Book Reviews: Totally Killer and The Principle of Ultimate Indivisibility

by Anne Pyburn, September 28, 2009

It’s a good year for Chronogram contest winners. Brent Robison, whose “Phoenix Egg” won the 2005 fiction contest, describes his new book of stories by subtitling them a “web” rather than a collection, and indeed they are a web, an intricately plotted and interlocking tapestry of human experience. It’s a tangle of happenstance and choices, of heroic love and alcohol-fueled rage, of the ways in which people try or stop trying, connect or fail to connect.

We meet a crotchety small-town judge for whom a brush with mortality sets off a wave of huge yet subtle emotional growth; a hard-working, intellectual young father and veteran who’s attempting to smuggle dope; families gathered around hospital beds and in kitchens. We see the world through their eyes, in moments great and small. In some passages, we are witnesses to shattering events that devastate some characters, bring about reflection for others, and brush past still others as peripherally as a moth’s wing.

It’s a feast of food for thought, a richly imagined reality that looks much like our own would if we could really see it. Robison has a lyrical and evocative style and a deep affection for human foibles, and wandering through the maze he has woven is oddly intoxicating. Yet, in contrast to the alcohol that makes messy so many of his characters’ lives, this intoxicant enhances understanding. It’s like taking a step back and looking down at the neighborhood from a rooftop, seeing the alleyways and garden paths and becoming newly conscious of the larger lay of the land, with a new appreciation for the symmetry and beauty of it all.