Literature exists to tell us what other people’s mornings are like. There are additional things too, of course, that fiction can reveal from somebody else’s perspective: life, death, sex, joy, sorrow — the gamut of the human journey. But morning — the time closest to sleep, when we are most vulnerable, and also closest to our dreams — is the one that stands out in two superb new books.
Here is Mick, a shipbuilder in Glasgow brought low by grief for his late wife in “Waterline” (Harper Perennial), by Ross Raisin: “This morning but he’s having a see out the window as the sun comes up. Watching the dismal light peter in through the streets that run straight lines to the river, bending only where they have to go around the stadium … By the river, there’s the twinkling new apartment blocks at Glasgow Harbour, the dry ski centre, and down the water, the shipyards, what’s left of them.” Watching over Mick’s shoulder, the reader seems to know, right along with him, what’s not there as well:
“It wasn’t always like this, of course … These same streets a hundred years ago, sixty, forty even, mobbed with hundreds of workers starting out for the day shift. Tired and quiet, like this pair, getting moving. The noise of boots on the road, the hooter about to sound way up the way and signal the start of work … riveters, caulkers, blacksmiths, the welders clear visible in their spotted hats and their leathers, boilermakers, platers — the whole black squad moving up the road.”
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And here is Alden, a lonesome loser in search of a second chance in “Wonder,” — a short story in Jack Driscoll’s superb new collection, “The World of a Few Minutes Ago” (Wayne State University Press) — who’s cutting Christmas trees during a doomed visit to a friend: “The morning had turned to flurries, the temperature falling fast, and my knees had started to lock; my fingers were blistered and going numb in my gloves. The bite of the wind out of the north went right through me.” The wind, it turns out, isn’t the only thing destined to cause Alden distress.
“Waterline” and “The World of a Few Minutes Ago” are set in different worlds: The former in Scotland and London, the latter mostly in Michigan. But both describe the mornings — those unavoidable times of stark and disturbing clarity — of men. Men defined by physical labor. Men baffled by the turns their lives have taken. Men who dream, but who do it privately.
Driscoll’s stories are masculine in the best sense of that word. They have a brusque, buttoned-up quality that relaxes only sporadically to let the inner lives of their characters, men who don’t wear their disappointments on their flannel sleeves, briefly shine through. The best stories in this collection — and, of the 10, only “Prowlers” and “Sky Riders” fail to impress — have a haunting authenticity. The men in Driscoll’s world are like Karl in “Long After the Sons Go Missing”: He is “a straight shooter whose easy demeanor and straight-ahead talk put others immediately at ease, and so whenever he spoke people listened.”
These are men who hunt and fish and build things with their hands. They are men who know about love and grief — the protagonist in the exquisite story “After Everyone Else Has Left” has lost his daughter and his wife; the protagonist in the title story is watching his wife’s slow mental deterioration — but who rarely gripe or ruminate out loud. Instead they do what Karl’s father did: They use physical activity to distract, to deflect, to help them get by. Karl recalls observing the man “skin and stretch and tan the hides, and the sound the knife blade made feathered across the whetstone, slowly back and forth until the steel edge could — as his dad used to say — trim the sidewalls right off a Fleetwood.”
These tales are emotional but in a disciplined way; there’s nothing gooey or sentimental about them. Driscoll’s men live in hard landscapes and have made themselves hard in order to cope. “It’s the old ache of being invisible and alone that he craves,” the reader learns about Karl’s habits as a hunter, “sealed off from the steady, low-grade buzz and clatter of his life, though he has never actually articulated this, not really, other than to let the deer pass and pass more often now that he has turned sixty.”
Raisin’s novel describes a world of men in which psychological suffering is channeled through the body’s miseries. Mick’s bereavement turns him listless, makes him drink too much. Dawn is a thing to be dreaded: “He wakes. The sour taste of alcohol in his mouth. … He caulks the eyes shut but they pinball in their sockets until they are pure throbbing and he can no longer stop the fear that is rising up in him, overwhelming him, a genuine terror made all the worse because there is nothing to fix it to, no reason, it is there just.”
Morning. Mourning. They are linked, it seems, and not simply as homonyms. As this pair of spectacularly moving and accomplished books demonstrates, the first hours of daylight can add a sharp edge to a man’s sadness. One wakes from sleep — and yes: The beloved is still gone. The dream was just a dream. And the grim day lies in wait.
Twitters: @litkell