The Review of Contemporary Fiction

Gas Station by Joseph Torra
Brian Evenson

Joseph Torra. Gas Station. Zoland Books, 1996. 134 pp. Paper: $11.95.

This first novel by poet Joseph Torra reads like a series of interconnected prose poems. There is no plot to speak of but rather bits and pieces that slowly accrue into a vivid and compelling picture of a working-class boy and his father in Medford, Massachusetts. Their lives revolve around the gas station that the father owns and struggles to maintain, and that the son works in as he grows up.
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The real strength of the book is not what is described, however, but the way in which Torra manages to describe it. He seems capable of moving effortlessly between diverse events, memories, and individual internal experience. The book operates in terms of resonances and connections, one experience serving as a touchstone to transform our view of another. Torra opts for a comma-stripped syntax, warped but still readable, in which the end of one clause and the beginning of another is not always clear. Though occasionally this can be irritating, at its best it allows for a shimmering of meaning that opens new vistas. In one sense, the main character of the novel is not any given person but the gas station itself, whose textures and grime seem to inform the prose itself.
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The vividness of the gas station and of its mechanics, the depictions of a family always quietly in crisis, the philandering and gambling yet never stereotypical father, are well-drawn and palpable. The depiction of small-town life in the fifties and sixties is quite convincing as well. With Gas Station, Torra has proven himself able to capture a place in all its manifold detail, and to do so with a care for language and style that is uncommon. [Brian Evenson]