Messy, Heartbreaking, Beautiful: Just Like Family
My little brother was born with a stick of dynamite in one hand and a match in the other, and when time came to cut the umbilical cord, Dad didn’t cut it—he lit it.
Okay, that’s not true. But if it were, we’d have called him [PANK].
Make no mistake: [PANK] is a little brother. Moreover, specifically, [PANK] is the little brother of Frankenstein’s monster, and as such, just as much a hodgepodge as any other little brother. Most of the time, the prose is indistinguishable from the poetry (or vice versa); the French tongue is butchered in one sentence, such as the Americanised plural of "culs-de-sac" in one story and then words like "cilia" sweet-talk your pallet; the audio player—with cool background noise that sounds like it’s originating from Jack White’s studio closet—sometimes cuts off without warning, and you have to start all over, until, eventually, inevitably, you give up and just read it yourself, which is, after all, the big brotherly thing to do; the April issue is released a week before the start of May; it’s all-encompassing, doing everything from online mag to print to blog to books to—yes—full-scale invasions.
Back in the day there were times when I’d witness my little brother come clomping into the kitchen wearing two different kinds of sneakers. And the miracle isn’t that he did it, but that he pulled it off, that he could pull it off. The span of time in your life during which you can successfully pull off something like that is so short, if you stop to tie your shoelaces, you’ll miss it. That span of time is, however, above all, what [PANK] aims to recreate.
My all-time favourite [PANK] story is Melissa Yancy’s ‘Boolean Napoleons’. The title says it all, really: it’s all about welding incongruous things together and marvelling at the outcome.
So, with all this in mind, perhaps it shouldn’t come as a surprise that this April’s issue isn’t about that at all.
Instead, it’s about the space in between, the rut between little and big brother, between childhood and something else, whatever else, where things are perhaps perfectly congruous and yet still make no sense. From Matt McBride’s all-but liquefied settings haunted by “people-echoes” and clouds gone mouldy, to Russell Jaffe’s last, sorry people on earth, to Russel Swensen’s prominent citizens drowning in the carpool lane, it’s about, to quote Uzodinma Okehi’s narrator in ‘Life of Jo-jo’, the “weird spot”. That weird spot where “we’re all twelve or close enough, we all still have toys but you can feel it, that part’s almost over”.
It’s a time that exists only in hindsight; when you finally realise it was, it’s too late. And as such, it is fitting that many of the characters in this issue are children yet the narrators decidedly adult. Katie Schmidt’s narrator in ‘The Boys of the Midwest 1 Through 5’, for instance, is sly about it, skulking foxily behind reedy sentences such as, “On weekends after church they disappear into uncultivated strips of prairie to tend their silent wounds. To inflict still more wounds upon each other”, and the narrator disappears with them, waiting till the last paragraph (or chapter, really) for one of those rare final revelations worth waiting for.
I have never met Katie Schmidt, but I know she bleeds from her fingers.
Not surprisingly, however, this sense of a time that persists only in the past is perhaps best illustrated in the nostalgia of the old-yet-not-so-old. You know, amalgams of Julian Barnes and Jonathan Lethem characters. For instance, in what is probably my favourite piece this time around, Dolan Morgan’s thirty-something protagonist and primary narrator dawdles along the lines of Euclid’s postulates in search of flimsy things such the narrative of love and other disasters. He contemplates how “Real freedom must be measured […] only against that which we are expected to do”, all the while skipping on his wife’s mother’s funeral and gallivanting around a strip mall, playing “a kid, a smiling idiot imitating an action hero”.
In Lena Bertone’s ‘Self Portrait’, which is arguably at once the most hopeful and most absurd tale in the bunch (which is saying something), we get the same story but told from the wife’s point of view. Margaret’s husband is, essentially, Sisyphus by another name, and he spends his days desperately “trying to find himself” again, to escape this weird spot. As the title alludes, he seeks to do so by creating self-portrait upon self-portrait, until he ultimately mashes some of them up into one giant self-portrait collage in an effort to “make himself into himself”—a sense that is, among other things, certainly echoed in Jessica Alexander’s magnetically enigmatic ‘Daughter’.
Listen:
What I’m talking about when I compare [PANK] to my little brother is, simply, revenge. [PANK] is a marvel. It’s ferocious. It’s a wolf in wolf’s clothing, and it leers at you and tells you all these fantasies and dirty half-truths; it leaves you in awe and, very often, speechless.
What I’m really talking about when I compare [PANK] to my little brother is, well, family. One second you’ll read a line and it’ll hug you like your favourite teddy bear; the next, some surly, pot-bellied uncle is crushing a can against your forehead. And then, eventually, inevitably, someone brings up Euclid.
[PANK] is all the best and all the worst parts of a dysfunctional family, and to butcher a line of Tolstoy’s: in truth, the stories of dysfunctional families are the only ones worth telling.
