Refresh Refresh, by Benjamin Percy
mark beyer
Benjamin Percy writes good stories. Contemporary, torn-from-the-headlines, mean-street variety (albeit set in Oregon’s eastern desert communities), and highly poetic. Poetic in the sense that so much in his stories must be found through the imagery he uses and the words characters speak. Refresh Refresh compiles ten of Percy’s short stories, nine of which have been previously published in lit vehicles like The Paris Review and Glimmer Train.
The title story takes realism of the Iraq/Afghanistan Wars from the point of view at the homefront, specifically high-school sons of two fathers from the same small town, Tumalo, Oregon, veteran Army Reservists called to action and suddenly gone, taken away from their families like many other reservists in the town, vanished into a war where little news is heard from them other than occasional emails. The boys are juniors in high school, perhaps seniors. Gordon and the unnamed narrator are pretty much on the loose, since their fathers have gone. They box in the back yard, ride their dirt bikes, get decent grades in school, and generally wonder in disaffected tones and mannerisms just what the hell their fathers are doing, gone, far away, practically unheard from. And with the trickle of “I regret to inform you…” notices delivered to families by the local Army recruiter, the narrator increasingly feels backed into a corner, like a caged animal. Or someone ready to take matters into his own hands.
Percy has tapped into the psyche of the warrior-class in America: the blue collared men and young-men who love their country, have not more than a few nickels to rub together, are struck by their own patriotism, and find themselves at the end of a paved street leading onto a rough road. They don’t have to go down that road. They need to go down that road.
All the stories are straightforward—though the emotions of their characters inviting, off-putting, complex—with an undercurrent of menace, either from the characters’ environment, their relationships, the government, and even nature. With such universal themes as father-son conflict, citizen-government duty, the breakdown of society, and murder, Percy finds little need for playing with language. It’s with great effect, then, when he uses powerful metaphor to capture—and highlight—an image. A random list shows, even without context, how pitch-perfect Percy’s imagery strikes one’s mind: “… his face split open as rocks do when water freezes inside them…” – “… driving feels different, the roads as routine as an old network of veins that has pumped the same blood along the same path for too long.” – “The wind blew [her hair] every which way, so that with the blue sky all around her she looked as if she were underwater.” – “… the barbed wire crisscrossed its body like fast handwriting.” – “… we brought our mouths against theirs and they tasted like menthol cigarettes, like burnt urinal pucks.”
The effect Percy creates when he uses such vivid imagery is not to knock the reader from his perch, but actually draw the reader further into the story by his own investment. We read to be enthralled by words, images, the lyricism of a sentence, a paragraph’s ability to knock us off balance, and the next paragraph to right that balance. Percy succeeds on each of these levels.
What else works in this collection is its cohesiveness. The stories are Oregonian. They are small town life, in-the-woods episodic, where Coors-drinking buds have difficulty talking to each other because difficulty talking to each other is the American male’s affliction; these are places that are the backbone of American idealism—and the cul-de-sac of American dreams. The stories are powerful, they are uplifting, they are sad, they are pitiless.
Refresh Refresh, by Benjamin Percy
Graywolf Press
250 pages, $15
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