God’s Work by Kevin Canty, 2016
The magic trick:
Really nailing that feeling of adolescence that is claustrophobically inward looking yet motivated by external factors
K is for Kevin Canty.
I think I’m more impressed by authors who take a seemingly mundane situation and draw poetry out of it than authors who take on a premise uniquely pre-built with drama. Not only does it feel like the easier path, it usually winds up surfacing less poetry anyway.
Today, we have the latter. Canty serves up a story about a young teenager who goes door to door with his mother hocking conservative religion, all the while dreaming about sex. That story just writes itself, right?
Well, of course now. If it was so easy, we’d all have stories published in the New Yorker. Anyway, I feel like this topic was handled more adroitly in “The Warm Fuzzies,” by Chris Adrian. I did enjoy parts of “God’s Work.” The explicit talk surrounding teenage sexual desire makes me a little uncomfortable. Surely, there are ways for this middle-age author to address certain topics or even create a certain crazed sexual mood without using some of the descriptions he uses here.
But I’m really off topic now.
On to the magic.
The story does a nice job of establishing us inside Sander’s point of view. It’s third-person limited, and it’s very well-executed. It’s crucial that the reader gets inside his head. His adolescent spiritual crisis is claustrophobic, and it’s that claustrophobia that drives the story.
At the same time, though, the crisis is being driven by external factors – namely, girls. So it has to be a mix of claustrophobia and obsessive interference from the outside world. This story nails that really well.
And that’s quite a trick on Canty’s part.
The selection:
It is exactly the person he was afraid it was, Clara Martinson, she of the ripped T-shirt, raccoon eyes, pierced anything, the next grade up from his, this girl who looks and dresses the way every teen girl would if there was nobody to tell her she couldn’t. Which there isn’t. Please, dear God, make me disappear, Sander thinks. Send me to the solar surface and vaporize me.
“What do you want?” she says. Then she notices Sander in his black suit and haircut. O.K.: there is something in each of us, in every sinner (and Sander knows that we are all sinners), that wants to climb toward the light, and for a moment, in Clara’s eyes, Sander sees the longing for grace.
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