unexpected prose narratives. Each story offers an
impressive concentration of quiet, constant beauty, using an amalgam
of languages to burrow deep into these yearning, lonely characters.
Baker’s appreciation for storytelling in all its forms--video
games, film, prose, etc.--is well reflected in the variety of
projects he undertakes, from his children's novel If You Find This to
his digital anthology of other authors' childhood and young adult
writings, Early Work. I first met Baker during a residency at The
Vermont Studio Center where he read an excerpt of "The
Transition," a short story about adaptation where a young person
attempts to transition out of their physical body. His reading was so
transporting that I was not surprised to hear the story was recently
optioned for film by Amazon. In Hybrid Creatures, however, Baker
offers readers a set of stories designed to resist all forms of
adaptation, even author readings. These are stories made exclusively
for the intimate relationship between the reader and the page.
K.C. Mead-Brewer:
Hybrid Creatures is the perfect title for this collection, not only
because of the hybrid of languages used throughout but because it
highlights how stories are a type of creature, something that will
interact and communicate with each reader in a unique way. Do you
think of your writing as a collaborative process between author and
reader, or do you think of it more like the teaista making matcha in
“Coder,” where drinking the tea matters less than the act of
making it?
Matthew Baker:
I’m fascinated with video games, and interactive storytelling in
general. The stories in Hybrid Creatures obviously aren’t as
interactive as something like Gone Home or Edith Finch, but I do
think of the stories as interactive, as a collaboration between me
and the reader. For instance, in “Movements,” the story that’s
narrated partly in music dynamics, it’s possible to ignore the
music dynamics entirely, and I’m sure that there are readers who
will.
Other readers will only engage with some of the music dynamics. Even
for readers who do fully engage—how do you interpret the
“glissando” attached to the sound of a stomach growling? How do
you interpret the sound of distant laughter that’s been scored as
“smorzando”? How exactly do you hear, in your head, the
“crescendo” or the “diminuendo” attached to a line of
dialogue? I’m only the composer. The reader is the conductor. We’re
all looking at the exact same sheet music for Dvorak’s Symphony No.
9, but every conductor in the world has a unique interpretation.
KMB:
Unlike most other artforms—music, film, sculpture, etc.—which
must be experienced in their original forms to be experienced at all,
prose is often adapted into other forms. These stories especially
would be next to impossible to pry away from the page. Could you talk
more about this and what the consequence of their narrative form
means to you?
MB:
I’m always jealous of storytelling moves that are only possible to
do in a certain medium. In Building Stories, for instance, Chris Ware
does these breathtaking moves that are only possible to do in graphic
novels. There’s a page structured in the form of a diagram, with
arrows pointing between different images and captions and a central
portrait of the protagonist’s body. There’s another page that has
visual memories that grow out of thought bubbles and float to the
ceiling, gradually collecting above the protagonist in the present
moment like a cluster of balloons. I wanted to find something like
that for prose—something that was only possible to do in a written
story. That was what led me to think about ways to use artificial
languages narratively.
KMB:
I was particularly struck by the fact that Tryg, the aptly named
protagonist of the math-infused story “The Golden Mean,” is
literally the remainder of a division, the child of a divorce. What
came first in your writing process: the characters or their unique
languages?
MB:
For each story, I started with the artificial language that I wanted
to use, and then I searched for a corresponding structure. For “The
Golden Mean,” first I decided that I wanted to use math notations
linguistically, and then I decided to give the story the structure of
the golden ratio, with two sections, an “A” and a “B,” that
in terms of word count would have a ratio that roughly approximated
1.618. Then I spent a lot of time thinking about what type of story
would be best told—could be enhanced—if it was written partly in
math notations and structured in two sections with a specific ratio.
And it was only then that I decided on the plot. So the plot of each
story was designed around what I saw as the inherent narrative
potential of the artificial language and its corresponding structure.
KMB:
I love how intimately connected each setting is to the larger themes
of the story. In “Coder,” you have a story about a tea-drinking,
attempted revolutionary based in Boston. In “The Golden Mean,”
you have a kid torn between two families living between North and
South Dakota. Do settings often bloom naturally for you during the
drafting process, or are they a decision you tend to make while
editing?
MB:
That was another decision that I would make before sitting down to
write the story. Along with the thematic connections that each
setting has, I also wanted the stories to span the country, so each
story in the collection was deliberately set in a different region of
the United States.
KMB:
Why was it important to you that these stories span the United
States?
MB:
Because there are people with this experience—people who speak and
think partly in an artificial language—everywhere. I did want each
of the protagonists to share the same native tongue, American
English, which restricted the stories to the United States. But
otherwise, I wanted the range of settings to be as diverse as
possible.
KMB:
There’s a wonderful, gentle arc moving across this collection: In
“Coder,” you herald the end of the story with, “Dusk had come.”
In “The Golden Mean,” you use, “Twilight was falling.” In
“Movements,” you continue this arc with, “It wasn’t dawn that
woke us, it was the birds that came just before.” And finally, at
the end of “Proof of the Century,” you give us a house glowing
like a torch with abundant life and a resplendent woman beaming out
of the night like an angel “in a neon beanie and a billowing
peacoat.” Even through all the grief and longing, this created for
me a sense of gradual brightening and increasing hopefulness. Do you
prefer that readers consume these stories in their prescribed order
or in a hodgepodge order of their choosing?
MB:
I love the idea that some readers will read the stories in a shuffled
order. In terms of age, the four protagonists of the stories span a
human lifetime—there’s a child, a college student, an adult, and
an elderly retiree—and early on I thought about ordering the
stories chronologically, beginning with childhood, then youth, then
adulthood, and ending with old age. That probably would have been the
logical way to order the book. But it seemed too perfect to me. I
wanted to mess with it. So I did. I inverted two of the stories. So
no, honestly, I don’t mind if readers mess with the order. I
already messed with it myself.
KMB:
All your characters are exquisitely drawn, from the hybrid languages
they use to the ways they undermine themselves to the moments of
eerie self-awareness. I choked on my tea when I read in “Proof of
the Century” that this man who ached to do both noble and
diabolical things with his life had dreamed of becoming a soldier. I
mean, shit. Nailed it. How do you build your characters?
MB:
Most of that was a surprise for me, even some very basic details
about the characters. I didn’t realize that the hacker had grown up
in foster homes, for instance, until after I had already been working
on “Coder” for weeks. So even though I knew all of that other
information about each story before sitting down to write it—the
language, the structure, the plot, the setting—I discovered a lot
about each character through the process of writing it. For me, that
was the thrill.
