Darkness & Light: On Lee Martin’s ‘The Mutual UFO Network’
Martin’s story collection explores the multitude of ways that people and relationships evolve, break, collapse, and blossom.
Lee Martin
Short Stories| 300 Pages | 6” x 8.5” | Reviewed: Paperback ARC
978–1–945814–49–5 | First Edition | $26.95
Dzanc Books | Ann Arbor | BUY HERE
In writing workshops, more often than not, the instructor would talk about a turn in fiction. We students were encouraged to search for a point in which the characters experience an irrevocable change that shifts the narrative, and, to use a phrase I hate, “raises the stakes.” The turn is a moment of transformation, in a way, and it’s a moment that separates a piece into the before and the after. Once a turn happens, the characters cannot go back to the way they once were.
When I read fiction, particularly short stories, I reflexively feel for that turn. I’m always interested in the different ways authors choose to achieve this moment, and there doesn’t seem to be one way of doing it that is more successful than others. In his newest short-fiction collection, The Mutual UFO Network, Pulitzer-Prize finalist and NEA fellowship recipient Lee Martin explores the multitude of ways that people and relationships evolve, break, collapse, and blossom. In each exquisite piece, the characters are placed into more and more desperate situations, and they must confront not only their companions in life, but also their own sense of humanity. With no irony or judgment, Martin peers into the lives of ordinary families and communities, and shines a light on the secrets that we all keep too deep in our hearts to ever speak them. This is a collection that is not only technically brilliant, but raw and emotionally powerful.
“Eugene bowed his head, and his fine hair lifted up in the wind around the combine’s flywheels. Something fluttered inside Jackie. He thought of the way his hip sometimes ached in the night, and he longed for someone to make it stop. He couldn’t keep himself from tipping his own head down until it touched Eugene’s. Jackie felt Eugene’s silky hair on his forehead, and he thought it the most delightful sensation, the soft tickle of that wispy hair.”
(from “Belly Talk”)
The real treat of reading this collection was that the stories became more and more emotionally resonant as they progressed, the turns growing continuously potent: A con man who sells faked UFO footage loses his wife when she begins to believe in a world of bigger possibilities. A husband comes to terms with the inexplicable intricacies of life when his wife disappears and he receives a call meant for someone else with his name. A teenager witnesses the disintegration of his parents’ marriage after infidelity and tragedy. A mother connects with her meth-addicted son over their mutual compassion for an ill foal. The stories continuously one-up each other, each one singing louder than the last, and I found myself saying, This is my favorite story; no, this is my favorite story. Throughout this stunning collection, Martin asks the reader again and again to expand her concept of what it means to be human and what it means to love fiercely.
“Now, I find myself wishing again and again that it would have been possible for me to tell them something that would have made a difference. Something about how broken we were. Something about how a time comes when it’s best to just walk away, even if it means leaving behind someone you swore you’d love the rest of your life. Maybe we thought we could save ourselves, but it was too late.”
(from “A Man Looking for Trouble”)
Martin’s ability to portray a variety of relationships with an emotional reality that never borders on the sentimental is an enormous feat and a testament to the way he crafts his narratives. Although the characters are often deeply flawed, Martin demonstrates and facilitates an understanding, respect, and love for them. When a character behaves badly, the reader is allowed to empathize and to accept that character for who he or she is. In “Bad Family,” Miss Chang, an immigrant who escaped from Maoist China, struggles with her ex-husband Don’s marriage to her good friend Polly. Don and Polly continue to include Miss Chang in their lives, going out with her to dinner and even inviting her to participate in Polly’s ballroom dancing classes, even though she lacks a dance partner. Miss Chang has a meek personality and is constantly pushed to the outskirts of everything. Despite trying to connect with Miss Shabazz Shabazz, the other woman of color in the neighborhood, Miss Chang is fundamentally alone. She resents her loneliness, and she expresses her rage by cutting out letters from magazines, arranging them into threatening messages, and mailing them to Don and Polly. Even as the situation escalates, becoming physically dangerous, the reader sympathizes with Miss Chang and understands the ambivalence of her feelings, for love and hate are not always on opposite ends of the spectrum. Martin treats his characters with a kindness they do not always feel for themselves.
“They drove on, the houses becoming fewer and farther apart as they went, the darkness coming on now — a quiet, cold night, the snow settling in over the houses and the fields. Ahead of them, Ancil could see the porch light that Lucy had thought to leave on, a faint glow in the distance. He drove toward that light, toward the house of last chances, where some bright thing between them—neither Ancil nor Lucy dared anymore to call it love—had almost gone out, but not now, not yet, not quite.”
(from “The Last Civilized House”)
What surprised me most about the stories within the collection was not Martin’s technical expertise in constructing turns in fiction, nor the emotional resonance and complexity of the characters, but rather the way that hope always blossomed out of the most desperate situations, even if it’s just a suggestion of light that can be managed. Not only do Martin’s characters have an enormous capacity for love and growth, they also possess an astounding resilience in the face of adversity. That’s not to say that the stories aren’t devastatingly sad, as many of them are, but rather that the characters are never truly broken at the end.
The story that upset me the most, “Real Time,” was one of the darkest in the collection, and, even though I had an inkling where the story was going, I was ill-prepared for the emotional gravity of its horrifying end. Liz and Del, a retired couple with a history of bad investments, experience a burglary one night when Del leaves the window open. Del successfully scares away the burglar by uttering a bellow that Liz later, jokingly, says sounded like a cow. Their relationship is strained in the following days as Liz gleefully recounts Del’s holler, often goading him into performing it for listeners on cue, putting him on display as a laughingstock. When Del cannot connect with Liz, he falls deeper into his hobby of writing letters to prison inmates, occasionally sending them money, to Liz’s chagrin. The tension between the couple culminates when a man arrives at their house to pick up a pair of keys that Del found in the post office parking lot, a man who turns out to be much more nefarious than he seems. The end is truly chilling, and it raises questions of capacity for evil in the human spirit. However, even in their mutual moment of terror, there is a bond, an intimate love, between Del and Liz, a tiny flickering light in the dark.
“Something went through me, then, the feeling I used to get when I’d stagger out of a bar, maybe puke on my shoes or piss myself, or fall over on the street and end up scraped up and sore, and I’d hear people laughing, or worse yet, they wouldn’t say a thing — they’d just stare, and when I caught them, they’d look away like I wasn’t right there in front of them. Standing there in that funeral home, I got that old sick feeling of hating myself and the life I had. I let that man do that to me even though I thought I’d squared things and was moving on.”
(from “Drunk Girl in Stilettos”)
In my reading, I sometimes come across books, especially collections, that are technically sound but emotionally lacking, and vice versa. Martin is a rare writer who possesses both mastery of the craft and the invaluable intuition for depicting human experiences. I often struggle with writing reviews of books that truly touched me, that found me and guided me home when I was lost. Writing this review was a struggle for that reason, because it’s difficult to place into words the kinship I felt with Martin’s flawed, resilient, and beautiful characters. The Mutual UFO Network is a solid and satisfying short-story collection that pays homage to all facets and stages of life, the light and the dark, the bitter and the sweet.
JEN CORRIGAN is a Prose Editor for Alternating Current Press and a Staff Book Reviewer for The Coil. A nominee for the 2017 Pushcart Prize, her prose has appeared or is forthcoming in The Rumpus, Pithead Chapel, The Tishman Review, Hypertext Magazine, and elsewhere. Visit her at her website.
