The Consummation of Dirk

by Jonathan Callahan

Overview

Winner of the eighth Starcherone Prize for Innovative Fiction, as selected by final judge Zachary Mason.

"The stories in this collection have the texture of the long bad nights that one keeps to oneself and is prone to think no one else experienced. The gifted children contemplating murder, the husband drowning in melancholy, the pro basketball athlete finding his road to Damascus all emerge from adept torrents of words that bear comparison with Virginia Woolf and David Foster Wallace."—Zachary Mason, author of The Lost Books of the Odyssey

"What we see in The Consummation of Dirk is a mind at work, a mind on overdrive, a mind that is relentlessly chasing down thoughts that tumble and slide and build and then circle back home only to be sent out into the world again, broken and beautiful. Jonathan Callahan's stories are twisted and hilarious and brilliant and announce the arrival of an extraordinarily gifted writer."—Robert Lopez, author of Asunder

"Stanley Elkin once said that all jokes are really about powerlessness. If that's true, Jonathan Callahan's various odes to failure, incompetence, and want are among the funniest jokes possible. Narrated from the deep interior of misery, the stories in The Consummation of Dirk are desperately, pyrotechnically, apocalyptically hilarious. But they are also, in their strange way, tender. This is work that sings across the divide of consciousness to touch us in our cages."—David Hollander, author of L.I.E.

Jonathan Callahan 's stories have appeared or are forthcoming in The Collagist, Kill Author, The Lifted Brow, Pank, Underwater New York, Unsaid, and Washington Square Review. He is originally from Hawaii, studied fiction writing at Sarah Lawrence, and has taught at SUNY/Purchase and in Japan.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780983740575
Publisher:	Dzanc Books
Publication date:	04/09/2013
Pages:	336
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.40(h) x 1.10(d)

About the Author

Jonathan Callahan: Jonathan Callahan's stories have appeared or are forthcoming in The Collagist, Kill Author, The Lifted Brow, Pank, Underwater New York, Unsaid, and Washington Square Review. He is originally from Hawaii, studied fiction writing at Sarah Lawrence, and has taught at SUNY/Purchase and in Japan.

Editorial Reviews

Callahan perplexes with this collection of experimental narratives which, when anthologized, reveal an unsettling repetitiveness. Many of the stories feature a primary character who is a problem drinker, a miserable expatriated American teaching English in Japan, a misunderstood genius struggling in obscurity while feeling he deserves better, or some combination of two or more of these. If the writer is following the old instruction to "write what he knows", then to see these themes visited so often in such few stories makes it difficult to read this as anything but autobiographical. This voyeuristic feeling is enhanced by the amount of page space dedicated to conveying the characters' self-obsessed inner monologues, making the book feel like a cathartic exercise. There are exceptions though; more pleasurable pieces delve into the fantastical, particularly the title story, which relates a mystical journey featuring NBA star Dirk Nowitzki. The collection's strength is its preponderance of unusual narrative techniques. Callahan is a clever stylist with many ideas in his toolbox, and while not all of these experiments succeed, they are each peculiar and thought-provoking. (Apr.)

Publishers Weekly

2015-09-08
Callahan offers a debut book of brief works that's strange but undeniably unique. It's an odd fit to call this a collection of short stories. The tales have no rising action as they build to a natural conclusion or some sort of twist; indeed, there's not much action at all. Instead, the stories are abstract and exist mostly as the interior monologues of particular characters. Many don't contain much dialogue at all, and what's there is handled with dashes and infrequent attributions, rather than traditional quotation marks. In "A Gift," the first story of the bunch, Callahan knocks readers off-kilter from the first line, "The narrator was in pain," but never explains why this person is called "the narrator." A first-person voice is added later, meaning that the character of "the narrator" isn't the narrator of this particular story. Characters are often in some sort of existential crisis and sometimes obsess over well-known, real-world people, such as author Rick Moody or professional basketball player Dirk Nowitzki, whose lives then become part of the narrative. The one constant in these tales, however, appears to be pain itself. The main character in "Cymbalta," for example, seeks out Moody as a life coach and writes to him of his own struggles with his self-image, his drinking, and even his bowel movements. Readers will find pathos and humor in these exchanges. Too often, though, the prose seems impenetrable. Readers must buy into Callahan's stream-of-consciousness style from the beginning for the tales to have any impact. He writes in great waves of clauses, sometimes stretching a single sentence over a couple of pages, and there are also times when the stories try too hard to be clever and fall flat. "The Great Challenges the Good to a Duel: Pistols, Dawn," for example, beats the cliché "the great is the enemy of the good" into the ground by anthropomorphizing "great" and "good" and having them fight it out for 12 pages. An obtuse collection with flashes of genuine fun and humanity.

Kirkus Reviews