KMB:
In a collection obsessed with issues of (mis)communication and
(dis)connectedness, I was particularly struck by the recurring idea
that you can never fully know anyone, including yourself. I’m
particularly haunted by what might be inside sensei’s mysterious,
unexplained envelope in “Coder”—money? Secrets? Tea? You
wouldn’t be willing to give us a glimpse inside that envelope,
would you? (I’m hoping you’ll say yes just as much as I’m
hoping you’ll say no.)
MB:
I definitely can’t tell you what’s in the envelope. I’m not
going to tell you the hacker’s gender, either. If it’s any
consolation, though, I can tell you a secret about sensei’s botnet:
it was assembled using a malware that was designed to exploit
computers that run Linux. I can tell you that the reason that
sensei’s name isn’t capitalized is that it’s an online username
that for aesthetic purposes sensei chose not to capitalize. I can
tell you that sensei isn’t Satoshi Nakamoto. I can tell you that
sensei has had personal interactions with Barrett Brown, Commander X,
and Jeremy Hammond, and fucking hates Sabu. Absolutely fucking hates
him.
KMB:
The way you’ve woven in all these different languages feels
impressively natural and seamless. Were there any particular stories
or authors you looked to for stylistic and/or structural guidance
while you were writing?
MB:
One evolutionary ancestor might be The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar
Wao, in that the novel is narrated through a fusion of English and
Spanish, and also narrated partly through the lexicon of nerd
culture, using comic book references and science fiction references
linguistically, as adjectives and adverbs and idioms and similes,
which you can only understand if you’re fluent in that arcane
tongue of geeks and otakus. I wasn’t thinking about that book at
the time, though.
I was thinking about Peanuts, how Woodstock speaks in a language of
dash marks, and how the other characters in the cartoon physically
interact with Schroeder’s music, sleeping on top of the music staff
or plucking music notes out of the air. I was thinking about A
Clockwork Orange, how the book is narrated partly in Nadsat. I was
thinking about Codex Seraphinianus, how Serafini wrote the book in a
constructed language. I was also thinking about Salvador Plascencia’s
novel The People of Paper, which is narrated primarily in English but
also includes Spanish and sign language signs and a character who
speaks in binary.
Like Plascencia and Diaz, I had a multilingual childhood—but
instead of English and Spanish, I grew up speaking English and music
and math and HTML, and learning to write proofs in formal logic.
Those were the languages that I thought in, the languages that I used
to try to understand life, to comprehend the world around me. So
although this project may seem hyper-experimental, in some ways it
was the most natural way for me to attempt to tell my story.
https://bombmagazine.org/articles/matthew-baker/
We’re told there
are only so many ways to tell a story. A person goes on a journey, or
a stranger comes to town. An AI once argued stories rely on six major
emotional trajectories. Yet in Matthew Baker’s debut collection of
short stories, Hybrid Creatures, traditional narratives are made
fresh by expanding their lexicons. Baker develops layered meaning by
implementing hybrid languages; in doing so, he also expands the
emotional spectrum of his characters. His short fiction is well
balanced with meticulous planning and noticeable passion for
language.
I was lucky enough
to connect with Baker at the recent AWP conference in Tampa and
interviewed him after leaving Florida. The following conversation has
been edited.
Aram Mrjoian:
In this collection,
you use HTML, mathematics, musical notations, and propositional logic
throughout the text. These aesthetic decisions seem to not only
expand the lexicon of each story but also add depth to the characters
that inhabit them. I’m curious; how much familiarity did you need
to have with these hybrid languages? What fluency was required to
bring these elements into your work?
Matthew Baker:
I completely
immersed myself. Not just in the artificial languages but in their
respective fields, too. I was living in Michigan at the time, writing
full-time, which meant living below the poverty line. I didn’t have
a car, and walking to the nearest branch of the public library would
take me almost an hour. There was a bus that went there, but I
couldn’t afford the fare. I could barely even afford food. I was
subsisting primarily on oatmeal, bananas, rice, and lentils. So, I
would just walk. I started writing the formal logic story, “Proof
of the Century”, in the middle of the winter, and I remember
walking to the library, hiking through the city during a whiteout
blizzard, slipping on patches of black ice, trudging through massive
drifts of snow, carrying an empty duffel bag, having to walk backward
when the wind blew so hard that it’d cut straight through my coat.
By the time I got to the library, my hands were numb; my feet were
numb, and my eyebrows and eyelashes were crusted with frost. I
checked out a couple dozen classic philosophy texts—Symposium,
Metaphysics, Ethics, Tao Te Ching, The Incoherence of the
Incoherence, etcetera—packed the books into the duffel bag, and
then had to hike back home, this time carrying a load of like forty
pounds. It was exhausting. It was freezing. In retrospect, though,
there was something satisfying about that—having to struggle.
Taking those books out of the duffel bag back at my apartment, I felt
like a miner unloading these giant nuggets of gold. And for a month,
those books were my entire world. I read about philosophy in bed in
the morning; I wrote about philosophy all day; I read about
philosophy in bed again at night, and I thought about philosophy
falling asleep. I had studied formal logic in college. I had never
been completely immersed though. That January, one hundred percent of
my brain was occupied by the rules of formal logic. I had nightmares
about disjunctive syllogisms and constructive dilemmas. All of the
stories were like that.
Aram Mrjoian:
Bouncing off the
first question, I imagine bringing these elements into short fiction
creates a unique set of challenges in the revision process. How did
you go about lining up the multiple layers of logic that go into
these stories?
Matthew Baker:
That work was done
in the prewriting, rather than the rewriting. I didn’t want the
experiments to feel random or gimmicky—for there to be a disconnect
between these linguistic and structural elements and the actual
narratives of the stories. I wanted each experiment to feel
absolutely crucial to the story being told, which meant having to do
a lot of planning. Take “Movements”, for example. For that story,
first, I decided on the artificial language that I wanted to
use—sheet music, music notations. I made a list of all of the music
dynamics that I was going to include in the story, “forte” and
“piano” and “staccato” and etcetera, along with a list of
sound verbs to include, words like “creak” and “wail” and
“crash” and “echo,” and a list of related jargon to include,
too, terms like “chromatic” and “signature” and “cadence”
and “gamut.” Then, I decided on the corresponding structure that
I wanted to use—that the story would be structured like a
traditional symphony with four movements: an allegro, an adagio, a
minuet and a rondo, which would each follow the unique conventions of
that particular musical form. And then, I spent a lot of time
thinking about the different types of stories that could be told
through this specific language, with this specific structure, and
designed a character whose story would have a reason, a narrative
justification, to be told in this experimental fashion, a character
whose story might have an enhanced emotional effect on the reader if
told in this unusual way. That was the prewriting. I would do all of
that before actually sitting down to write the story.
