The back cover alone is worth the $4. “Some of the stories in here aren’t so bad,” says one critic. If you want to actually open the book and read some of the stories, you’ll find out that it’s true, some of these stories really aren’t so bad. In fact, some of them are pretty good. They’re careful stories, carefully mapped out, carefully limited to a very small space. In “Motel Room”, the narrator tries to describe the hotel room he is staying in: “the room takes on a shape similar to the state of Utah,” he says, and then he asks the reader to “find a map of the United States and locate Utah. Draw a rectangle around it. The little area of Wyoming that infringes on the rectangle is the bathroom…and the town of Rock Springs is the shower head.” He then goes on to describe in detail where on the map various things in his hotel room would be. A story called “Short Story” does a sort of statistical destructuring of a story. “This story has 26 characters…Of the 26, at least ten of them are very important…there are 11 more characters who can be described as relatively important.” And on it goes. Simon’s attempts to structure these tiny little moments seem at times much too limiting. There’s a real physical sense of being trapped within the moment each story is exploring. In the last story, Simon goes outside the bounds of the little structure he’s working within. It’s a story about two people (X and Y) on a car trip that has no destination. The bulk of the story involves a description of the sense of motion involved in travelling in a car. Things like: “…if a single road were built around the world and a car were driving on it at the speed of the earth’s rotation (but in the opposite direction), it would appear to a distant observer that the car was stationary and the wheels were causing the earth to spin.” What makes this final story different, and more satisfying than the others, is the places where the narrator abandons his description of vehicular motion to talk about events surrounding the trip, and even memories triggered during the trip. For instance, there is a description of a couple X and Y met in a motel parking lot a few days earlier. The couple are fleeing from an enraged and armed husband. “They had been going for nearly fifteen days and had no way of knowing whether or not he was still on their trail.” I think Jesse Simon is mining some interesting if limited territory, and I look forward to seeing more from him (her?). (KS)
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