Further Interpretations of Real-Life Events by Kevin Moffett (A Review by Amye Archer)

Harper Perennial

240 pgs, $10

I first met Kevin Moffett on a cool April evening when he cracked open my skull with an ice pick and settled into my brain for the next three weeks.  Okay, so maybe he wasn’t physically inside of my head, but for the weeks I was immersed in his collection of short stories, Further Interpretations of Real-Life Events, it sure felt that he was speaking directly to the fears that had nestled into my subconscious over the past thirty-some years.

To say that the opening story of Moffett’s collection, whose title bears the name of the book, is Seinfeldian in its approach to plot would be undercutting the seriousness of the story’s theme.  However, I could not help but notice that while this story, much like Seinfeld itself, is “about nothing”, it is also about everything.  All at once.

The story is about a struggling writer, Frederick Moxley, who, to his dismay, discovers that his father, also Frederick Moxley, (although he is supposed to be going by Fred!) has begun writing short stories of his own.  The stories the father is writing, however, unnerve young Frederick since they are seemingly about the two of them, father and son, and their dysfunctional relationship.  The stories soon become about something else.  The boy’s dead mother, the man’s dead wife, and the silence that enveloped them both since she left their lives.   On the surface Moxley is upset because his father is finding success in writing, a world that should be solely his, and this intrusion is every writer’s worst fear.  But Moxley is upset about so much more, and struggles to juggle the raw painful memories his father’s stories conjure up.

Add to the narrative a brutally honest girlfriend, “Carrie was cold and smart and meticulous.  She crawled inside your story with a flashlight and blew out all your candles,” who is hell bent on bridging the gap between father and son, and you could have a heavy, depressingly gray story.

But not in the hands of Moffett.  He manages to take this deep, sad story and pinprick light and humor through the darkness in the most unexpected ways.  My favorite is the inclusion of Harry Hodgett, Moxley’s writing mentor and unintentionally hilarious Bukowski-ish character.  Hodgett’s wisdom and six rules of writing are dispersed throughout the story and had me laughing loudly at times.  I won’t spoil all of them for you, but here is my favorite:

“Another of Hodgett’s six laws: Never dramatize a funeral or trip to the cemetery.  Too melodramatic, too obvious.”

And where is Moxley as he’s telling us this?  The cemetery.  See, that’s what is brilliant about Moffett’s story.  He’s breaking all of the rules as he’s dictating them to us, therefore subtly undermining and exposing Hodgett for the false idol he is.  And suddenly all English and Creative Writing majors in the world smile in acknowledgment.  Because we have all had that teacher, the one who is touted as Hemmingway reincarnated, and ends up being, well, not.

In the end, the Moxleys are not much further down the road than where they started, but something inside of them and us, has been rerouted.  We realize, as readers, that something big just happened to us, but we are not sure what.  Because, like I mentioned, this story is seemingly stationary in its plot, yet we have traveled a great distance somehow.  This is the first story in the collection, and I was actually deflated when it was over, praying somewhere inside that Moxley was real, and that this would be his memoir.

My disappointment was short lived however, as I moved through the other stories in this collection.  They are all wonderful stories, rich in character development and detail.    One in particular, Lugo in Normal Time, became another stand out in the collection.

Lugo is a single father who has lost his family.  His daughter, Erica, comes to stay with him for the weekend, (against her will, his ex-wife reminds him), and is in search of something.  Her teacher has assigned her to find a household item and use it to tell a story.  Only, Lugo doesn’t live in his house among the stories anymore.  He lives in a less than desirable apartment:

“This is Lugo’s house, his new house.  Actually, it’s an apartment with broth smells and puppy and disinfectant smells in the carpet.  The odor of a dozen forfeited security deposits.”

His daughter cannot find anything of storytelling value in his home, and quickly moves on to the next pressing drama in a teenager’s life.  But Lugo cannot let this go.  He makes it his mission to find something worthy of his daughter’s presentation.  He offers up a bunch of photographs with Erica standing next to a variety of Popeye’s signs.  And this is where the river sweeps your feet out from under you:

“You were obsessed with the Popeyes sign,” he reminds her.  “Whenever we drove near it you’d chant popeye popeye until I pulled over and let you look at the sign,  After a while, you’d say okay and I’d drive off,”

“I don’t remember.”

She also liked street sweepers, bats, kangaroos, the sound of television static…

Maybe it’s because I am a mother that this resonated so deeply with me.  My twins are five and I connected with that feeling, the urgency of what amuses them at three, four, five, and then in the same breath, the fleetingness of it all.  In my gut an ache bloomed to full heartbreak.  Lugo loved his little girl.  Loved her enough to call the main office of Popeyes and try to order her a sign, loved her enough to drive her around the state looking for new signs to stand by.  He loved her enough.  He loved her.  He loved.

And it is in this moment, with this realization, that Lugo, even though we learn he cheated on his wife and broke up the marriage, even though we see his apparent love of alcohol, becomes our tragic hero.  Someone we root for that represents the mistakes and missteps in all of us, yet someone that consistently gets in his own way.

These two stories were my favorites, but there is so much to love in this collection.  I urge you to read it, I dare you not to love it.  These stories are pieces of us, and this is the gift that Kevin Moffett gives you when you read his short story collection Further Interpretations of Real-Life Events.  A rich and meaningful look at the moments, the split-seconds, the choices, the words, and the aches that comprise the human condition.

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Amye Archer wuz here.