Aram Mrjoian:
Thematically, one
thing that strikes me about Hybrid Creatures is the sense that these
underlying ways of thinking create dissonance between your characters
and the people around them. Whether a technological, mathematical, or
musical proclivity, your characters often feel isolated by their
esoteric interpretation of the outside world. With that said, how are
your stories hinting at larger ideas about language and
communication? What are you trying to convey through your characters?
Matthew Baker:
My mom tells me that
when I first started learning how to read English, the language
thrilled me. I was insatiably curious. If an object within reach had
words on it, I’d read it. Eating breakfast at the kitchen table,
I’d read the back of the cereal box—where the manufacturer would
put jokes and puzzles and fun facts meant to entertain you while you
ate—and then I would turn the box and read the side where all of
the ingredients were listed, every single word, and then turn the box
again and read all the words on the front, and then turn the box
again and read the words on the other side, and then flip the box
over and read the flaps on the top and the bottom. I’d read the
labels on every toiletry product in the house. I’d read the text on
every article of junk mail that arrived. As my mom drove me to
daycare, I’d demand to know the meaning of unfamiliar words on
every billboard and storefront that we passed. What’s a “governor”?
What’s a “merchandise”? What’s a “tequila”? I loved
learning English. I adored every new word, the look of it, the sound
of it in my ears, the feel of it on my tongue, the thrill of adding
it to my vocabulary, like a new tool to a workbench. To this day,
there’s still nothing as exhilarating to me as learning a new
language, whether it’s Japanese, Klingon, Quenya, or HTML. But at
the same time, there’s also something profoundly alienating about
it, because the more and more specialized that your lexicon becomes,
the fewer and fewer people there are who can understand you. The only
thing worse than not having the words to express yourself to another
person is having the words to express yourself to a person who
wouldn’t understand.
Aram Mrjoian:
The stories that
make up Hybrid Creatures, in particular, “Proof of the Century”,
are also fairly expansive. What are the challenges of writing long,
short stories? What considerations do you make when writing longer
work, especially given that many literary publications currently
place emphasis on brevity?
Matthew Baker:
Honestly, I don’t
think about the preferences of literary journals while writing. I
just make the story whatever the story needs to be. I do wish that
literary journals were more welcoming to novellas though. A couple
years ago, I heard Christine Schutt give a reading at the Vermont
Studio Center, and during the Q&A she said something about how in
prose there’s nothing better than a good novella. She said it much
more articulately and intelligently than that, of course. I wish you
could have heard exactly what she said, word for word, because the
way that she said it was brilliant. But that was the basic gist: “In
prose, the novella is the supreme form—a good novella is better
than a good short and better than a good novel.” I’m not sure if
this is a firm opinion she holds or if it was just some offhand
remark that she made. But what she said resonated with me. For me, as
a reader, there’s something intensely satisfying about a story that
length. I don’t think about it often, but it does make me sad,
genuinely sad, that there are so few literary journals that will even
consider a story that length for publication.
Aram Mrjoian:
Many writers mention
that by the time something is published they’re well into the next
project. Is that the case for you, and if so, what are you working on
now?
Matthew Baker:
I always have to be
working on something new. At the moment, it’s a new collection of
stories. Like Hybrid Creatures—which is basically a concept
album—the stories in the new collection were written as a group and
designed to be presented together. Unlike Hybrid Creatures—which
was intended to be impossible to adapt for film—the stories in this
new collection seem to be well suited for adaptation. Four of the
stories have already been optioned for film: one by Netflix, one by
Amazon, one by Brad Weston’s new company, MakeReady, and another by
a director who’s developing the project in secret and for now wants
to remain anonymous. Which has been the most incredible experience.
I’ve always been obsessed with film as a storytelling medium.
Growing up, I was very close to my grandfather; he was like a father
to me, and he’d have me over for sleepovers, babysitting me while
my mom worked the night shift. He was this massive, towering, gentle
man with bright blue eyes and angular facial features, a retired
police captain whose greatest passion in life was film. He was a
total fanatic. He owned hundreds of movies on videocassette, and that
was how we bonded together—eating ice cream and microwave popcorn
from the convenience store across the street, watching gangster
flicks and spaghetti westerns. He introduced me to Casablanca, The
Bridge on the River Kwai, North by Northwest, 2001: A Space Odyssey.
And at his house, the movies weren’t just on the television. The
shelves and the cabinets were filled with replicas of famous props:
the Maltese falcon, the Rosebud sled, Dorothy’s ruby slippers,
Indiana’s dusty bullwhip. He even had film memorabilia in the
bathroom. Sleeping over at his house was like getting to spend the
night at a movie theater with free concessions that was
simultaneously a film history museum where you were allowed to touch
all of the exhibits. He acted in low-budget productions in Michigan.
He even wrote a script once about these Army nurses in Nevada who get
sent back in time to the Civil War. So, because of him, film has
always had a special place in my heart. I wish he could have lived to
have seen one of my stories adapted. He would have been so amazed. He
would have been just delighted. He died a decade too soon, in a
hospice bed in my mom’s living room.
Aram Mrjoian:
At the time of this
interview (March 13), we’ve just returned from the AWP conference
in Tampa. What books did you snag while you were there, and what are
you looking forward to reading?
Matthew Baker:
So many. I live with
my partner, the fiction writer Jenessa Abrams, and we have the most
beautiful stack of new books in our apartment now. I’m especially
excited to read Veronica Gerber Bicecci’s novel, Empty Set, which
based on a quick flip-through appears to incorporate a lot of math
concepts, different graphs and diagrams. Also, Shayla Lawson’s I
Think I’m Ready to See Frank Ocean, Rita Bullwinkel’s Belly Up,
Melissa Cundieff’s Darling Nova, and Diana Khoi Nguyen’s new
book, Ghost Of. I’m also fascinated by this new press—maybe it’s
not new, it’s new to me—called Container. Container was
“established to create books which aren’t, in the quotidian
sense, books at all.” For instance, a story published on a Rolodex
or stories published in a View-Master. As you’d probably guess
after reading Hybrid Creatures, I love strange and peculiar
experiments like that. That’s always been my favorite part of
AWP—just walking through the bookfair, checking out what new
mutations have appeared in the literary gene pool, what bizarre
creatures have evolved. - Aram Mrjoian
https://chireviewofbooks.com/2018/04/04/there-are-more-than-six-ways-to-tell-a-story/
Hybrid (kitchen/language/literature) spaces: a conversation withMatthew Baker
The Extinction of Homo Sapiens
The Visitation (story)
Sport, Online 01-24-2012
Superhighway
Matthew Baker,
Why Visit America: Stories,
Henry Holt, 2020
Equal parts
speculative and satirical, the stories in Why Visit America form an
exegesis of our current political predicament, while offering an
eloquent plea for connection and hope.
