The Remains of River Names

This book has an honesty I find rare in short fiction today. There is a slowness and a sincerity to the writing that is admirable. The subject matter is not new, and yet the stories read with a surprising freshness. They are vivid and beautiful (and brutal). Briggs lacks the flash of many of his contemporaries, but he lacks nothing in the way of talent.

This first novel of Matt Briggs' is a collection of a dozen or so chapters which are each told in different voices, similar to William Faulkner's technique for "As I Lay Dying." It starts off with the youngest son in grade school, then the oldest son who is in high school, as well as their mother and father, and takes place in the south end and other rural parts on the outskirts of Seattle, not just Renton, but all the way up to Monroe, too. Lots of reminiscences of everything from Pike Place Market to all over the state. I bet he's a hell of a poet, because there are a lot of flashes of brilliance. He keeps everything chugging along nicely but I didn't grow up around people like that when I lived in Renton, so a lot of the time I'm never sure if I'm just along for the ride or what since I can't judge whether or not their actions and reactions are accurate as far as their threadbare lives would have them be. They're amazingly self-reflective for characters with limited or non-existent choices, not to mention consistently self-defeating attitudes and mores. The characters all have very unusual ways of expressing love. Yeah, it's there in a very obligatory familial way, but the underlying assumption is that these are new parents in the 70s when substance abuse led to directionless ennui rather than clinics. There's no attempt by the characters to better their lives even though you get the feeling that they believe they do and ARE in the only ways they know how. A lot of the movements and dialogue seem kind of wooden, but on purpose: the characters don't really know how to deal with emotion at all, probably because they're drunk or stoned half of the time.The use of the passive voice gets to be downright leaden as you feel the characters not really able to do anything more than just react to what someone else does. The love and sex scenes are filled with a tactile aggression which is borne more out of miscommunication, bad timing and emotional rage than any real tenderness whatsoever. "Is this the precipitation of the promise of the panacea of sex, drugs and rock and roll that fueled the 60s?", the novel seems to ask quietly. Pretty sad, pretty joyless, and a pretty damn good first novel. I can't wait to read his second.