Review from Julie at Publish Chicago of Chicago author Andrew Farkas’ new book Self-Titled Debut.

Though the novel is what is usually published, advertised, and well distributed in mainstream bookstores, and even non-mainstream bookstores, it is important to remember the power of the short story, and short story collections. Concise, evocative, and to the point, the short story offers an alternative to a long narrative that can be both freeing and challenging for the reader and writer. In a collection, each story must stand alone, but all the stories must come together to form a poignant or moving whole.

One particularly fascinating book of short stories that I’ve just finished is Self-Titled Debut, the winner of Subito Press’ 2008 prize for fiction. It is Chicago author Andrew Farkas’ first book. Like the title, the entire book is a bit tongue-in-cheek. Farkas pokes fun at the world and the nature of living through his writing, and by doing so often seems to imply something a bit more serious. In the book he explores various narrative styles, settling most often with one that is mostly sarcastic but also often endearing.

I had the pleasure of hearing Farkas read the first story in the book, a short piece detailing a few moments of a standard evening in a college dorm room. His speaking voice is similar to the narrative voice that runs throughout most of the pieces in the book: wry, sarcastic, funny, and earnest. This opening story details excruciatingly the effort of communication between a sober student and his stoned roommate and roommate’s girlfriend in a humorous way that ends up sounding somewhat, though not out-rightly, serious.

“Life Insurance,” features a man who has recently woken up to find out he’s dead, and proceeds to live out his life as he normally would, in some ways. The narrator of this story speaks in a wonderfully convincing blue collar, middle-American voice that is quite enjoyable to read. The book goes on to feature a play that involves God, the real one, not some fake or metaphor or whatever. The actual God is—as the script describes it—required to be in the play. We see a man lost in space contemplate how to make a fire for some warmth. His thoughts delve into an ordered list of thoughts about fires that contains some fantastic insights and images, all in the space of a few pages.

The best piece in the book is probably the last, “The Last Light You’ll See” in which the narrator begins the story by asking for directions at a gas station and proceeds to get more and more lost from there. The narrative follows his confusion, which is to say that the story breaks down and we follow the narrator through progressively weirder strings of images, thoughts, and events. The writing moves in a wonderful way. It’s not as if the narrative suddenly gets weird, and you can tell you’ve gone form a normal story to something more abstract. Rather, several pages into the abstraction I slowly realized that I was as confused as the narrator was. It is cleverly written.

Farkas is able to weave into almost every one of his stories the idea of God, or at least of the idea of the nature of living. This makes the actual presence of God in the script for the play interesting and poignant, though at times the stories could seem heavy handed. I noticed this most particularly in the story “The Committee for Standing on Shoulders” in which a bar scene is turned into a grand metaphor for human life on earth. The story is well constructed, and the narrative voice is well maintained, yet at the end of it I was left wondering what the purpose of the story was beyond making me, as the reader, understand that this bar scene was very much like human life is on earth. It didn’t really help me to understand anything new.

One other moment of difficulty I had with Farkas’ prose was in the story “Oubliette” in which he describes a character getting lost in a dark alley with progressively larger and harder to understand words. My supposition is that Farkas was using little-known words in order to disorient the reader, just as his character was being disoriented. Yet the technique was a bit lost on me, and I felt frustrated by having to continually look up words. “The Last Light You’ll See” proves that Farkas is able to masterfully handle the art of confusion through words that most readers should be able to understand. It would have been nice to see that technique used in this story as well.

Overall, I thoroughly enjoyed this collection of short stories. I feel that it does everything a collection of short stories is supposed to do: deliver quick scenes and narratives that come to interesting points, keep the reader moving from one story to the next, and have an overarching theme or point behind the collection that becomes obvious and interesting by the end of the book. Farkas is certainly a new author to keep your eye on, and I would highly recommend his first book.