The citizens of
Plainfield, Texas, have had it with the broke-down United States. So
they vote to secede, rename themselves America in memory of their
former country, and happily set themselves up to receive tourists
from their closest neighbor: America. Couldn’t happen? Well, it
might, and so it goes in the thirteen stories in Matthew Baker’s
brilliantly illuminating, incisive, and heartbreaking collection Why
Visit America.
The book opens with
a seemingly traditional story in which the speculative element is
extremely minimal―the narrator has a job that doesn’t actually
exist―a story that wouldn’t seem much out of place in a
collection of literary realism. From there the stories get
progressively stranger: a young man breaks the news to his family
that he is going to transition―from an analog body to a digital
existence. A young woman abducts a child―her own―from a
government-run childcare facility. A man returns home after
committing a great crime, his sentence being that his memory―his
entire life―is wiped clean.
As the book moves
from universe to universe, the stories cross between different
American genres: from bildungsroman to rom com, western to dystopian,
including fantasy, horror, erotica, and a noir detective mystery.
Read together, these parallel-universe stories create a composite
portrait of the true nature of the United States and a Through the
Looking-Glass reflection of who we are as a country.
"Satirical and
comedic... The premises of the stories in “Why Visit America” are
increasingly inventive and clever, often featuring some sort of
reversal to our current social order, offering up allegorical
commentary on who we are as Americans."―The New York
Times
"Baker never
takes the easy way out. He doesn’t brandish sharp swords at
American capitalism or consumer excess or fears that masquerade as
politics. Neither does he construct straw men, then ask the reader to
applaud when he lights them on fire."―The Washington
Post
"Imaginative. .
. .Satirical and deeply humane, these poignant stories expose the
moral bankruptcy at the rotten core of the American social contract."―Esquire
"Inventive. . .
. Baker pairs his propensity for play with broad societal critiques.
. . . In the vein of a writer like Donald Barthelme, Baker is both
witty and big-hearted."―The A.V. Club
"Striking... In
Baker’s stories we see an aspirational America: a country wrought
with anger and longing and fear and hate but also one where you can’t
let go of the feeling that we are hurtling toward some greater
reconciliation... Baker’s writing is beyond satisfying."―The Rumpus
"You hold in
your hands the perfect object, a buried treasure. You have been
looking for it all your life, maybe without realizing. Inside are all
the mysteries of existence, delivered in story form, like a sermon.
My God, you will think as you read it, at last finally I know. Plus,
it’s kinda funny."―Noah Hawley,
author of Before the Fall
"How does he do
it? Matthew Baker’s mind is an oyster producing pearl after pearl.
Each story in Why Visit America offers an eerie and unsettling vision
of our possible future while remaining emotionally truthful and, as
always, incredibly damn fun."―Kelly Luce,
author of Pull Me Under
"Only Matthew
Baker could create stories that are so unique, so stylistically
adventurous, and manage to contain it within a single collection.
These are high-concept narratives that somehow gain depth and clarity
as Baker finds the heart of the story. It's both a love letter and
critique of the world we live in and the world that awaits us."―Kevin Wilson,
author of Nothing to See Here and The Family Fang
"Matthew
Baker's Why Visit America is at once deeply heartbroken by the state
of our country and world and also deeply hopeful about what both
could be. These stories critically examine the harms wrought by
American xenophobia, misogyny, transphobia, and capitalism while also
bearing an abiding, profound love for this planet and for its people.
This is a brilliant collection that shines with imagination, and with
empathy."―Anne Valente,
author of The Desert Sky Before Us
“With his unique
brand of quirky, sardonic compassion, Matthew Baker offers us a book
that’s like a cross-country road trip as seen through a funhouse
mirror. At once trenchant and deeply tender, the stories in Why Visit
America thrum with all that is exasperating, absurd, tragic, and
still so compelling about life in these United States.”―Naomi J.
Williams, author of Landfalls
“Matthew Baker's
stories are wild in all the best ways, but Why Visit America isn't
just a triumph of weirdness―these stories use a variety of skewed
lenses to offer smart critiques of the systems and beliefs humming
through so much of American life. They also somehow manage to be,
always, a ton of fun to read.”―Lee Conell,
author of Subcortical
"Buoyed with
humor and extraordinary empathy, Why Visit America maps the
indignities of late capitalism taken to its extremes. Baker gives us
iconoclasts, commoners, haves, and have-nots who reckon with what it
is to be human―to hope and love―in distinctly-drawn worlds where
dwindling resources and maturing technologies compromise and
complicate our values. These stories mourn and celebrate, warn and
accept. They capture the best and worst of who we are and who we may
become. Baker is an exciting, inventive, and immensely talented
writer. I could not put this book down."―Kara Vernor,
author of Because I Wanted to Write You a Pop Song
“Like the country
that graces its pages, Why Visit America offers up stories at once
horrifying and heart-warming. Baker writes with incisive speculative
insight, capturing the paradoxes of modern life in prose that drips
with details and dizzies the imagination. This book will make you
want to throw open your windows, hug your family, and give away all
your possessions. A story collection of staggering
intelligence―Baker’s latest work is not to be missed.”―Allegra Hyde,
author of Of This New World
“Baker is a
visionary. His wild future and parallel versions of America are
cautionary, provocative, evocative, and revelatory. Uniting them all
is the immutable human desire to be intimately connected.”―Katie Chase,
author of Man and Wife
“Why Visit America
is an exhilarating, transformative read. From memory erasure as
criminal justice reform to an epidemic of lost souls due to
overpopulation, Matthew Baker perfectly makes the familiar strange
and the strange familiar. Witty, sharp, and truly innovative. This
book reimagines the pressing moral and cultural questions of our
time.”―Crystal Hana Kim,
author of If You Leave Me
"Matthew Baker
writes stories that look like garments made for limbs we haven't
grown yet. The worlds of Why Visit America refract the reality in
which we live with spooky, prismatic intelligence. I'd bask in the
strange, warped rays of these stories forever if I could. They do
what only the best fiction does―invert you so that you can view the
so-called real from the other side."―Rita Bullwinkel,
author of Belly Up
Every now and then a
book comes out that when you read it, your world is changed, whether
that is that you’ve just discovered a writer who you now adore,
whether it moves you in ways you’ve not been moved before, or that
the storytelling is so sublime that the book you believe is destined
for greatness. All of these things are true of Why Visit America the
new collection from Matthew Baker – who is now up there as one of
my favourite writers, and this book as one of the greatest
collections I’ve read.
