TWO NURSES, SMOKING

There’s nothing quite like a David Means story.

Jangly, elliptical, apparently autobiographical in some sense (but maybe not), his work functions like a series of Russian nesting dolls, one layer leading inexorably to the next. The 10 pieces in his sixth collection—he is also the author of the novel Hystopia (2016)—begin with small scenes, anecdotal encounters: the hospital workers in the title story, “somewhat lonely-looking figures, taking a smoke break, back behind a trailer, leaning toward each other as they talked softly beside a row of neatly trimmed bushes”; the man in the grief encounter group “who lost his teenage daughter two years ago, chasing after a Frisbee into the road.” Means is a genius of the fragment: Some of the narratives here include subtitled sections, a strategy that recalls “Two Ruminations on a Homeless Brother,” which appeared in Instructions for a Funeral (2019). But even those that don’t work this way build their effects incrementally, moving back and forth from the action to the reflective eye of the narrator, who bears a striking resemblance to the author himself. Means makes this clear from the opening story, “Clementine, Carmelita, Dog,” which he narrates from the perspective of a canine even as he acknowledges the challenges of doing so. “I wish I could make words be dog,” he writes, “…find the way to inhabit the true dynamic, to imagine a world not defined by notions of power, or morality, or memory, or sentiment, but instead by pure instinct.” What he’s addressing are the limitations of literature as well as its possibilities. This conundrum sits at the center of this remarkable set of stories, which seek to destabilize the illusions of fiction even as they embrace and heighten them. How does he do it? Let’s call it presence, both that of the characters and of the writer, whose language lives and grows by such an interplay. "Do your best to be as specific as possible while also bending around the truth so as to protect the living,” he implores in “The Depletion Prompts.”

These brilliant stories exist in the space between desire and complication.