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Men Overboard
A Review by Andrew Benedict-Nelson

In one of the best stories in Gary Amdahl's debut collection, winner of the 2006 Milkweed National Fiction Prize, a left-leaning Minnesota political organizer reflects on the true motivation for his activism, about which he has begun to feel a gnawing sense of futility:

The truth was that the family farm was dead, long dead, and that his wish to spend time with livestock was in fact a yearning to die, disguised as an idea of living simply and quietly in a world he knew did not -- could not possibly -- exist anymore.

Those of us who have left rural regions behind have often felt a similar mixture of longing and loathing for our homes. Amdahl's stories are fueled by this same heady mixture. But even though each of the stories in Visigoth is connected to the same place -- rural, small-town Minnesota -- the real object of their sympathy and violence is not geography, but gender.

These are stories in which, as the jacket copy announces, "the modern American male is center stage." All the stories feature male protagonists, and though not all of them are in the first person, each feels like it could be. Descending these deep gorges of monologue, Amdahl's characters plumb (and often plummet into) the depths of masculinity. The author's prose is pitch-perfect when describing the male situation. Yet this insight can also turn insular, especially as Amdahl denies his characters a social context in which they can truly feel like men.

In the first story in Visigoth, a character dreams of a skyscraper: "He had seen a skyscraper only once or twice, as a thing that went up and up, a thing with an interior that in no way fit its exterior, a place his father and he had visited." This is Amdahl's American male identity: infrequent, immense, insincere, inherited. The clearest representative of this kind of identity is the main character Bill Axelsen of "The Volunteer."

Perhaps in response to a comment from his boss that he should bolster the "civic duty aspect" of his resumé, Bill volunteers to coach a pre-peewee hockey team. This will not be a reprise of The Mighty Ducks; indeed, although Bill's volunteer identity seems very important to him, the story offers little description of actual coaching. Instead, Bill mostly hovers on the edge of the action, dreaming vaguely of a "hard-drinking cocktail party lifestyle he'd never actually been privy to."

Bill is shaky in some other areas, too, including the matter of truthfulness. He doesn't quite deny the false rumor that he had played in the state tournament in high school, doesn't quite cheat on his wife with a woman he meets at a Halloween party, and doesn't quite settle the score with her husband when he blindsides Bill during a pick-up hockey match. And while Bill seems to blunder his way toward a kind of peace at the end, the reader is left with the impression that this sort of frustration isn't what he -- or anyone with a Y chromosome -- signed up for. When his wife tells Bill that he is "twice the man" he thinks he is, Bill feels that it is "not necessarily a compliment."

The masculinity captured in these stories is more average Joe than G. I. Joe, an empirical survey of the pathological quirks and dodges of Tom, Dick, and Harry. For instance, Amdahl notices the way many men disguise weeping as sneezing. If only women feel the pain of childbirth, only men have regular cause to doubt that their children are their own.

This sort of doubt frames one of the best stories in the collection, "The Flyweight." Here Amdahl tells the story of an undefeated high school grappler turned trippy mystic. In his grotesqueness, this character (with the Dickensian name Dennis Hurt) defies the glam-jock stereotype; the narrator of the story, Lance, while admiring Dennis's athleticism, compares him to a "tiny Frankenstein's Monster."

Dennis and Lance have arrived at that moment at the end of adolescence when authority figures can be seen for who they are, yet are still far from one's equals. Lance and Dennis realize that their coach has little to contribute to Dennis's ability. Nonetheless, both seem to maintain respect for the man. The same is true for Dennis's father, though this relationship is more complicated. Lance begins the story by noting how different in appearance Dennis is from his father and brothers. But in pointing out "how strange fathers and sons can be to each other," Lance plants a seed of doubt as to Dennis's true paternity. The seed begins to grow when we learn that Dennis's father drove away his wife while immersing himself in his career as pastor of one of the world's largest Lutheran churches.

Despite his father's distance, Dennis undergoes a drug-induced revelation in a distinctly Christian mode during the boys' unfettered summer of raw experience after graduation. Lance says that he and Dennis "had a friendship referring dangerously to sex and violence and little else." It is the nature and consequences of such a friendship that make the story so interesting.

Amdahl's prose hits its stride in these shorter character studies. At his best, he has a sort of squaredance caller's syntax and diction that make any lug's ruminations sound downright Shakespearean. In "The Flyweight," he writes how things can seem strange when "you've isolated or insulated your brain, peninsulated it" and you consider "the fruitlessness, the bootlessness" of the words on a page. A sentence about climbing a gym rope will leave readers breathless. The result is a kind of writing that is artful but not self-serious, that can both describe a landscape as an "arctic Homer" and joke about a stalled crime as a "held-up holdup."

Unfortunately, this prose does not carry all of Amdahl's stories. The longest piece, "The Free Fall," is particularly disappointing because it presents such an interesting premise. Here the main character, Gary Leen, is a Minnesota political operative struggling with alcoholism. The story covers three periods in Leen's life, culminating in a wildcat strike in International Falls. Leen hits the scene hoping to help resolve the conflict and build support for his candidate, but soon faces unexpected violence from within and without.

The political understanding that Amdahl demonstrates in this story clearly could have supported a novel, and there are few more compelling settings than Minnesota, a state that still displays strains of a uniquely Midwestern radicalism. (One only has to consider the late Senator Paul Wellstone, to whom Amdahl dedicates the story.) Amdahl is familiar enough with this world of grassroots organizations and Democratic- Farmer-Labor Party stumps to create Leen, a completely credible character whose uncertain balance of cynicism and idealism seems plucked from the pages of tallgrass novels like Robert Penn Warren's All the King's Men (1946) or William Kennedy's Roscoe (2002). But for whatever reason, Amdahl is so focused on his character's inner life that he does not extend his prose and imagination to the world in which he suffers. The same can be said for a number of these stories.

"The Free Fall," for instance, presents a real need for a stronger supporting cast. Leen's thoughts turn to his Hollywood liberal wife, his nihilistic punk daughter, his charismatic farmer candidate, a politically savvy café matron -- but these characters are little more than their labels, because they do not seem to act or think except in the context of Leen's own issues. The organizer envisions the café owner, Nancy, as a sort of seraphic union maid -- and then she promptly disappears. It feels overly politically correct to note that these stories of men lack thoroughly developed female characters, but it's hard to see how one can figure out the "modern American male" without them.

Coupled with a weak supporting cast, the lack of context in "The Free Fall" and other stories becomes frustrating. Just as the children are strangely absent from "The Volunteer," disgruntled union workers and scabs never really speak up in this political tale. That's not to suggest that Amdahl's work needs some sort of extra authenticity -- he knows this quality is fleeting, as Leen's comments on the family farm suggest. But these genuine insights about men can't mean much unless the men interact with the rest of the world. The devaluation of industrial jobs, the rise of the managerial class, transformations in the structure of the family -- these things would seem to have some bearing on where the American man is coming from and where he is going, yet they appear in these stories only as distant stars. The end effect, intended or not, is that nearly all of Amdahl's male protagonists come across as rather selfish, narrowly narcissistic.

A cynic might say this is dead on, that any attempt to consider the trials and tribulations of the white Midwestern man without apology will of course wind up sounding selfish. But Amdahl's characters are still strong enough to give the lie to such assertions. For this male reviewer, at least, it's hard to read a book like Visigoth without thinking that the crisis of masculine identity in this country is for real. As Leen observes, imagining we can go back to a simpler world -- even if that were desirable -- is just another way of dying. Perhaps Amdahl's future work will suggest some ways for us to live.

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