Hiding Out
By Jonathan Messinger, illustrations by Rob Funderburk
Featherproof, 183 pages, $13.95 paper
When writing about a work of fiction for grown-ups, there is rarely any reason to discuss the physical book itself, but Chicagoan Jonathan Messinger’s “Hiding Out” is an art object. A small paperback with a wrap-around cover design that mixes photography with handwritten lettering, it perfectly embodies the ambience of the stories, or, as the title page has it, the “decoys.” More on that in a moment.
The photograph is of a young man lying on his side pushed up against the woodwork on a wooden floor in a room that just has to be in an old Chicago apartment. His feet are hooked on a doorjamb, his shins are pressed against a short wall, his knees fit neatly in the corner, and the rest of him hugs a longer wall, his head just shy of a tangle of wires emerging from a small hole. A thought balloon hovers above the back of his head. Before it’s even opened, the book conveys a palpable sense of the enervation of Messinger’s well-intentioned yet disaffected characters, and his low-key yet cutting humor.
Inside the reader will find another visual component. Each story begins with a line drawing by Rob Funderburk that riffs on the cover image: a disheveled male is wedged in a corner or lying bent around a couch or a refrigerator, or prone under a coffee table or crammed under a desk. Hunched, slumped, defeated guys hiding in plain sight, seeking camouflage and comfort from large, inanimate objects. Are these drawings keys to Messinger’s use of the word “decoys?” Well, these are not stories about shooting ducks, or entrapment, exactly, but one dictionary definition — “Someone or something used to draw attention away from another” – – does apply, albeit in subtle ways.
This striking debut is published by a small Chicago press, Featherproof Books. Co-founded by Messinger in 2005, Featherproof publishes paperbacks and downloadable mini-books that can be printed and “assembled with ease” (according to the catalog at the back of “Hiding Out”). Messinger is also the book review editor for Time Out Chicago and founder of the popular reading and performance series The Dollar Store Show, which plays once a month at The Hideout, a writer-friendly bar on the North Side. A force for good in Chicago’s literary world, how does Messinger rate as a fiction writer?
Messinger’s prose is the literary equivalent of the line drawings – – deceptively simple and direct – – and reading his succinct stories is as natural as breathing. But like the quick, fool-the-eye, knock-you-flat moves of kung fu (a recurrent theme), these tales of lonely, brooding, sweetly romantic guys pack covert and concentrated power.
In “Bicycle Kick,” the athletically impaired and hungover narrator is smacked hard in the eye by an exquisitely well-kicked soccer ball. As though that’s not alarming enough, a subsequent CAT scan turns up something much worse. In the woebegone, painfully funny title story, Eamon, a file librarian for a hedge-fund company longing for a girlfriend and saddled with a ridiculous boss, sends himself encouraging e-mails but seems to be receiving more cheerfully advisory messages than he’s composing. “True Hero” is similarly cringe-inducing and heart-wrenching as the narrator, his identity concealed (initially) by a complicated superhero get-up, crashes a costume party, desperate to see his ex-girlfriend. These guys are inept, repressed and hapless, echoing the inanities of any number of bumbling sit-com and movie-comedy schlemiels.
Just when it feels as though the collection might be a bit too focused on endearing losers, and a bit too uniformly melancholy, Messinger mixes it up with a fractured and grimly funny fairy tale about a man-eating wolf that escapes a small-town zoo and terrorizes the populace. Next is a stealthily affecting story about a black student at Oak Park-River Forest High School who is writing for a poetry slam, resisting input from an overreaching white reporter and worrying about the carcinogenic toxins being removed at tremendous expense from the park he and his younger brother used to play in.
Messinger revels in ludicrous and revealing situations. He invests simple physical comedy with deep psychology in a story about a 7-year-old who, on a dare, has gotten his head stuck in a wrought-iron fence. This is one of several insightful tales in which an extreme gesture serves as a decoy while Messinger smuggles in terse observations about ineffective, self-absorbed parents.
But most of Messinger’s quick-draw and resonant stories are about faltering quests for love. The startlingly fresh and empathic “Between Here and There” is set in a factory in China, where Waysun Tsai is inspecting coffee mugs emblazoned with “A&E Investigative Reports with Bill Kurtis. The Closest You’ll Get to the Truth,” a promo that acquires bittersweet irony as Waysun crosses the line between fantasy and reality in his doomed courtship of Li Wei.
Messinger’s deadpan tone allows the bizarreness and poignancy of the predicaments he choreographs to emerge with stinging clarity, while he neatly encapsulates the malaise that permeates our world like a toxic gas. Just as the figures in Funderburk’s drawings turn away from the frenzy and aggression of life in glumness and exhaustion, each man-child in Messinger’s wry stories looks inward to superhero daydreams and miniaturized expectations. Yet these nerdy, smart, funny, well-intentioned and resilient guys dream on, “very much alive, if not lively.”
Messinger’s pared-down yet richly ironic and obliquely hopeful stories add a new facet to Chicago literature, sliding neatly into place alongside Elizabeth Crane, Joe Meno and John McNally. His “decoys” are finely rendered works of wily misdirection, caustic insight and stubborn faith in the ability of even the most battered, insular and goofy guy to crawl, claw, or stumble his way out of the corner and into light and love.
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Donna Seaman is an editor for Booklist, creator of the anthology “In Our Nature” and host for the radio program “Open Books” on WLUW 88.7 FM and www.openbooksradio.org. Her author interviews are collected in “Writers on the Air.”
