The Review of Contemporary Fiction
Head by William TesterBrian Evenson
William Tester. Head. Sarabande, 2000. 197 pp. $19.95.
Tester’s first book, Darling, was a tender novel cum prose poem about a boy’s sexual attraction to the family cow. In Head, which won Sarabande’s 1999 Mary McCarthy Prize (Amy Hempel judge), Tester offers less bestial fare, though with the same control of language and style found in his earlier work. Head offers eleven loosely linked stories reminiscent at times of Denis Johnson’s Jesus’ Son, at other times of dirty realism. The characters are down and outers, drifters, acid-dropping stutterers, men suffering extreme anxiety, boys with hangovers, full-blown alcoholics. All of them are driven, according to Hempel’s incisive introduction, by their sense of fear. One character suggests he was “never not mostly afraid,” and indeed even the subsidiary characters don’t seem free of terror, the waiters serving the coffee “as if tortured.” In “Wet” two boys are forced by their stepfather to string barbed wire across a swamp during a storm. “Whisperers” recounts a childhood sexual initiation with a combination of eroticism and sublime wonder found often in Tester’s fiction. “Bad Day” offers a man’s nervous unravelling on the job, while in “Immaculate” a voyeur watches his neighbor and yearns in the dark. “Cousins,” with a fairly regular metrical style (which unfortunately is sometimes slightly forced), is actually an excerpt from Darling and offers the darker, more adult side of “Whisperers.” “The Living and the Dead” follows an ex-student turning tricks in Italy, while “Floridita” reduces the narrator’s father to a reel of tape. An effective and disturbing collection, Head presents lives aching simultaneously with fear and exhaustion. Combining a gorgeous bleakness with a lyrical understanding of prose, Head shows Tester has not lost his touch. [Brian Evenson]