HOW THEY WERE FOUND by Matt Bell

In the liner notes of How They Were Found, Michael Kimball says that Matt Bell ‘can do what so many fiction writers can’t: [he] can make anything happen.’ Though I agree with that sentiment, I’ll take that to the hyperbolic next logical step: Matt Bell can alter the order of events in lives (specifically mine [See: Incident One.]) I offer the following documents as proof:

A: A few weeks ago, I saw Inception, and was quickly leveled by it. On the ride home, blasting Edith Piaf—a sight as funny as it sounds—I found myself in a winsome mood, ruminating over love and storytelling and love of storytelling, and like after any good experience with art, wanting to prolong the mood. As I approached my front door, I saw that my copy of How They Were Found had arrived. I sat on the back stoop to read a story then continue with the rest of my evening. At least, that was my intention. Three times, I read the opening story, ‘The Cartographer’s Girl,’ each time hearing the mournful refrain of Piaf floating somewhere along the torn edges of the Cartographer’s maps of loss. His attempts to document his life with the girl are as maddening our own. This is one of the best depictions of the way we as a society impossibly try to compress our lives and emotions into an ordered system of grids. If I were trying to pick up a NYU girl, I might say the story was a post-modern meditation on the human condition. But really, it is a uniquely presented, wrenching story of love and loss that is told so beautifully, you would gladly deal with the loss because in order to have felt something so true as the love. And in fact, the state of loss is achingly gorgeous, as well.

B: After finishing How They Were Found, the next book I read was The Pugilist at Rest, by Thom Jones. Similar to the prior unexpected reading combo (Incident One) it struck me as uncanny how similar—at heart—these two collections are. Though Bell delves into much darker territory, each author pins a man down then subjects them to excruciating trials in order to find what really lurks in shadow regions of the heart. In ‘His Last Great Gift,’ a preacher foregoes his entire community’s welfare for the sake of his machine, which is built according to directions given in a series of revelations he’s not sure he even understands (a lovely commentary on the process of writing.) In ‘The Receiving Tower,’ a group of men are stationed in a remote tower, under the reign of the seemingly tyrannical Captain, and slowly disintegrate to little more than the static and snow that surrounds them. Like the Vietnam soldiers and boxers who populate Jones’ work, these men are compelled to preserve the core of their self. To the end, any consequence, regardless of how dire, is frankly irrelevant. And it is the mark of an excellent writer that when these characters eventually self-destruct, the reader is helpless but feel it was still worth it.

C. Michael Kimball makes a good example that Bell can in fact make anything happen, but I’d venture to say that his greatest talent is to take something shocking and then normalize it in order to expose its true horror (refer to ‘Hold on to Your Vacuum’ as a poignant example.) The characters in How They Were Found are doomed to endlessly slog through the cycles which, while destroying a bit more with each repetition, simultaneously liberate them in some perverse way. They relive their traumatic pasts in order to find peace, a peace which can only come in fleeting spurts.

-A grandmother, a granddaughter and a wolf consume each other while hacking one another to bits in ‘Wolf Parts.’

-The man in ‘Mantodea,’ who has swallowed dirt and broken lightbulbs and staples and ‘a lot more drain cleaner than you’d expect, if you’re trying to kill yourself’ in order to ‘clean himself out,’ approaches a woman in a bar, only to encounter an ill-fated ending. He swallows hard and ‘when [he] didn’t die, he went back for more.’

-In ‘Dredge,’ which was included in Best American Mystery Stories 2010 (and the fact that I’m only now mentioning a story with such accolades speaks highly of how good this collection is,) a man pursues a relationship with a bloated corpse as both a romantic interest and cathartic totem for his absent mother.

The subjects who wander through the haze of How They Were Found are all horribly damaged hopeless souls who bump against travesty after tragedy. They are ugly, gnarled, deformed and maligned. And probably, this is the reason they are so affecting: they do unspeakable things both to themselves and others, and there is but a negligible delineation between them and us. Perhaps, even, they have the courage to act on their impulses, and we can only hope to be so brave.

How They Were Found by Matt Bell

Published by Keyhole Press

Review by Nik Korpon

Nik Korpon

is from Baltimore, MD. He likes to bang on the keyboard until something intelligible comes out, or his head hurts, whichever comes first. His stories have appeared in various places and his first novel, STAY GOD, will be published by Otherworld Publications in December 2010. He reviews books for the Outsider Writer Collective and is a Fiction Editor for ROTTEN LEAVES Magazine. Every month he co-hosts LAST SUNDAY, LAST RITES, a super awesome reading series in Baltimore.

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