Being a Better Inspector
I Will Shout Your Name by John Matthew Fox
Press 53, 2017
Reviewed by Chloe Allmand
“I needed to be a better Inspector. I needed to inspect the shape and bends of the universe, and the hidden currents inside the human heart, and the scaffolding up to the heavens.”
– from “The City of God and the City of Man”
The cover image of John Matthew Fox’s I Will Shout Your Name brings to my mind a line from the Modest Mouse song “Paper Thin Walls”: “Everyone’s a voyeurist they’re watching me watch them watch me right now.” We see a man staring through a window frame in which we can see only blackness. The man’s hand hovers timidly above the sill, wavering between reaching in or retreating.
In his debut collection of short fiction, John Matthew Fox is a master inspector. He offers his readers a journey through nine stories, a look through nine windows, all bound together by Fox’s insightful and unflinching exploration of religion. Christianity is present in each story, but whether its promises, its limitations, or its complications are in question is dependent on the characters. As varied as a missionary teacher in Samoa, a rugby team of religious “seed planters” in Australia, a mother seeking a cure for her son’s seizures, and a man who has suddenly lost control of voice, Fox’s characters demonstrate his meticulous attention to the details, both entrancing and mundane, that make for characters with breath in their bodies.
As a godless person who abandoned religion after only a brief foray into bible day camp, I related to the man on Fox’s cover when I first sat to read Fox’s work. I hesitated. Will he shout my name? But in only 155 pages, Fox captures the experiences of the godless, like me, who have felt religion as an oppressor, an acquaintance who pushes a party invitation while standing too close. While I could see and hear myself in “You Will Shout My Name” and “In the Dark Heart of the Fojas,” Fox also delivers a compassionate and humanizing view of true believers in “Fatu Ma Futi” and “To Will One Thing,” winners of Third Coast Fiction Contest and the Shenandoah Prize for Fiction, respectively. Whether portraying skeptics or spreaders of “the word,” Fox has managed to craft prose that is simultaneously intricate and resounding, balanced with whispers and shouts.
In videos on his blog Bookfox, in which he endearingly refers to his followers as “Bookfoxers,” Fox shares writerly advice from what appears to be his home office. In “5 Daily Activities Every Writer Should Do,” Fox tells his Bookfoxers:
“Every day you are paying very close attention to the world, and maybe you pick up some weird quirk from your boss or funny thing that your kid does that is extremely strange… A lot of books fail because they don’t have insightful, intriguing details.”
The “you” Fox uses shows his trust that every writer is as attentive as he is to the weirdnesses and wonders of our worlds. After reading I Will Shout Your Name, I would place Fox among only the most vigilant of world-watchers and writers. It is this vigilance, I believe, which makes it possible for Fox to write dialogue that doesn’t feel written, and to build scenes that do not feel built.
If you find yourself poised over the cover of Fox’s book, on the sill between reaching in or retreating, I advise you to climb through and listen. I bet you’ll hear your name.
CHLOE ALLMAND is a graduate student at WWU and poetry editor for the Bellingham Review.
Featured image by Glen Carrie