It’s a collection
of thirteen stories and from the press release that accompanied my
copy states that eight of these stories have been optioned by various
TV and film agencies – the story ‘Life Sentence’ was won by
Netfilx in a nine-way, six-figure auction – so anticipation was
high with this collection and it didn’t let me down.
Matthew Baker is a
new writer to me, his previous collection Hybrid Creatures seemed to
fly under the radar but this one is showing up on that radar as a
gigantic nuclear missile – Baker’s prose is astonishingly crisp,
whilst his imagination and storytelling prowess are masterfully
original and deeply touching, causing the reader to lose themselves
in this most beguiling and transforming collection – once you’ve
read Why Visit America, you’ll feel changed, you’ll feel
enlightened and most of all you’ll be witnessing greatness!
The collection opens
with ‘Fighting Words’ where our protagonist Emma is left with her
mother’s brothers as she heads off to the capital to be with her
new lover. Emma’s uncles are two timid creatures who take up the
call, they wanted to say no, but were too timid to do so, so now they
are Emma’s guardians. Her Uncle’s didn’t know what they were
letting themselves in for when they became her guardians, and how
strong the burden of protecting their niece is, but we soon discover
that they would do anything to protect Emma, who is is being bullied
by a boy called Nate – these twig tea drinking, petunia planing,
rhubarb growing, squirrel feeding brothers now want to cave his knees
in and destroy the boy who’s slowly destroying their niece. One of
the uncles in this piece is a lexicographer and the use of word play,
plays a fundamental part of the prose and storytelling which Baker
wields as a double-edged sword, it’s both sharp and witty and adds
more gravitas to the delectable prose on offer. ‘Fighting Words’
is about being consumed by the feelings of wanting to protect someone
close to you, to help them any way you can, to change the
circumstances they find themselves in, but in doing that, in being so
consumed in trying to make things better, we seem to miss the bigger
picture of transformation that is occurring within their lives.
The next story I
want to talk about is ‘Rites‘, a story set in Minnesota, we join
it when a family is gathering for the last rites of Pearl (a
tradition that this community are observing) she wanted as it appears
to leave this world in a Viking type funeral, being cast out on a
lake in a boat where she would be engulfed in flames. All appears to
be going as planned, some were shouting, some were cheering, but one
of the onlookers, was crying (an odd sight at these events), drawing
their eyes and their disdain, Orson. Orsen was the last of his
generation you see, normally the rites were carried out at seventy,
but he was now seventy-three; the family that had gathered to send
off Pearl in this wonderful fanfare, were now growing in their
anticipation for him to choose his rites, but they also feared that
he was stalling and that wasn’t allowed.
‘Stallers often
became eager to quit stalling as their health worsened, as rites
became less of a menace and more of a relief. From a purely selfish
position, that was what rites offered: escaping the intensifying pain
of living with a deteriorating body.’
‘Rites‘ is a
deeply original take on small town America ways of life (cults would
be another word we could use) and is deeply touching whilst also
being shockingly brilliant. Baker goes on to deepen the mythos of
this tale with discussions about other ways this family have taken
their rites – such as pills, a banquet of poisonous mushrooms,
suicide, caffeine, being eaten alive by wolves, drink, insulin and as
we know, some people chose fire like Pearl. It’s the conversations
and the deep sadness of this story that really grips the reader, an
old-timer discussing his views with a family that have grown apart
from him, his loneliness is palpable (feelings of disconnection), but
his wanting to live, his wanting to have all that life can give you
is a bold and uplifting part of this quite remarkable story.
I’ll touch on a
few other stories from the collection, as I don’t want to go into
too much detail, as I feel that this collection is so brilliant that
it’s best discovered coming at it blind like I did, there is so
much to enjoy, so much to discover and I don’t want to do the
stories a disservice.
‘The Transition‘
was one of my favourite stories within the collection (it’s hard to
choose between so many great stories – but this one spoke to me in
a deep and powerful way), our protagonist Mason wants to transition,
he’s grown dejected in the body that he has, doesn’t feel that he
belongs in it, feels that he’s living a lie, so he raises this life
changing quandary with his parents (an initial conversation that is
beautifully rendered by Baker, a cluster-fuck of emotions being
spilled out and spat out within his family unit – who don’t take
his decision seriously or offer any sign of support), it’s gone on
too long and he can’t keep living his life like this. Mason informs
his family that he is planning to have his mind converted to digital
data and transferred from his body to a computer server, where he
will be able to finally be the person he believes he was born to be,
where his soul can be free from the restrictions of his confining
life.
The alarm and
distress shown by his family especially his mother was perfect, her
initial thoughts were of her sons insanity, but the scene where she
is brushing her teeth recalling her son’s demeanour how he was a
slow realisation creeps in that he has been unhappy, unwelcome in his
body and perhaps this is what he was born to be – really powerful
as we compare this to a person transitioning from gender, the grief
of loosing a son but gaining a daughter or vice versa- it’s
extremely powerful writing. He seemed happiest when alone, on the
computer he seemed to come alive at those moments, other than
withdrawn and apathetic of life when doing things ‘normal’ boys
his age should be doing.
‘If you’re born
in a body, then you belong in a body, and that’s that.’
‘He’s just lazy.
Doesn’t want to work anymore. Just wants to live for free. God
knows we’ve got enough of those types in this country.’
‘Life Sentence’
was a stonking short story. The story starts with our protagonist
Wash (Washington) being dropped off by a police cruiser to a house
and life that he has forgotten – his memories have been forgotten,
he doesn’t remember his wife (Mia), or his son (Jaden) or his
daughter (Sophie) he can’t remember his favourite meal, or even his
mutt of a dog (biscuit) – everything is a haze of a life he once
lived. But what happened to Wash?
We’re soon
introduced to his Reintroduction Manager (Lindsay) who explains to
him that his memories have been erased; informing him that his
semantic memories (general knowledge) remain, but his episodic
memories (personal experiences) have all been wiped – due to him
receiving a sentence of life for a crime he had committed.
