From the Place in the Valley Deep in the Forest by Mitch Cullin
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
Pretty good short story collection. I do like Mitch Cullin’s work. In each story Cullin centers around his character’s experience of a void. We get a glimpse of a life, and then, in the face of a larger apparatus, be it an event like Vietnam, or communist totalitarianism, sexual awakening, the devastation and lies surrounding Chernobyl, or a friendship of native american boys who find themselves involved in a senseless beating… we end up facing the meaningless contingency of life. In life we do things, often without understanding consequences, or even understanding it. And then life changes around us in some imperceptible way but we are left holding the bag; our loss, or our missed opportunity… even in the mist of a suburban paradise — where housewives can be left to gossip, get drunk, play with their friends and face a non-lack of abundance — Cullins shows that we are able to reach our limit, and the limit is ourselves and the situation that creates us as we create it.
She wants to stand alive and intact before the splintered creations of men. In the quiet of the cellar, her only deep fear is that nothing will happen–and, truth be known, she is not alone in this regard
In a great way, this is what Cullins is able to show us. What makes his characters ordinary is that we relate to them. Despite being in extraordinarily contingent; specific situations full of history and personal experience most of us may not be able to relate to, Cullins pulls from these situations a larger experience that is out of the characters control, an aspect of being-there that solidifies for us, through these tiny sketches, a brief moment that transcends the larger situation. You know this when he ends the story, for that brief moment, the added weight of social, economic and power relations that trap the characters and define their situation are added together as one unity that exceeds being this or that way, to be, and be free, released beyond the finality of his own writing. Like a magician, Cullin builds us up to show us what something is, and then show us that it’s actually something else he has in his hand, the moment when a white dove flies off.
It is for this reason that Cullins must start from the place in the valley, deep in the forest. Without that added resolution, we wouldn’t have the ability to be set free.
View all my reviews
The Cosmology of Bing by Mitch Cullin
