Pee On Water
Pee On Water (Rachel B. Glaser, Publishing Genius 2010, 150 pages)
Every time I read another story in Rachel B. Glaser's short story collection, Pee On Water, I feel like I missed the boat, big-time. By this I mean, I find that the conversation in my head looks like a bunch of me's sitting around a publishing house conference table, offering up one doozie after another for back-cover book jacket copy. Pee On Water moves at a clip that is intoxicating if not frightening. These precocious words and ideas do exactly what fiction needs to do in a world fraught with unnecessary draws on our ever-shrinking attention spans. Shit like this. Or, The velocity of Glaser's fiction is a degree beyond terminal, a kind of imperative, convincing, maddening drive from sentence to sentence that will have you plowing through this author's first collection in such a short amount of time that you'll too soon be sad the book is finished. And I don't feel bad about thinking of the book this way, because it is simply that amazing, in many senses of the word.
As St. Thomas's incredulity is recast as collage on the front cover, so the reader is drawn into the image of the doubting one, in need of physical evidence or tangible proof of what is being told them in order to truly believe. In the picture of Christ, there is a certain unwillingness to suspend disbelief that is being depicted. I'm torn between thinking that this is exactly what this writer wants us to reckon with while reading her stories, or the possibility that the stories exist as exercises for the author to play out this action -- the willful "reaching into the guts of language" or life or something else entirely, with nothing more than the desire to catch a bit of the real, of the blood and guts that will make her (and her readers by implication) into a believer. This may be a clever diversion, or it may be drastically over-thinking this marvelous first collection of stories which crosses over a wide variety of voices, characters and places with more energy and drive than usually exists in a dozen collections of short fiction.
Let me break down some of the stories and share a few of my favorite sentences from Pee on Water. "The Jon Lennin Xperience" stands as my personal favorite in the collection -- a story that upon first read had me both elated that it existed, and simultaneously jealous that it wasn't me who wrote it. I loved it so much that when I had a few friends over for drinks the following week, I actually announced Story Time! and proceeded to read the entire thing to all my guests. In the story, the main character Jason is the brother of a girl who got wealthy by creating a popular phone app called Fun Face -- a not-so-hard-to-believe detail mirroring the ridiculousness of the Internet age in which we have found ourselves living. But Jason finds it hard to participate in video games, and to a potentially even greater degree, in life itself. That is, until he discovers the game called Jon Lennin Xperience after his sister begins spending time with her new (real) boyfriend, leaving Jason alone in their apartment. Through the telling of the story, Glaser portrays the reality of video games as brighter, more compelling, more real than reality itself, but one that ultimately has to be a let down. In the end, we have little more control over the virtual "Xperience" than we do over our actual lives.
In "The Sad Girlfriend," Glaser moves the reader through passages with the deftness of poetry, allowing the images to build up in order to create a portrait not just of this character, but somehow of all young girls, falling in and out of love and sadness:
A portrait of a sad girlfriend can find shade in many silhouettes. Trying to cry on the toilet. Struggling with the passenger-side seatbelt. Scowling under the weight of an arm. Growing up, girls ambition to be girlfriends. Birthday candles die for it.
She vacillates, in a way not unlike Jason from "The Jon Lennin Xperience" does, between the real and the virtual existences that characterize contemporary lives. While on board a subway train in a later passage, it is said that "If the sad girlfriend lets her eyes linger too long on any one man, the man might later log on to Craigslist and post a missed connections entry." The story, as several in the collection do, begs us to ask ourselves what is real and what is virtual, where do we establish our identities, and in what places do we choose to plant our efforts in the act of composing for the world (what we believe or decide to be) our true selves.
In the story "Infections," the narrator is a young gay man named William, whose boyfriend Justin has just left him. Though William technically fails out of his med school class, readers are enticed to join William in his understanding of illness and disease, the human body and medicine -- the poetics of which point to a perhaps greater awareness of truth than what the university environment posits as biological fact. Institutions are torn asunder in this book, time and time again.
On a general note, as a fellow writer of short fiction, I found myself flabbergasted time and time again after blowing through paragraphs lightning fast. There is a quality to Glaser's prose that is relentless, as I mentioned earlier -- it does not pause, it does not lean heavily on adverbs, it is generous because it assumes that the reader does not need this and may not have time for it; it allows the story to tell itself in a such a way that I think all writers can look to Glaser's stories as models for an economy of language in the service of refined storytelling. Here is one tiny example of many, from the story titled "The Totems Are Grand":
Delirious from teamwork, we built fires with the extra wood, pitched tents among the totems. Eyes closed pretending sleep, we imagined we were a tribe. These were skinny totems, sure, but in modern times one must comply. It was okay to cut up trees. We recycled. Dying gets everyone feeling alive. If you don't distribute the energies right, a family loses money to gambling, affection to television, togetherness to private mulling.
Somehow, in those seven sentences, Glaser manages to sum up the entire story, but what is more profound even than that, she also (arguably successfully) sums up the entire idea of existence in the modern age.
I won't spoil any more of the truly ingenious and brilliantly rendered works in Glaser's collection -- though it would be easy to talk my way into any and all of them here. If it hasn't already, Pee on Water should find itself onto more than a few Best Short Fiction Collection lists of 2010.
Support Publishing Genius, add a terrific new collection of short stories to your book shelf or night stand, and make sure this writer knows we'll be needing another fantastic collection of words from her soon: buy Rachel B. Glaser's Pee On Water now.