Civil Coping Mechanisms

138 pgs/$13.95

Most humans I know can’t regrow a lost limb, but the same adaptive limitations don’t extend to our minds and souls. Shattered hearts, broken spirits can be stitched and rebuilt given the proper conditions, and, of course, time. Such regeneration plays out among the nameless central figures of Matthew Salesses’ I’m Not Saying, I’m Just Saying, a novel told in flash fictions. Each of the 115 titled chapters reveals a moment in the shaping of a thrown-together family, its members straddling borders between their respective pasts and futures. The stripped-down structure of this story confronts readers with deep-set, trembling emotions so often expressed erratically on the surface. It is a novel that manages, in few words, to devastate with its honesty and fearlessness.

At the center of the story is a Korean man living recklessly. He employs no self-restraint in taking on multiple lovers at once. His job is an obligation endured, and with little effort. He maintains friendships with people on the constant prowl for trouble. None of this changes when his life is disrupted by a five-year-old boy, half-Korean, their physical likeness irrefutable. The boy attaches to him after watching his mother slowly die in a hospital bed. With no other family claiming the boy, the man assumes a pseudo-guardianship, an interim solution as he troubleshoots his predicament. Death hangs over them like a cloud: An object of obsession for the boy, who craves obituaries and stories of gruesome death; an ongoing process for the man whose known life shrinks further into oblivion with each day the boy remains in his care. Early on in the book, he takes the boy to the beach, watching him play in the surf and reflecting on a life no longer carefree: “I hated to be reminded that I was on vacation, not life. … I wanted my wants to have nothing to do with anyone else’s. Now, as if in another life, a boy owned me.” This apprehension to fully embrace fatherhood is not overlooked by the boy, who the man admits is “a genius at context.” Continue reading →