It’s a stunning
short story that talks about a time in the not too distant future
when such a thing could happen, where the failing prison system is
replaced with this mind wipe process, it’s subtly woven into the
prose and dialogue and we soon discover that we are immersed in this
new dystopia of law enforcement. It’s actually masterful the way
Baker puts this across and is reminiscent of the type of crazy that
Philip K Dick would come up with.
‘…his wife hands
him a rubber syringe and a plastic bowl and asks him to flush a
buildup of wax from her ears, an act that to him seems far more
intimate than intercourse.’
You see ‘wipes’
cost, some people wipe a horrid memory, some a comment that keeps
playing on them, addicts if they can get it, wipe the need for a fix,
survivors of traumatic experiences do too. It’s an elective
procedure, one that criminals get it for free, whether it’s a year
for a crime, then that year is wiped, it’s missing from there
memory recall – if you get life, it’s all erased, everything you
ever knew… gone. A new form of prison, of punishment. But you’re
able to continue to live your life as a free person, away from a life
behind bars and with your family!
Can you mourn a life
you can’t remember? Can your family mourn the loss of that member?
Can you be held responsible for the things that have been erased or
the tiny echo of that past the remains in the pained expression of
your children, in the flinching and of the unspoken facts? Do you try
to find out what you did? If you got life for something it has got to
have been recorded somewhere, right? And this is what plagues Wash –
building to a deftly crafted conclusion.
I could talk more
about this book, but I’ll stop myself here, as I mentioned
previously, there are only a handful of books that come around where
you will remember where you were when you read it, and this is one of
them.
Why Visit America is
brilliant, beguiling and brutal – a marvelously crafted collection
of stories that brim with menace and moments of truth – reflective,
humane, tremendously evocative and absorbingly readable ; some of the
finest writing I’ve read in a long while! - Ross Jeffery
https://storgy.com/2020/08/04/why-visit-america-by-matthew-baker/
None of the
alternative Americas envisioned by the conspicuously talented Matthew
Baker in his new collection of short stories, Why Visit America, is
implausible. That they don’t read as preposterous, even as they
confound, is due to the author’s inventive play with form and his
deeply affecting focus on human desire ... restrained but always
trenchant humor ... These stories are not overly comedic—they are
too deeply, complicatedly human for that—but there are plenty of
snort-provoking moments. Baker employs a similarly light touch with
the absurdism that comes preloaded on speculative fiction ...
Meticulously working the genre to devise his examination of
individual versus collective good, Baker (author of a previous
collection, Hybrid Creatures) never takes the easy way out. He
doesn’t brandish sharp swords at American capitalism or consumer
excess or fears that masquerade as politics. Neither does he
construct straw men, then ask the reader to applaud when he lights
them on fire. Instead, he demonstrates charity toward his characters,
who as Americans stand in for the prismatic nature of the country
itself. All of which he seems to love, even the unlovable parts. -
MELISSA HOLBROOK PIERSON, THE WASHINGTON POST
“There wasn’t
anything special about us,” says the collective narrator of the
title story in Matthew Baker’s Why Visit America. “We were just
an average town. Porch swings, wading pools, split-rail fences,
pumpjacks bobbing for oil on the horizon.”
That’s Plainfield,
a fictional small town in Real County, Texas. You could see it as a
thinly veiled version of Leakey, the actual county seat of Real
County, except for one thing: Plainfieldians don’t bleed red,
white, and blue. “We were fed up with our country… We were
anti-government, we were anti-corporate, but mostly we were normal
people who couldn’t afford to buy an election and had come to
understand that our votes didn’t mean shit.”
So residents decide
to secede from the United States and declare their town a new
country, named, confusingly, America. The town’s oddly progressive
residents promptly mandate that people in the new country use “Mx.”
instead of “Mr.” or “Ms.,” convert to the metric system, and
do away with copyright law. All of these are unlikely to happen
anytime in the real Real County, which gave President Trump 82
percent of its vote in 2016, but Baker refuses to play anything
straight in this book—in the world of the title story, the
inhabitants of a tiny Texas town are willing to be swayed to the left
when confronted with calm explanations.
Nobody of any
importance seems to care about America’s secession, but things come
to a head when the town’s one holdout recruits some associates from
across the country to reclaim America for … America. It’s a
fantastic story, quirky without being twee, and Baker refuses to
engage in stereotypes about the politically dissatisfied hoi polloi
in rural areas.
Why Visit
America, set in different parts of the United States, is a
socially conscious book, though not a didactic one. The stories take
place in a near-future dystopian version of the nation, one that
looks a lot like ours, but with present social problems taken to
their logical, chilling ends. In “Life Sentence,” a convict named
Washington returns to his home after being subjected to a novel
punishment: a procedure that has deleted his memories. As his
“reintroduction supervisor,” Lindsay, says, “Imagine what your
situation would have been, being sentenced to life. You would have
spent the next half a century locked in a cage like an animal …
Instead, you get to be here, with your family. Pretty cool, right?
Like, super cool? You have to admit.”
It isn’t, of
course, and he doesn’t. Washington finds himself at loose ends,
unable to remember what he was like before the procedure, and unaware
of why he was sentenced to prison in the first place. He can’t even
recall whether he’s in love with his wife: “He can tell that
the feeling is strong, but even though he knows how strong the
feeling is, and though he can’t imagine how a feeling could
possibly be any stronger, he’s not sure whether or not there’s
still another feeling that’s even stronger out there.”
It’s a beautiful,
painful story that again sees Baker underplaying his hand, addressing
a social problem—the cruelty of the criminal justice system—with
subtlety. The story ends with Washington on the cusp of making a
choice that could upend his life, and Baker handles it gorgeously.
MOST OF THE STORIES
IN WHY VISIT AMERICA ARE BOTH CLEVER AND GRACEFUL, WRITTEN WITH
PERCEPTIVENESS AND A SUBTLETY THAT’S OFTEN LACKING IN FICTION THAT
ADDRESSES SOCIAL JUSTICE ISSUES.
Among Baker’s
skills is a sharp sense of humor, which he uses to good effect in
“The Sponsor,” a witty critique of the roles corporations play in
our day-to-day lives. The story follows Brock and Jenna, a couple
planning their wedding when their corporate sponsor goes bankrupt.
(In the world of the story, it’s unthinkable to have a wedding not
sponsored by a big business.)
