SINKING BELL

Eight stories set around Flagstaff, Arizona.

In this debut collection, Louis, a Diné writer whose first volume of poetry won a 2018 American Book Award, writes of electricians and day laborers, custodians and aspiring writers, many of them Navajo, their lives constrained by poor pay and bad bosses, parole agreements and addiction, cultural expectations and racism. In “Volcano,” Phillip puts in 12- to 14-hour days installing conduit and running wire, all in hopes of getting a Saturday off to take his cousin’s son, who has been left in his care, on a hike. In “As Meaningless as the Origin,” the unnamed narrator gets shorted by a computer tech who has hired him to hang Sheetrock. The unrelenting grind of work, sometimes absent from fiction, takes center stage here, as Louis’ characters dig holes, fix engines, mop hallways, plaster walls, and taxi people around. Though the circumstances are often exploitative, this labor is also so closely described that Louis imbues it with beauty and worth—bestowing dignity on his characters. “Keeping my hands busy and moving product: that’s what I’d been good at—well, until I got caught,” reflects the narrator of “Usefulness,” as he’s expertly repairing a bus that will help a woman escape her alcoholic partner but also put his parole at risk. “But after that, just keeping my hands busy, my body busy.” Readers may hear echoes of Denis Johnson in brief lyrical landscape descriptions that appear throughout and the characters’ jewel-like insights, even in drug-altered states. “We weren’t ourselves and didn’t know it,” thinks the narrator of “Trickster Myths,” one of the collection’s many gut-punching pieces, as he’s about to kill a coyote, a futile attempt to right an evening gone terribly wrong. “Our outlines were blurred beyond the fault of our vision.”

Devastating yet hopeful stories about characters toiling to find refuge in the world.