The Review of Contemporary Fiction
Pressure Drop by Robert BuckeyeEckhard Gerdes
Robert Buckeye. Pressure Drop. Amandla Publishing (Box 431, East Middlebury, VT 05740), 2001. 71 pp. Paper: $15.00.
“Buckeye,” the constructed persona of the author in this dreamy, philosophical, sexy pressure-dropping novel, finds his way from Vermont to Vieques—less to get away from the pressures at Middlebury College and recover from a virus than to recover from his divorce from Nancy. He follows a friend’s advice: “Find someone while you’re down there. Spend a few days with her.” That someone is the sexy Liz. However, when pressure drops, storms follow, and now that he has left home in order to be himself and find himself, he obsesses about his past lovers, his friends, his place in the world. What he discovers is that he and his fellow travelers are, in truth, all mask-wearers. The reality he had thought he’d find is an artificial construct resulting from a peculiar and precarious balance between ugly Americans (tourists who end up staying, as well as the U.S. Navy personnel stationed on the island), hostile locals, and the disaffected—all of whom don their masks for one another in order to fulfill roles they believe they have to play. Buckeye focuses on this irony beautifully. The escape from reality that is meant to be some sort of rediscovery of a preferred reality is ultimately merely temporary. In a chapter set in a público van where the passengers all wear masks—the gringo, the elderly lovers, the angry young independista, the nervous nineteen-year-old girl, the lecher, the driver—not only can they not see behind each other’s masks, they cannot see out of their own. Masks become blinders. Ironically, when Buckeye returns to Vermont unrefreshed albeit ostensibly sans masks, he remembers his mother’s advice: “You do not let them know they’ve hurt you. You put it behind you.” Or, in other words, the masks can’t ever come off. [Eckhard Gerdes]