FISH COUGH

In this debut novel, a gay couple in Portland, Oregon, face difficulties in the aftermath of a meteor shower.

Thom’s marriage to Howard has hit a rough patch. The two freelance writers are both stressed out from the hustle, which may or may not be the cause of the recent cooling of their sex life—a cooling that even the introduction of a third can’t thaw. “I knew I was just pining for the early days of our relationship when Howard found everything about me exciting,” thinks Thom. “Five years into our relationship, was I thinking about ending things or just breaking some of the rules?” Complicating things further are Howard’s chronic hip pain and his desire to have a child, a prospect that Thom dreads. An approaching meteor storm is filling the couple—and everyone else in Portland—with apocalyptic thoughts, but the Leonids bring something much stranger than Thom could ever have imagined. He awakens the next morning to learn that the warehouse across from their apartment has caught fire. He then watches a squirrel crawl through his neighbor’s open window and destroy their Eames chair. Using a handful of peanuts, Thom lures the squirrel into his apartment. Luckily, Howard is an animal lover, and he agrees to let Thom keep Gordito, as the animal is soon named. Thom comes to believe that Gordito can talk—one of a number of strange phenomena he’s observed lately. Gordito brings Thom a tiny meteorite, the one that set the fire in the warehouse, to which Thom begins to attribute growing levels of meaning and power. As Howard’s hip worsens and shows signs of a more serious condition, Thom becomes convinced of his ability to solve everything. But will Thom’s mind—and marriage—fall apart faster than Howard’s body?

Buchner is a poet, and his lyricism comes through in his prose. At one point Thom narrates: “Under that careless sun, on the sidewalk, I watched cars pass. Straight-faced strangers driving through their own lives. Their own thoughts bouncing through their heads. Not one of them had my thoughts—not this moment.” The author delights in the uninterpretable. The title comes from an inscrutable message that Thom finds on the bottom of a Snapple cap in lieu of the normal bit of trivia. The end of the world for these characters is less dramatic than a meteor shower, but the signs are all around them, waiting to be dissected for meaning. There’s something poetic in the way the narrative accumulates: Thom’s story is littered with digressions about the past and ruminations about the future. For this reason, it takes a while for the plot to gain momentum, and even then, it often feels like a process of slow decay rather than one of rising action. Thom’s is not the most pleasant head to inhabit, and readers at times will grow frustrated by his myopic ennui. But those who stick with the story will find a subtle examination of life at the edge of a mundane catastrophe.

An often beautiful, sometimes measured tale of aging and love.