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If There's Any Truth In a Northbound Train
Eight short stories about the truth and if it matters, the places we sleep when our wooden teeth no longer fit our bodies, what we do with our life not quite all in one place.
"You have to want something all the time," I tell him. "It's just human."—Werner’s book is full of characters wanting something all the time. It makes me want. It makes me want to read this book over and over. Hilarious, witty, ghostly: people and body parts go missing and sometimes reappear. But the Truth, dammit, is elusive and pervasive at the same time. How does he do it? It makes me squirm.--Amy Temple Harper author of Cramped Uptown
"You have to want something all the time," I tell him. "It's just human."—Werner’s book is full of characters wanting something all the time. It makes me want. It makes me want to read this book over and over. Hilarious, witty, ghostly: people and body parts go missing and sometimes reappear. But the Truth, dammit, is elusive and pervasive at the same time. How does he do it? It makes me squirm.--Amy Temple Harper author of Cramped Uptown
28 pages, Chapbook
First published June 2, 2014
21 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
May 31, 2014
I love the way Werner can write these stories in such a minimalistically gritty and earthy way while still having the core soul soar effortlessly. The lines are solid like asphalt chucks thrown through the windows of a deserted warehouse, but the essence is as delicate and beautiful as freshly blown glass. You get it precisely as you finish each story and excitedly turn to the person next to you to tell them about it, but then you can't and have to reread the story again. Then you just give up and make them read it. It's some impressive work.
October 6, 2015
Maybe not genius, but geniusy?
October 20, 2014
In Ryan Werner’s slim, beautiful collection, If There’s Any Truth in a Northbound Train, twins vie for birthright order, a hollow-boned girl traces her ancestry back to birds, and at the end of the world, a man just wants to eat a caramel apple. These stories are brief but never elliptical; the past is ever present, lives are fully lived before the characters appear on the page, and Werner’s prose is precise and muscular. There are no wasted words here, and no attempts at authorial trickery. What more can—or needs to—be said about “two girls, one with purple hair and the other with a laugh like formaldehyde” or how a crowd will “come together and disperse like old milk”?
If some similarities link the eight stories—they are all told in the first-person, mostly by young men suffering under the weight of their Midwestern unhappiness—the specificity of Werner’s details gives each story the sense of a full world. A meat processing plant’s discards are used for a haunted house’s decorations; a worker on his last day in a Wisconsin grocery finds himself locked in a bathroom with a young woman; a man’s former fiancé wins the lottery and attempts to fill her pool with New Coke.
The collection’s main preoccupation is the elusiveness of answers to the Big Questions. More bluntly, the stories eschew the epiphanic moment that so often appears in short fiction. In “Origin Story,” the narrator—whose brother’s disappearance has fractured his family’s relationships—wonders, “So the good guy is the one whose story gets told and the bad guy is the one whose story gets lost?” By the story’s end, there is no clear answer; one senses that there is no point. Werner’s characters do not come to realizations as much as step beside their own misguided views, not toward a larger truth, but closer to the greater mystery that still lies ahead.
Werner is particularly skilled as an excavator of his characters, drawing forth into precise images and lines the essential truths and doubts of their experiences. Take, for example, the title story, in which a description of the physical body morphs into an illumination of a character’s central dilemma. “Both of our noses looked like a blown-apart tulip,” the narrator says of himself and his twin brother, “the same hot blood on our knuckles, the same problem of not knowing who the oldest is, not knowing which of us should sign away their years and worship the other.”
In the final story, “There Is No Joy Between The Last Thing and The Next Thing”, the collection’s longest and best, Werner is at his most generous. Eugene, the narrator’s best friend, has has convinced the narrator to take small doses of poison, “the way some rats have built up an immunity … us doing the same thing is like teaching our skin to deflect knives, which is something people say when they’re scared, when they’re trying not to be scared.”
