Neither Sublime Nor Ridiculous

The Spring Antioch Review’s cover is a rebus of a submarine and a citrus fruit, poking fun at itself and illustrating the issue’s theme, From the Sublime to the Ridiculous. I only wish that the issue had lived up to that promise, on either end of the spectrum.

This issue opens with an essay about the sublime, “Fear of the Sublime,” by Paul Velde that is so impenetrable, that I almost gave up on the entire journal. Chock-full of sentences such as “Though it is liberation that is ostensibly being sanctioned, freedom itself, leading apparently nowhere, hardly requires absolution,” and “The sublime is not a raw event, despite its passion and inexplicable splendor, but an exaltation of order in its irreducible essence,” at least the essay proved what I think might have been its point, that the sublime is hard to describe.

Luckily, things improved from there. “Our Thoughts and Our Prayers” by Thomas J. Cottle, was an interesting mediation on prayer as contact between two souls, whether with or without the presence of the divine, sparked by a devout Catholic telling the author, a Jew, that he will pray for him when both are in the hospital. I also enjoyed Don Lago’s visit to Loren Eiseley’s longtime assistant as described in the essay “Loren Eiseley’s Remembrance of Things Past.” But my favorite of the section was “Mrs. V. and the Lessons of Obscurity,” in which Ben Miller took me along on a trip to visit his past at the family cemetery, and the headstone of the mysterious Mrs. V.

Essays in the Antioch Review are traditionally followed by 16 pages of poetry, and those pages in this issue begin with William Virgil Davis’s standout “Home From the Factory.” The entire piece is only 44 words but every one of them is shaped to perfection, and leaves marks on the reader like the blood-stained pages of the novels the protagonist of the poem receives from his father.

Most of the other poems were serviceable (except for the over-indulgent “American Geo-Poetic” by Kimo Reder, which is twee at best), but quickly faded from my memory after reading, although one of the three prose poems that could have been classified as short-short stories, Patty Seyburn’s “Roses, Chapter Four,” made me both laugh and think about those whom she calls the “natural predators [of beauty]: those in love, those lovelorn, lost loves, those less blessed with loveliness.”

But for me, a literary magazine stands or falls on the short fiction it publishes, and in this issue I found the fiction uneven in quality at best, with a few hits but a few more misses.

“Lunch Across the Bridge” by Peter LaSalle tells about an incident where a Mexican drug lord takes over a restaurant and treats the guests, including a clueless American couple who have lost their son to cancer, to their meals. The author keeps us at a considerable remove when describing the couple’s memories of both their son’s illness and the restaurant event, and although the story ends just after the woman says “We walked an awful lot today, though, didn’t we?” the couple doesn’t appear to have traveled any emotional distance at all.  

In Mary Morris’s “The Interpreter,” the characters travel much further, both externally (on a lecture tour across Japan) and more important, internally, as a deliberately misinterpreting translator adds to the main character’s lectures the personal details that she didn’t realize were missing, and in so doing opens that character up to her own life.

“Distortions” by Carolyn Osborn deals with adolescence and racial prejudice in an original setting, a Galveston gambling club and a carnival’s Hall of Mirrors, but the main character seemed as flat as a windowpane rather than a fun-house looking glass. It seems as if she was thrown into the story deliberately to be an observer and participant but without a solid past, or future, of her own that would make her truly memorable and more than the author’s puppet.

Edith Pearlman’s Cathy Donnelly, however, is fully fleshed out (including her weight struggles, so pun intended), and in many fewer pages than the Osborn piece. Reading Pearlman’s “Niche” I had no doubt that Cathy was a character, no, a person, who would form the relationship that she does with a monkey in Central America, and make the life decisions that center the story in the way that she does.