Brockmeier scores winner with creative vignettes, lyrical prose

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This article was published 25/03/2008 (6502 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

“The View From the Seventh Layer”

Kevin Brockmeier (Pantheon Books)

Kevin Brockmeier dedicates his latest artistic book to his grandfather, a man whose last words were: “Well, I’m dying now. It was a pleasure to know you.”

It’s a fascinating line – perfectly logical but reflecting an intriguingly matter-of-fact view of the world.

With that type of influence in his life, it’s not hard to see how Brockmeier came up with “The View From the Seventh Layer,” a collection of- short stories in which he uncovers the intrigue in our world or simply creates fantastic worlds of his own.

In one story, a man in a thrift shop unwittingly buys God’s overcoat and finds that its pockets fill mysteriously with slips of paper listing the prayers of people around him.

In another, Brockmeier conjures a town where several seconds of absolute silence occasionally falls across the entire city, leaving residents oddly tranquil and inspired.

As with these two stories, most of Brockmeier’s vignettes have no real point – but they’re eminently pleasing nonetheless. In a way, they’re like Norman Rockwell paintings: snapshots of an event or person’s life drawn in rich and exquisite detail. Their charm lies more in the storytelling than in the conclusion.

For example, we meet a mute man who lives in a city where everyone else has the gift of song. He compensates by filling his home with a flock of parakeets whose twittering speaks the symphony of his life. It’s a story told with such lyrical artistry that even when it ends suddenly, the effect is less of an abrupt finish than of the story simply fading into silence.

The effect endures even when Brockmeier delves into the periphery of science fiction. In “The Lady With the Pet Tribble,” a character who is doubtless Captain Kirk of “Star Trek” enjoys a brief tryst with a woman on another planet. But instead of becoming just another of Kirk’s conquests, this woman surprises him by arousing genuine feelings of long-term love.

It’s as though Brockmeier is developing Kirk’s character in a way the “Star Trek” producers never did. The result is certainly satisfying.

A number of stories deal with the supernatural and death, and Brockmeier handles these, too, with deftness and expressive imagery.

Perhaps the most impressive is “The Human Soul as a Rube Goldberg Device,” a choose-your-own-adventure vignette that actually does have an apparent point. The story is written in the second person and describes an ordinary day in which “you” make a number of mundane choices. But every choice leads to the same conclusion: You die of a heart attack.

Maybe the point is that death is inevitable and our choices ultimately don’t matter. But in Brockmeier’s hands, even this story has a twist of intrigue, and the reader is left pensive and strangely comforted.

These- stories are original and imaginative, and the reader is drawn easily into his fanciful worlds as much by the poetic prose as by the plot. Brockmeier made his mark with his previous book, “The Brief History of the Dead.” In “The View From the Seventh Layer,” he has certainly scored another winner.