David Means' fourth collection, The Spot, is new out. There are writers you wait to hear from, and writers you track through periodicals and websites: David Means is one such - and it's not the easiest name to track through Google.
The first story is 'The Knocking', originally printed in The New Yorker, in which a man is plagued by a noisy neighbour and (in brackets) the demise of his own marriage, is a monologue, even a rant - a beautifully cadenced rant that runs from a pathological obsession to near hysteria only to return again and again to resignation and to reverie.
Could more be made of it than a writerly exercise? Yes, it has that feel, but what redeems it, and redeems all Means's work, even the most brutal, is its tenderness, and even as an exercise it shows how match fit the prose is, fascinatingly auditory not only in what it chooses to describe but in its diction and syntax.
Imaginative capacities gather around the knock. A hammer against a nail, sharp and determined, goes on a beat too long, pounding and pounding throughout an entire evening, with metronomic precision. The rounded edge of a sap—lead in leather—is slapped against the floorboards overhead, making a blunt rubbery thud with a leathery overtone. A sharp metallic tap, not too loud and not too soft, comes out from under the casual noise of a summer afternoon—the roar of traffic on Fifth combined with high-heeled taps, taxi horns, and the murmur of voices—with a hauntingly pristine quality, like the tin tip of a walking stick. A sweeping sound stretches from one side of the head to the other, arriving one afternoon . . . Again, many of these knockings come late in the day, when he knows, because he does know, that I’m in my deepest state of reverie, trying to ponder—what else can one do!—the nature of my sadness in relation to my past actions, throwing out, silently, wordlessly, my theorems: Love is a blank senseless vibration that, when picked up by another soul, begins to form something that feels eternal (like our marriage) and then tapers and thins and becomes wispy, barely audible (the penultimate days in the house by the Hudson), and then is, finally, nothing but air unable to move anything (the deep persistent silence of loss; Mary gone, kids gone).
The prose savours sound even as the narrator savours the pained memories of his failed marriage - just as we all secretly savour the complaints we make against those who disappoint or do us wrong, and how we permit incomprehension and a sense of victimhood to goad us almost into ecstasy.
The story is one long complaint and complaint - which means to express a grievance but also a mourning, an outcry of grief , a yearning for lost love- here becomes a prayer, even a hymn.
To complain means also to groan and creak as a mast - and the narrator is islanded in his Manhatten flat -which makes me think how Melville also haunts this prose. I never want David Means to write a novel - and not one the size of Moby Dick - his commitment to the short story form is admirable and, to this reader, necessary - but something akin to a Billy Budd is within his register and his reach.
But then not enough is said about the future books or stories we imagine might come from a favourite writer. David Thomson is well practiced in expressing how we dream other movies, other combinations of stars in favourite films, how, in reading a novel, we cast and direct a future adaptation. We do it, too, with books we have yet to read and ones we can have no reasonable expectation of reading. You find me, having already read this first story and three others in magazines, staving off reading anymore today, imagining what the other nine might be so I can compare my dream of them with printed reality.
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