Visigoth: Stories

by Gary Amdahl

Visigoth is a portrait of the American male—gritty, violent, and fascinating. The protagonists in this collection of stories come from all walks of life—hockey players, middle managers, political hopefuls, and wayward husbands—but all share a tendency to turn towards violence when life begins spinning out of control. In "The Flyweight," an all-star high-school wrestler struggles with his own success and the expectations of others when he begins hearing voices after a schizophrenic breakdown. "Visigoth," the title story, depicts a college hockey player unable to understand that his relationship with an English professor is over. The novella "The Free Fall" focuses on a cycle of escalating violence in small farming and mining towns and the effect that it has on the main character and his family. Sharp, inquisitive, and witty, Visigoth challenges the reader to question the popular glory of violence in all its manifestations.

Genres: Short Stories, Fiction

208 pages, Paperback

First published March 17, 2006

Reviews

[W.D. Clarke · Rating 5 out of 5]

[Edited Note: a much, much longer version of what follows is up on my blog]

I am a novelist (proud to say so, and equally proud to admit that only one-tenth of one novel has seen the light of a bookstore) and operate under the belief that novels and people are ideally suited to each other. Reading a novel is all about the immersion of oneself in the comfortingly familiar incomprehensibility of life and living, in observant incomprehension, in the disorder and beauty of the houses that languages and minds build, in the disordered architecture of language itself
—Gary Amdahl, “Narrow Road to the Deep North”

“You are twice the man you think you are.”
—Gary Amdahl, “The Volunteer”

I said things like, “Had I only known...” but the truth was, well, I don’t know what the truth was.
—Gary Amdahl, “The Flight From California”

The first epigraph to this review comes from the closing story in Gary Amdahl’s 2006 debut collection, Visigoth, a story in which the putatively auto-fictional narrator confronts real life violence (in the form of the random murder of his uncle by a mentally ill veteran of the U.S. invasion of Grenada) and agonizes over, among other things, the ethics of mining a brutal family tragedy in the name of art:

As Barry Hannah’s narrator says in the story “Carriba”: “Murder is not interesting, friends. Murder is vomit. You may attach a story to it but you are already dishonest to the faces of the dead.... I knew I had no place arranging this misery into entertainment, a little Hamlet for busybodies and ghouls. ...My whole professional life reared up in my mind. I was a hag and a parasite. I was to be grave and eloquent over their story. ...They were to get nothing. I was to get fame and good bucks, provided I was interesting. A great sick came on me.”

Or, in the narrator’s own words:

I went about perfecting the terrible beauty of the black tale—the writer of fiction assuming the pompous posture of truth-teller and coming more completely undone by the duplicity of it than he would have had he simply told lies […]

The “duplicity”, or multivalence of our motives is one of the great themes of Amdahl’s stories—his protagonists are all driven this way and that, distracted by oh so many shiny objects, deluded by their own misfiring. omnidirectional thoughts into following (often violent) impulses which, though they may pay homage to (often conflicting) grand ideals, are often doubled-down upon in the manner of a gambling addict who continues to feed the one-armed bandit in spite of his own awareness of the Sunk Cost Fallacy.

And yes, “his”: the would-be, never-could-be heroes here are all men—for (aspirationally) better *and*, of course, (usually) worse. They are either lacking in crucial or even all departments...

(e.g. “Dennis's mother left his father because there wasn't enough of him to go around”)

...or there is much too much of a muchness about them, in a Saturday Night Live “Que es mas macho” vein:

(“But certainly we had a friendship referring dangerously to sex and violence and little else. But what else is there?”)

Those quotations come from the opening story, “The Flyweight”, which employs the “unremarkable Marlowe relating the story of the remarkable Kurz” framing device of Heart of Darkness fame, except that it centres around a pair of teenaged boys on the cusp of adulthood, one of whom is held adoration by the other, who narrates his exploits as local hero and prospective state wrestling champ, and who is (spoiler) apparently so disturbed by how when their friendship suddenly ends when violence leaves the ring and enters real life that he is compelled to write about it years later, yet still insists, but what else is there? in the manner of It’s all I’ve got, and so without it I’d be nothing—as, in the Woody Allen joke, a son escorts his father to the shrink because the father thinks he’s a chicken, yet cannot commit to having his father committed to the asylum because, he admits to the shrink, the son needs the eggs.

[To Be Cont'd...]

[Lori]

From Amdahl's biggest fan's personal collection.

[Steven · Rating 3 out of 5]

On this first reading I was impressed with the lyricism and with Amdahl's attention to language. Aesthetically, a strong collection--a book for writers. The stories didn't wow me, but maybe that will come on subsequent reads. Certainly a collection to return to.

[Michael · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great collection. have you ever wished to see a hockey player layout a figure skater? Beautiful descriptions of being hit and hitting the ice. blurbs from Barry Hannah, Thomas McGuane, and Ken Kalfus. he's not fucking around.

[Karen · Rating 2 out of 5]

Sorry, Jen, I hated it.

[Dave · Rating 5 out of 5]

Complicated, engrossing fiction. Excellent.