With Out Loud, his second collection of short stories, Anthony Varallo has done the
impossible: he has written a book that has made me miss the suburbs. Coming
from a girl who grew up on the outskirts of a mid-sized Midwestern city, that’s pretty high praise. And something tells me that even if you were lucky enough
to be reared in a city not saturated with strip malls, you will like this
collection. The people on the Drue Heinz Literature Prize committee sure did,
enough to name Out Loud the winner of its 2008 prize. The collection is comprised of fourteen stories
about average people who fancy themselves extraordinary, lonely boys
negotiating the growing gulf between themselves and their parents, and adults
who wonder why their lives turned out the way they did and whether their
neighbors ever wonder the same thing. These are stories of missed connections,
made all the more poignant by the fact that their narrators couldn’t precisely name what has been missed – they only know it is something small and fragile and necessary. Eschewing
glittering prose and post-modern gimmicks, Varallo prefers to whittle down his
stories to their necessary components: a thoughtful narrator, realistic and
entertaining dialogue, and the familiar setting of towns stuck between the past
and the present with no eye toward the future. Varallo’s characters inhabit the world of high school football fields, run-down movie
theaters, expansive lawns, and man-made ponds. Seeing the same old landscapes
over and over can get repetitive, but on the whole I commend Varallo for his
restraint. How easy it would be to shift the action to a bustling city or, at
the very least, a hip college town, but Varallo wisely resists the temptation
to embellish his stories with gratuitous glamour. The suburbs are his subject;
dull as they may be, he is intent on excavating beauty from their subdivisions
and lawns [note: you may have noticed I’ve already mentioned lawns as an example of the essence of suburbia. If you don’t want to read about lawns, don’t read this book. In quite a few of the stories, Varallo portrays lawn
maintenance as a divine act of meditation – and he pulls it off.] The characters are defensive of the unsatisfying places
they inhabit in a realistic and endearing way. They don’t necessarily want to escape where they live; rather, they desperately wish
things could be just a little bit better there.
“Toro” and “The Walkers” are just two examples of the book’s message about the necessity of careful observation. People stand outside and
try to decipher what’s really going on inside, but often the “inside” is their own homes. “We leave a porch light on, as a sign of our hope and regret,” remarks the protagonist of “The Walkers.” All we really know about him is that he and his wife take strolls through their
neighborhood and imagine what it would be like to actually interact with the
neighbors they encounter. But that is all we need to know for the story to
succeed. Here is a man who wants to reach out to others, people he suspects may
be like him, but he is skittish, and must make do with the simple fantasies he
creates. What a sad life that might be, and how cynical it might make one, but
Varallo has too great a respect for the powers of imagination to allow this
character to sink into despair. “Toro” follows the intricate and unexpected mental meanderings of a little boy mowing
his lawn; who’d have guessed a story about lawn care would be so sweet and carefully observed?
When all the grass has been razed away and the mower returned to its proper
place, we are left with an understated tale about growing up and expanding your
worldview. “The Summer He Was Seven” reads as a companion piece to “Toro” – a prequel, perhaps. It takes up Toro’s thread of apprehension, a particular ill-defined anxiety perhaps only felt by
young boys making big, vague plans to never be like their fathers.
“Leaving the Movies” takes up a narrative about adolescent friendship that runs throughout the book,
namely, the way loyalty between friends gets cast aside when members of the
opposite sex come into the picture. The reader gets immersed in the minutiae
that makes adolescence so unbearable – the specific ways adults lord their power over teens, the way a perceived
slight can gnaw at a fragile ego, but also the surprising facts of everyday
life that occasionally take on great significance and can elevate a person’s sense of dignity. The narrator, looking back on the summer he was sixteen and
worked at a movie theater, recalls that “I liked pretending my task was tremendously important,” even if that task is just mopping the sticky cinema floors. This collection is
full of tiny moments of self-aggrandizement; because the characters are
generally young and naïve, it has not yet occurred to them to wish for the grand and glorious. Rather,
they only want a little more than what they have; they only desire for others
to see them as a little better than what they are. Elsewhere in “Leaving the Movies,” the protagonist voices his desire for a house of his own – nothing showy, just a tidy ranch home, so that the neighbors will respect him
but won’t think him pretentious. When someone’s hopes are as meager as these characters’, it is hard not to root for their success in life.
Varallo is a respectful and compassionate writer; you get the sense that he
wants the best for his characters, and he never lets them stray very far from
the path of moral righteousness. His suburban adolescents don’t have time to sit around bullshitting and getting high; they are too busy
baby-sitting and writing in their journals and trying to form meaningful
connections with their peers. Although he skillfully portrays the inner lives of disaffected teenagers and
valiant little boys, I would have liked to see him try his hand at a broader
range of perspectives. “Like That” is one of the only stories to feature a female protagonist, and Varallo does a
lovely job of portraying the particular brand of sadness possessed by a
fifty-something divorcée whose only child has recently left home.
Reading these stories, I found myself longing for them to rise to a crescendo of
feeling; I wanted something undeniably dramatic to happen. And yet there’s something good in the steadiness and humbleness of the action. It is hard to
walk away from these stories without absorbing some of the wistfulness that
courses through them. Related entirely in the first person, most of the tales
are recollections of a specific point in the past that has clearly shaped the
narrators’ present lives, the details of which we are not privy to. There is a sense that
these protagonists – you might even call them heroes – have found themselves at midlife with an urgent need to record specific
impressions and memories before the particulars are lost to them forever.
