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
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’
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