[REVIEW] If There's Any Truth in a Northbound Train, by Ryan Werner

28 pages, $4

Review by Jonathan Russell Clark

In his essay, “E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction,” David Foster Wallace describes what he calls “Image-Fiction” as writing that “uses the transient received myths of popular culture as a world in which to imagine fictions about “real,” albeit pop-mediated, characters.” He cites as a practitioner of the art Mark Leyner, whose 1990 book My Cousin, My Gastroenterologist contains lines like, “I had just been fired from McDonald’s for refusing to wear a kilt during production launch week for their new McHaggis sandwich.”

Leyner’s novel and Wallace’s essay popped into my mind as I read Ryan Werner’s If There’s Any Truth in a Northbound Train, which seems to me both a throwback to that style and a cautious update of it. Like Leyner, Werner’s stories are filled with oddballs, off-kilter occurrences and pop references. And Werner also shares with Leyner an ability to distill a situation in very few words. One of Werner’s stories opens like this: “I didn’t marry a girl named Florence and then she won the lottery. That’s not the way I tell it but it sure is the way she tells it, like they’re related, like there couldn’t be one without the other.” Not only is this a very funny line, it’s also remarkably economical––an entire relationship dynamic is established in a handful of words.

But where Leyner wanted to satirize pop culture’s pervasive role in our lives, Werner is more interested in meaning. His characters yearn for missing things (limbs, people, the past) but they aren’t sure how to recapture them. In “Atavism,” a young girl with “empty bones,” hopes to prove she’s descended from birds. Unable to do this, she and the narrator create a haunted house with “livers stuck to a wall and intestines hanging from light fixtures.” In “Origin Story,” the narrator waits for his missing brother to return. He tries to believe that his brother’s “superpower was going invisible.” In “Lifeguard,” a woman tries to get her ex back by fulfilling his wish: fill her new pool with New Coke, that failed soda initiative from 1985. Here, pop culture becomes an easy language with which to discuss difficult aspects of the characters’ lives. What we talk about when we talk about pop culture.

The only problem with Werner’s economy is that the pieces are so condensed everything the characters say takes on heightened importance, as if they speak in aphorisms: “It must be great to have your life all in one place,” “Some things are just too big for one person to handle,” “The thing about responsibility…is that love has nothing to do with it,” and “Sometimes the only question is how do you want things to fall apart?” When two friends are measuring out poison for them to ingest, one says, “I think a few drops each should do it, but I don’t know how big…Like a raindrop or a teardrop?” The other says, “Depends on the weather, depends on the eye.”

This is not how people speak. Or, if they do speak that way, they do so very infrequently. In If There’s Any Truth in a Northbound Train, every moment is peppered with these sorts of metaphorical phrases. In one sense this allows Werner to effectively establish (and maintain) a mood of contemplative ennui and inadvertently insightful language; in another sense, the reader is reminded of the inherent artifice of the work. Leyner in My Cousin, My Gastroenterologist relished in pointing to the fabricated nature of fiction. Werner, though, has a different intention: his stories portray a particular group of young people in a particular part of the Midwest in a particular age. These stories are about the moment, and ultimately, the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. By the end of the book, the cumulative effect of the narrator’s casual lethargy reached me. It is the “I” here that connects the pieces and creates something bigger––not a complete portrait, not an out-and-out success, but a hint at the truth, a peek of his world as it is.

***

Jonathan Russell Clark is a regular contributor to The Millions, PANK and Slant. His work has appeared or is forthcoming from The Georgia Review, The Rumpus, Colorado Review, Chautauqua, Thrasher Magazine, and elsewhere.