[REVIEW] The Exiles, by Matthew Kirkpatrick

57 pages, $10.00

Review by Matt Pincus

In late February Matthew Kirkpatrick wrote an article in The Believer about a McDonalds constructed to seem like it’s floating at a shopping plaza in Berwyn, IL. He discusses how an architecturally significant building is antithetical to the corporate notion of a “less is more” philosophy, where the space is a container so one associates with and attaches it to the brand name. Corporate stores are homogenous because they make the consumer familiar and comfortable with their products.

Kirkpatrick’s style, in his novel, The Exiles, on the surface, consists of simple sentences that act as similar containers. The language is generic, abstract in a sense, such as when discussing the protagonist James: “The boy says they have not seen Dad in years.” The girl across the street from James “sits at the dinner table inside the dark dining room, eating her salad, and watches her father on the weight bench in the living room.” The text breaks through the small container of sentence with adjectives, little vignettes of Gothic context. One wonders first of all how James does not recognize his Dad, who is possibly trapped, locked in the basement. Another instance is the parents across the street who run on treadmills during the day and lock their daughter in the house during the night, and the way she accepts and fears their negligence as well as their omnipresent parental authority, which she expresses through her habit of running in circles out in the backyard.

Voyeuristic details and sadistic motives lead one to recognize an eerie conscience running through the narrative, similar to Teresa Carmody’s stories Requiem, and her epigraph to the text from Faulkner, “Given a choice between grief and nothing, I’d choose grief.” The mother rips James away from the basement when he tries to unlock it as if she is hiding their father. The girl across the street screams when a strange boy creeps up into her room to watch her; even though he is slightly obsessed, he seems awkwardly harmless.

These narrative junctures are layered with little moments of crystallized minutiae. When describing legs, the narrator says, “She touches the hard muscles of her calves, wondering when they will be strong enough to take her beyond the edge of the steps and beyond the yard.” James’ observation of her spandex also occurs earlier with a desire to see, to step beyond the boundary lines of home. Even the imprisoned father expands as if to escape: “Banished to the basement and surrounded by cardboard walls, he transformed and began to grow into the wet corners like moss gradually overcoming a stone.” Similes and metaphors transgress to the sublime function of a natural, but also distorted, freak-show in suburbia.

In a telling moment, the father describes her mother’s trophies to the girl: “He tells her he bought them for himself and had them engraved, that he did this for years because he was never good enough for trophies, that her mom never cared, but all he ever wanted out of life was a little recognition.” These people embody hyperboles of American exceptionalism exacerbated by Post-9/11 paranoia. Kirkpatrick creates an allegory to canvas these citizens through graceful, fluid sentences.

***

Matt Pincus was born and raised in San Diego, CA. He received a B.A. in English and World Literature from Pitzer College and is currently an M.F.A. candidate at Naropa University’s Writing and Poetics Program. He has written reviews for RainTaxi, Bookslut, PANK and the Volta 365 Blog.