Every Day There Is Something About Elephants (Big Table Publishing)
Review by Leah Brundige
Timothy
Gager’s engaging new collection of flash fiction, Every Day There Is Something about Elephants, shows a novelist’s
interest in human interactions and vivid details coupled with a poet’s gifts
for compression and figurative language. The book’s 107 stories vary in tone,
scope, and length, but none is longer than four pages. Some—such as “The
Lottery Winner,” a tour de force at just a page in a half—deploy and develop an
extraordinary number of characters relative to their size, while others navigate
the constraints on their length by more poetic means, turning on a single pun (“Chiller”)
or extended metaphor (“How penguins break”). The reader is carried along by
their expert pacing and, in many cases, by their sheer shock value—Gager is a master
of the twist ending.
The
subject matter of these short-shorts is often harrowing, and the author is
unafraid to write with sympathy, if not approval, of the seedier sides of human
nature and society. Abused or addicted, homicidal or lecherous, his characters
command our attention as they grope through their flawed lives toward connection
or transcendence. Gager is frugal with his imagery, but he knows how to
illuminate a character’s plight with a painful, well-chosen detail when the
story calls for it:
You burned your
lips on a crack pipe, without the warning: The
glass on this pipe reaches extreme temperatures. Handle with care. You
didn’t care. The blisters popped and fused your lips together.
The gritty realism of that terrible
last sentence might seem at first glance to be at odds with another strain that
runs through Gager’s work: a domestic surrealism that at times borders on
whimsy. The elephant-haunted narrator of the collection’s title story recounts
details that at first seem merely absurd (“How did I know an elephant had been
in the refrigerator? He left his footprint in the cheesecake”) but become more
disquieting as the narrative progresses, until we realize that the “elephants”
are manifestations of the character’s mental disturbance. The conclusion brings
the elephant metaphor to chilling culmination and unsettles the reader with all
that it leaves unsaid. The story recalls Ernest Hemingway’s famous “Hills like
White Elephants,” another piece of short fiction animated by its pachydermal
symbolism, though the judicious silences in Gager’s narrative threaten to make
Hemingway’s measured withholding of information look like a parlor trick.
If the familiar concerns of Gager’s
fiction—domestic violence, firearms, and drinking among them—recur frequently
in these stories, they never feel repetitive; Gager’s imaginative resources are
considerable, and imbue each piece with its own freshness of character or
circumstance. They are stories that, however grim on the surface, rejoice in their
own brevity and technique. This immensely readable book affirms the prolific
Gager’s literary gifts, and showcases a kind of short story that seems, by the
collection’s end, entirely his own.