Brock and his best
friend, Ty, attempt to find a new sponsor and uncover a promising
lead with a company called BJ’s. (“Just don’t make any blowjob
jokes,” Ty warns Brock.) But the company isn’t satisfied with the
average income of the wedding guests and declines to sponsor the
event, leaving Brock with no choice but to beg an old neighbor who
now works for Mattel for help. The man, whom Brock once tormented as
a child, agrees to help, but only if Brock takes part in a bizarre
ritual.
Stories that
satirize American big business are a dime a dozen, of course, but
this one stands out for its dark humor and witty dialogue. Baker
captures perfectly the way young men of the dude-bro variety speak to
one another. There are shades of George Saunders, but it’s not
derivative; the book manages to be both fun and socially perceptive,
a difficult twofer to pull off.
Not every story in
the book is successful. “A Bad Day in Utopia” follows a woman
working at a video game company in a world in which the reign of men
has come to an end: “The global population of men was strictly
regulated, just over a hundred thousand in the world, and all of the
men had been raised in captivity from birth, were familiar with the
bite and the sting of batons and stunners.”
Her city maintains a
“menagerie”—a brothel in which women can use men for their
sexual pleasure. She visits her favorite lover, Rex, whom she pities:
“He had never felt sunshine. He had never felt rain. He had never
felt wind.” Rex begs her to help him sneak out of the menagerie,
and she considers it, fantasizing about moving to the country with
him. But then she thinks about stories she’s heard from the past:
“She thought about the genital mutilations, and the forced
pregnancies, and the forced abortions, and the bride burnings, and
the boy clubs.” The story ends with a line of dialogue that’s
meant to be ironic but is too pat and predictable to be effective.
It’s an obvious
and ham-handed story, reminiscent of the kind of man who tries to
ingratiate himself to women by criticizing his own gender. Baker’s
heart is in the right place, to be sure, but the story reads like the
work of an earnest but clumsy college student.
But that’s the
exception, not the rule. Most of the stories in Why Visit America are
both clever and graceful, written with perceptiveness and a subtlety
that’s often lacking in fiction that addresses social justice
issues. Baker will fascinate with his boundless imagination and
talent for crafting memorable prose. - MICHAEL SCHAUB https://www.texasobserver.org/why-visit-america-review/
[The title story is]
a story of several satirical and comedic masterstrokes, Baker at his
best. The premises of the stories in Why Visit America are
increasingly inventive and clever, often featuring some sort of
reversal to our current social order, offering up allegorical
commentary on who we are as Americans ... Baker’s premises are all
intriguing and start off showing promise, but his stories often get
bogged down in the setup, in explaining the mechanics of the worlds
he’s created. As the narratives become baggy, the conceits wear out
their welcome, and the author seems to lose sight of his characters
and their distinct struggles against the forces of their societies.-
RION AMILCAR SCOTT,THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW
The stories are a
wicked lament against what might be called 'late individualism,' and
every non-hero faces a powerful collective (an extended family, a
seceding town, an omnipotent state), which has shifted its portfolio
of operations in creeps and bounds ... parallel, near-futuristic
Americas vary in outlandishness ... The collection’s greatest
satirical target, though, is domestic consumerism. Baker puts the
'list' back into 'stylist' with his compelling accounts of the
landfill-in-waiting that accumulates in strip malls, and of the
hoarded trash in McMansions. Good on people, brilliant on stuff, he
is at his most televisual at these moments—evocations not of big
budget, scripted blockbusters but of America’s weirdest home
movies. - JAKOB HOFFMAN, THE TIMES LITERARY
SUPPLEMENT (UK)
Why visit America?
It’s a good question—not that you’re able to, right now. As I’m
writing this (on July 4th, coincidentally), non-essential travel is
banned from China, Iran, Brazil, Ireland, the UK, and most of Europe.
Even as an American, a patchwork of restrictions and mandatory
quarantines makes it harder than ever to explore the country. In
light of this, Matthew Baker’s short story collection, Why Visit
America, is an extraordinarily punctual travelogue. The thirteen
stories—one for each stripe in the American flag—sweep from sea
to shining sea, from “between trucks with rusted motorboats on
hitched trailers” on the shore of the Great Lakes to a compound in
the New Mexico desert where wealthy pregnant women come to term amid
yoga studios and “glass water bottles embedded with colorful hunks
of quartz meant to dispel negative energy.” Baker has a sharp eye
for Americana, both faded and glossy.
Of course, this
America is not, strictly speaking, the America we have lately been
trapped in. The stories take place in a parallel United States, where
a crease in the fabric of reality allows Baker to approach his
subject obliquely. Quickly moving from the naturalist to the surreal,
the erotic, and the experimental, the diversity of styles, locales,
and characters in this collection is a testament to Baker’s range:
A father arrives home, only to realize his memory has been wiped in
punishment for some heinous crime he can’t even remember. In a
world where asceticism is the norm, a girl grapples with her
consumerist urges. When a child is kidnapped from the state-run
nursery system, a detective tracks down the culprit. A small town
secedes from the United States and names itself America. In form and
concept, these stories recall those by the great fabulists Italo
Calvino, Jorge Luis Borges, and Shirley Jackson.
The stories can also
be dystopian, portraying evil societies in ways that are challenging
and even revolting. In one passage, Baker lists dozens of cruel and
unusual ways that people end their lives, having reached an age where
it is customary to do so. In another, townsfolk slaughter all life to
prevent babies from being born without souls, the bodies “heaped in
piles as high as haystacks.” This through-line of callousness, of
disdain for human and animal life, reflects back on its subject
matter as a critique of the country’s senseless inhumanity. The
critique of American violence, at home and abroad, is nowhere more
apparent than in the collection’s final story, “To Be Read
Backward.” Concluding this particular book presents a challenge:
How do you end a collection of stories about America, when the
subject matter is dispiriting and the work of reforming it so deeply
unfinished? Is it possible to end a book about American decline on a
hopeful note?
Baker, in an
inspired turn, writes his final story in reverse. Instead of a story
about a man who loses his children in 9/11, only to make derivative
art, fall into a depression, get divorced, and return to live with
his parents, it becomes a story of resurgence, of finding children,
family, art and love—but only through a shift in our perception of
time. From this perspective, the world, too, is healed of American
imperialism. The American people collect garbage, spit up animals,
and bring civilians around the world back to life. As a reader, this
impossible catharsis only highlights the damage the country has done
and the impossibility of undoing it.
