Deceits of Our Past
Amazing Things Are Happening Here by Jacob M. Appel
Black Lawrence Press (April 15, 2019)
Reviewed by Joey Griffith
If you read Amazing Things Are Happening Here, you might find yourself looking over your shoulder as you look back in time. Jacob M. Appel’s stories on murder, gator wrestling, hormonal teens, love struck seniors and whales that swim upstream confound our present and convince us to distrust our nostalgic pasts. When his characters take absurd avenues to pursue their desires we ride along with them but see our expectations of the stories’ plot razed like a burning amusement park. An off-kilter voice, a suspect scene, or a protagonist’s compulsion often plant the feeling that something is more than a few degrees off, but we get immersed in worlds so rich in detail we forget we are looking at lives askew. Then, when he ultimately flips those worlds over, the details dropped throughout make them land all the harder.
In the first story, “Canvassing” we are introduced to an established appellate judge, taking stock of a murder case from years long gone. It feels likely we can’t trust this narrator, as he himself doesn’t seem to understand the circumstances of his life. But, as we follow his teenage self through the backwoods of a Reagan era presidential campaign, his tale of thwarted desire surrounds us in its fully realized particulars. It’s only when the characters start reminding us that their world is complicated, and not what we thought, that we remember to look around at the violent remembering that bore us to this point.
We encounter throughout this collection more stories that examine what happens when truth is shrouded behind characters’ expectations and the ways they paint their memories. In “Gripping” we witness a love long anticipated fulfilled by a disappointing figure, but this contorted longing comes bookended by violent throes in a gator pit. Again and again, Appel blows the dust off a character from a story’s past, to throw a wrench in the settled perspectives of other people. For example, in “Helen of Troy” the wrench steps off an airplane in the form of a zany not-cousin named Laney Beck. She pulls two young boys along on a kaleidoscope tour of the past she shared with their mother and alters their understanding of the stories they thought they knew about where they came from. In “Live Shells” an ex-husband of decades past shows up with one less arm than he had before. Via a tenuous and tense dance, the characters try to make sense of feelings that they cannot speak out loud, and instead speak about things that don’t make sense to them anymore.
In perhaps the most emotionally dense story in the book, “The Bigamist’s Accomplice,” a demented husband forgets his wife and asks to marry another woman in his nursing home. As she continues to visit and care for him, we watch her grip the dilemma of whether she can let him marry this new woman and be happy again, or hold onto her claim over their marriage, and risk bringing isolation to his final days. We are given access to the rocky retrospective of their marriage, and see her looking forward, considering the possibility of an altered future. In one scene we see her wrestling with this ambivalence, where Appel writes “She watches him talking to his new companion and is almost touched as he tucks a strand of steely hair behind the woman’s ear.”
Jacob M. Appel’s Amazing Things Are Happening Here is a book of stories stuffed with detail and driven by characters who make bad decisions to hold onto lives they may have never had. In this collection he explores our pasts with a discerning eye. He recognizes the dishonest stories we tell ourselves about them and shows us the humanity that can be revealed when we pull off the blanket of our deceits.
JOEY GRIFFITH is an MFA student at Western Washington University. He loves the upper Midwest, stark seasonal changes, and wacky short stories.
Featured image “wheels of history” by drpavloff