The Review of Contemporary Fiction

Touch Wood, by Joe Ashby Porter
reviewed by Peter Donahue

Joe Ashby Porter. Touch Wood. Turtle Point, 2002. 192 pages. Paper: $15.95.

The ten stories in Joe Ashby Porter’s fifth volume of fiction, Touch Wood, read like storybook fables, Gothic fantasy, eighteenth-century travel-journals, picaresque tales of disguise, and equatorial magical realism, with a contemporary American inflection. The collection is a curio box of fictions, opening with “A Man Wanted to Buy a Cat,” which with its shopkeeper characters and snowy village setting has an air of a Hans Christian Andersen tale, and closing with the titular story, in which story folds in upon story like a Möbius strip. Porter’s prose has a charmed quality, comprised as it is of subtle syncopation, incantatory syntax, and bracing diction, which even in the simplest descriptive passages can transport: “Nothing much here under the power lines humming in the lucency—bottle caps and such oddments, scraps, bones, ribbons and what not strewn among clumps of old wild dead grass and some green sprouting through, but little refuse.” His prose is often tinctured with near-ludicrous imagery—“The cat groomed his wrist with its tiny rough tongue down into the palm, along the destiny line still welted from carpal tunnel surgery”—suggesting a suffusive wryness reminiscent of Tom Robbins. Ranging from eight to fifty-three pages in length, the stories compensate for their lack of traditional narrative shape with an organic narrative drift, confirming what the narrator of “Icehouse Burgess” remarks about his own tale, that “here . . . other aims rule”—making the stories like so much tinder readily kindled into a burning glow.