Two stories have
less distance between the real world and this fictional one. In
“Transition,” a character’s desire to become pure data is a
less-than-subtle comment on gender dysphoria. We follow an unnamed
male character who has always felt uncomfortable in his body, and
wishes to undergo an invasive surgery to be free of it—a step that
his family sees as unnatural. In “Appearance,” a series of pale
figures appear in the fields of Rhode Island, taking low skill jobs
and integrating into hostile communities under laws that makes their
existence illegal. These stories are heartbreaking, and they mirror
the emotion of real-life accounts of gender transition and illegal
immigration to a tee. Yet the alternate-reality twists do little to
deepen our understanding of the world outside of fiction. There is no
prejudice (yet) against pale apparitions or people who wish to become
digital. That prejudice, if it existed, would be just as senseless as
the bigotry real trans people and undocumented immigrants face.
Robbed of truth’s urgent veracity, the stories are unsatisfying.
In some ways, the
collection inherits its subject matter’s blind spots. One
surprising omission is America’s most defining dystopia: the
kidnapping and enslavement of millions of Black and brown people.
Although the book largely reflects the makeup and geography of
America, the use of state force to enslave and tear down communities
of color is largely and conspicuously absent. The collection also
sets aside alternatives to laissez-faire capitalism. Even in a world
where thrift and asceticism are the defining virtues, there is still
market-based homelessness and hunger. Even in a matriarchal utopia,
the narrator faces economic pressures and complains of her high tax
burden. Even in a story about a town that secedes from America, the
new nation keeps the same currency, the same inequality, and the same
banks. Baker seems aware of this; throughout the collection, several
characters refer to communism, invoking it as a pipe dream and a
slur. One character, a truck driver transporting glow-in-the-dark
cheese graters and cigar-scented air fresheners notes, “Because he
was a patriot, and because patriotism in his country meant an
unquestioning faith in the greatness of capitalism, he treated these
products with the reverence with which a humble monk would treat the
mysteries of god.” It is impossible, even in Baker’s realities,
to imagine an America that doesn’t worship kitsch.
Why Visit America is
a travelogue, but it stays close to home. This is still the America
that so many of us live in, with all its familiar vibrancy and
violence, its patriotism and paternalism, its wishful thinking and
willful blindness. - Taylor Poulos https://www.guernicamag.com/local-color/
Each story is smart
and capably written, and each strives, with mixed success, to look
beyond the gimmick of its premise to study the human cost of
ideological perfection. If the collection were to carry a warning it
would say: Be careful what you wish for. - SAM SACKS, THE WALL STREET
JOURNAL
In 13 cautionary
speculative tales spanning America, Baker (Hybrid Creatures, 2018)
evokes a hilariously terrifying future that challenges assumptions
about sexuality, mental health, death, and identity both personal and
national. In the George Saunders–esque title story, a Texas town
secedes from the U.S., forming a micro-nation called America, whose
inhabitants struggle to unite over their progressive values, views on
foreigners, and a lone dissenter. In “Rites,” aging adults are
expected to make room for future generations through public suicide
ceremonies; then, odd Uncle Orson refuses to die, shaming his family.
When two nerdy adult brothers begin caring for their niece in
“Fighting Words,” they seek to prove their manhood, plotting
revenge against her teenage tormentor. In an alternate reality, where
life happens in reverse (people are born in coffins and slowly spit
up their food), the artist in “To Be Read Backwards” gradually
discovers the source of his crippling depression. And in “The
Transition,” a twentysomething social outcast decides to have his
mind converted into digital data, and his mother frantically scans
his past for an explanation. Bold, captivating, and deeply relevant,
Baker’s imaginative stories offer approachable, optimistic
perspectives on morally ambiguous topics facing Americans, including
what it means to be one nation. — Jonathan Fullmer
https://www.booklistonline.com/Why-Visit-America/pid=9731877
In Baker’s
sophomore collection (after Hybrid Creatures), the mundane details of
everyday life are tweaked in subtle but surprising, fantastical ways.
“Rites” follows a Minnesota family’s frustration with their
ornery Uncle Orson, who refuses to perform his “last rites,”
which are expected of all people over the age of 70 and are
essentially a suicide ceremony. In “Life Sentence,” a felon is
sent home for “reintroduction” after a procedure that permanently
erased his memory of everything but his family’s faces, his
punishment for a terrible, unknown crime. And in the title story, a
libertarian town in Texas votes to secede from the United States in
protest against government corruption, renaming itself America.
America’s first town hall is surprisingly progressive, passing such
reforms as the abolition of gendered titles and conversion to the
metric system. With such a voluminous collection, there will
inevitably be writerly flourishes that begin to grate, like Baker’s
reliance on the first person plural or his love of a list, but there
are plenty of strong stories, the best of which are rooted in
specific political or cultural critiques. Despite its flaws, this is
a smart, imaginative, and thoughtful collection. - Publishers
Weekly
A journey across a
fictional version of America that’s a few degrees off-kilter.
Baker’s second
collection of short stories uses satire and elements of speculative
fiction to grapple with the contradictions of life in modern America.
The title story is about a small town that secedes from Texas and the
United States and names itself “America.” Along the way, the
residents fall into bickering about everything from whether capital
letters represent an unfair “class system” to whether setting off
fireworks on the Fourth of July makes one a traitor to America. The
stories take actual social issues and amplify or distort them. In
“Rites,” people are expected to choose the means of their own
suicide once they are old enough to become a drain on society. The
story begins with a woman dousing herself in gasoline, rowing a boat
to the center of a pond, and lighting a match while her family cheers
her on. Gender identity is mirrored in “The Transition,” which
follows a mother struggling to accept her son's wish to leave his
body and upload his consciousness to a computer. In “The Sponsor,”
consumerism is satirized in a couple’s desperate attempt to secure
an impressive corporate sponsor for their upcoming wedding. The
writing is sharp and the scenarios are creative, yet it too often
feels like the author is writing toward a thesis. For example,
“Appearance” is set in a world where countless, mostly unnamed,
unidentifiable people suddenly appeared throughout America. The
narrator of the story is part of a family that hates the so-called
“Unwanted” because they’re willing to work menial jobs for
below minimum wage. The narrator and his grandfather make a habit of
kidnapping local Unwanteds and dumping them across state lines.
Setting aside the ickiness of comparing undocumented immigrants to
identity-less zombies, the parallel to modern immigration debates is
all too obvious. Baker is fascinated by modern America, and each
story is an attempt to explore an important issue. However, once the
reader gets the satire, the effect of the story and the collection
quickly wears off.
A collection of
witty, imaginative stories striving to be morality tales. - Kirkus
Reviews
Excerpt from
‘Transition’
