Cul de Sac
Scott Wrobel
Sententia Books, 2012
Cul de Sac Release Party
Magers & Quinn Booksellers
April 20, 7:30 p.m.
A month after AWP 2012, MCB still recalls its high points. For inspiration and motivation, there’s much to gain at AWP, despite the beginning writer’s despair at vanishing in a crowd of 10,000. Of course MCB never left Minneapolis, experiencing AWP through the lens of social media. Whether or not it happened the way MCB images is unimportant. It’s what’s taken away that counts, including the laughs. The image of Jarrett Haley, for example—editor of Bull: Men’s Fiction—defending his enterprise of masculinity against a rightly suspicious crowd of authoresses and editrices, conjures a fast-talking high-voiced politician who can’t quite make eye contact with a contracting circle of thoroughly pissed voters.
In reality it isn’t that funny. Nor, however, is it that one-dimensional. In an industry dominated by male authors and supported by female readers, a magazine promoting “men’s fiction” seems at first glance unnecessary and insulting, like tax breaks on the wealthy. Yet, as a male reader, Haley’s defense is provocative. The heart of his goal is to change publishing’s dynamic, at least in the sense of the men-don’t-read myth. While the real solution would start with an entire redesign of society, addressing gender inequality, empathy, all those wonderful things, and end with something like a book review publication geared more toward masculine sensibilities, Haley’s attempt is at least admirable. More importantly, it hints at something missing. While masculinity certainly exists in contemporary fiction, it seems polarized. Speaking purely in the realm of literature, you have hyper-masculinity as an exclusion of all else—something like McCarthy or Roth, if you want to go after the heavyweights—and the hyper consciousness of masculinity that portrays it as something in need of suppression and refusal (often portrayed ironically, with brutal, sociopathic narrators). This reflects our culture’s view of masculinity itself—as a joke, an exaggeration, or an intrusion of base animality into our thinking, feeling society. While the work and ideas of men are taken seriously, men themselves are not. There’s been a reduction of the male complexity, and masculinity has been relegated entirely to the realm of sex.
Before this descends into a chauvinist manifesto, let’s talk about books. Let’s talk about a specific book—Scott Wrobel’s forthcoming debut story collection, Cul de Sac. While its jacket copy suggests the aforementioned irony—masculinity as destructive and immoral—the book itself is an extraordinary and complex look at men at odds with humanity. Following a community of men living on the same cul de sac, these stories are more than linked. Like A Visit from the Goon Squad or The Things they Carried, Wrobel’s stories form an emotional narrative you’d be cruel to deny as novelistic. In the first half—“Regular Guys”—we encounter in five stories five broken men and their broken families. Of course it wouldn’t be a book about suburbia were their brokenness at all visible to the other characters, or even, sometimes, to themselves. In the first story, “Motor Repair,” we meet Ken, a newly christened diabetic and alcoholic who refuses to let either change his course in life. “According to this book Ken has to read for his program, he and his wife are supposed to say they love each other at least three times a day, like flossing.” What Ken sees as the rules of family life are static and cannot be questioned. Their son, Robby—to whom his wife repeatedly refers as “your son”—suffers from a hyperactivity that she and the doctors diagnose as a disorder: “She turned to him and said, ‘I want this kid on drugs. Now.’” Ken, he assures everyone, is just tired. He’s tired all the time, as though Robby has stolen all his energy. It’s clear, even in this snapshot, he’ll never get it back, and that Robby’s energy will only go to waste.
A novice writer might bring Ken to some kind of external crisis point (suicide, murder, tin foil), as well as Byron in “After the Lovin’” and Doug in “Model Man” and all the others, down the line. Wrobel is not a novice writer. As anyone knows, the opposite of love is not hate but indifference. Hell, similarly, is not tragic, but static. The terror of a book like this is that nothing outwardly changes. Even with its telescopic movement through time, Cul de Sac warns that the cul de sac—both this particular cul de sac and its wider ideology—will be with us for a long time, no matter what the characters learn about themselves in the process. The second half of the book, “The Ballad of Gary Wiegard,” zooms in on a particular resident of the cul de sac and his family. While it could stand as its own novella, it isn’t complete without the prelude of “Regular Guys.” These latter stories look closer at a single life, whether through Gary himself or his two sons, Peter and Danny. MCB isn’t much of a family guy, but “Where the Kids Go” and its portrayal of kids at play, stroller accessories, and parental dysphoria makes one not only want to get a vasectomy but also commit a string of felonies in order to remove adoption from the table as well (or simply move to Arkansas). The further we delve into Gary’s life, the more depressing it becomes, if for no other reason than it becomes more real. Gary’s suite of stories both dilates and contracts the narrative movement, reaching out for the universal in one character’s isolation. Even his sons, for whom you could almost hope, don’t promise much. It’s easy to think that Peter, whose disgust at what he’s learned of masculinity, might free himself and move in another direction, but Wrobel doesn’t let us off so easily:
And they’ll make expressive faces when they fart and say, “That was good” or “That one hurt.” And they’ll talk about Chickenshit Liberals and Tree-Huggers and when one of them disagrees on a point, the other will say, “We agree to disagree on that one,” or “Everyone’s got their own way of looking at things” and then change the subject to Mexican immigrants, both of them prefacing their comments with, “I’m not prejudiced, but”… and Peter Wiegard will do what he’s never done before: he will walk upstairs and join the ladies in the kitchen.
Peter, who, to his father’s indifference, is gay, escapes the masculine trap only by absolving himself completely of masculinity. This only reinforces the polarization. No matter what Peter does after that, nothing for the cul de sac will change, as his status as a man is no longer valid. His younger brother Danny, in a similar vein, is already emotionally shut down at fourteen, communicating, in the rare moments when he removes his headphones or takes a break from looking at porn, through clichés and taglines from Nick at Nite reruns. In this sense, Danny promises the cul de sac an even more devastating generation in the future, made all the more disturbing for us by its presence when we look up from the book and return to the cul de sacs and suburbs of reality. The book itself is devastating, outlining with sheer ruthlessness how cold life can be.
What Wrobel knows, as Haley might know, is that this is not masculinity. This is what’s happened to masculinity—a cartoon version that’s nothing more than satire. Blame it on fifty years of societal homophobia if you like, or the paranoia of recognizing women as people, but even the word masculine connotes things like course, brusque, domineering. This is not to say “poor men” or to call forth a men’s rights movement. You might as well call forth an aristocrat’s rights movement. More so, it’s to recognize the little glimmer Haley has shown us and that Wrobel has given us. Haley calls for “thinking men’s fiction,” which, though in simple terms excludes what he calls “trash,” expresses a clear desire for a more well-rounded masculinity. They say that, out of any demographic, straight men have the most difficulty forming new friendships. Perhaps there’s a loneliness we’re not recognizing. Even MCB, seeing two men together in a restaurant, works backward from the lavender assumption. While Haley has much to learn about publishing (to say nothing about marketing), as a man MCB cannot fault him for his pursuit, and will work to support and inform it. Once, there was something beautiful, even soft, about men, and there should be again.
Cul de Sac is Scott Wrobel’s first book and will be available from Sententia Books. Celebrate the release on April 20th at Magers & Quinn in Minneapolis. For more information about the event, visit M&Q’s website. Wrobel has been published in Great River Review, Identity Theory, Minnesota Monthly, and several other magazines. In 2006 he was awarded a mentorship through the Loft Literary Center, and in 2008 won the Third Coast Nonfiction Award. Say hi at scottwrobel.com.
