The Review of Contemporary Fiction
What We Won't Do by Brock ClarkeTim Feeney
Brock Clarke. What We Won’t Do. Selected by Mark Richard. Sarabande, 2002. 165 pp. Paper: $13.95.
The immediate and oft-repeated reaction to the notion that good fiction makes the familiar strange is to point out that the familiar is already pretty strange to begin with. Fiction can forego experimentation and whimsy and meta-aspects and wind up conservative and dull, or it can forego these things while focusing on how thoroughly weird being alive gets sometimes and come away with something formally conventional, but still odd and provocative, weighty. This is Brock Clarke’s forte. There’s a Donald Barthelme epigraph at the start of this collection, which at first seems like a pose—this isn’t a book whose back-cover description screams pomo—until it becomes apparent that Clarke is taking a cue from the strange-making Barthelme of “Chablis” or “Critique de la Vie Quotidienne,” rather than “The Balloon” or the clip-art stuff. Clarke shares a thematic and tonal kinship with Barthelme, instead of being a typical tyro/impostor (though Clarke’s “Specify the Learners” is a close cover of Don B.’s “Me and Miss Mandible”). His characters drink a lot and work at the mill or the plant, where everyone’s a little worried about the guy who just cut his hand off with a table saw; relationships crumble from the strain of growing incomprehension between former soulmates; his dialogue has a sureness and import that transcend its simplicity, even in lines like “You’re on your own” and “Thank God for that elephant.” Clarke might collect other comparisons to George Saunders: both have a thing for depicting people (especially working folk) who should know better, but screw up anyway, and both combine the comic and the deeply sad to create something at once bleak and radiant. Clarke’s maybe a little meaner, grimmer. He’s also relentlessly distressing and very funny, and quite good. [Tim Feeney]