London, Eugene’s girlfriend, is pregnant with triplets; by the story’s end, the babies arrive. Here, Werner is able to articulate the terror and immediate vulnerability that comes over the new father. Eugene has stopped taking poison; he is awkward with the new babies. But in his old age, the narrator thinks, Eugene will give in to his daughters when they need “a dollar for a distraction, a car to leave him, a house to exclude him, nothing left for him to do but remove most of the severity from everything, put holes in his gut and then try to fill them up.” As Werner does again and again in the collection, the story swells with a transcendent, semi-hopefulness: here is the thing the character never knew he cared about, in front of him all along.
Ultimately, this is what I loved about If There’s Any Truth in a Northbound Train: that it reads like a love song to life as it is, “half a joke, and it doesn’t matter which half because neither one is funny.”
--Note: this review was originally published on Heavy Feather Review's website. (http://heavyfeatherreview.com/2014/10...)
If some similarities link the eight stories—they are all told in the first-person, mostly by young men suffering under the weight of their Midwestern unhappiness—the specificity of Werner’s details gives each story the sense of a full world. A meat processing plant’s discards are used for a haunted house’s decorations; a worker on his last day in a Wisconsin grocery finds himself locked in a bathroom with a young woman; a man’s former fiancé wins the lottery and attempts to fill her pool with New Coke.
The collection’s main preoccupation is the elusiveness of answers to the Big Questions. More bluntly, the stories eschew the epiphanic moment that so often appears in short fiction. In “Origin Story,” the narrator—whose brother’s disappearance has fractured his family’s relationships—wonders, “So the good guy is the one whose story gets told and the bad guy is the one whose story gets lost?” By the story’s end, there is no clear answer; one senses that there is no point. Werner’s characters do not come to realizations as much as step beside their own misguided views, not toward a larger truth, but closer to the greater mystery that still lies ahead.
Werner is particularly skilled as an excavator of his characters, drawing forth into precise images and lines the essential truths and doubts of their experiences. Take, for example, the title story, in which a description of the physical body morphs into an illumination of a character’s central dilemma. “Both of our noses looked like a blown-apart tulip,” the narrator says of himself and his twin brother, “the same hot blood on our knuckles, the same problem of not knowing who the oldest is, not knowing which of us should sign away their years and worship the other.”
In the final story, “There Is No Joy Between The Last Thing and The Next Thing”, the collection’s longest and best, Werner is at his most generous. Eugene, the narrator’s best friend, has has convinced the narrator to take small doses of poison, “the way some rats have built up an immunity … us doing the same thing is like teaching our skin to deflect knives, which is something people say when they’re scared, when they’re trying not to be scared.”
London, Eugene’s girlfriend, is pregnant with triplets; by the story’s end, the babies arrive. Here, Werner is able to articulate the terror and immediate vulnerability that comes over the new father. Eugene has stopped taking poison; he is awkward with the new babies. But in his old age, the narrator thinks, Eugene will give in to his daughters when they need “a dollar for a distraction, a car to leave him, a house to exclude him, nothing left for him to do but remove most of the severity from everything, put holes in his gut and then try to fill them up.” As Werner does again and again in the collection, the story swells with a transcendent, semi-hopefulness: here is the thing the character never knew he cared about, in front of him all along.
Ultimately, this is what I loved about If There’s Any Truth in a Northbound Train: that it reads like a love song to life as it is, “half a joke, and it doesn’t matter which half because neither one is funny.”
--Note: this review was originally published on Heavy Feather Review's website. (http://heavyfeatherreview.com/2014/10...)
August 11, 2014
While I cannot claim to have an unbiased view of Ryan Werner's work and latest collection, I can say with confidence that it is unique in its' scope, approach, and style. Nobody else is writing the way that he does. He has a tendency to work a blend of armchair philosophy and comedy while paying close attention to pacing in such a way that is approachable and nuanced.
My favorite story of his is found within this collection. It is titled: "there is no joy between the last thing and the next thing," and in it, he captures that rare bird of evocative conflict in fiction.
Two favorite lines:
"After a few hours of the big forever out my window, I get off in a town so green it makes my heart seize up."
"I should have tongue kissed a foreign girl with skin the color of a vegetable and bought a Dalmatian named after a guitarist and gotten braces and learned Italian and paid my rent on time and divorced my second wife but maybe not my first, and as people start to look for the end, start to scale buildings to either see into the distance or jump to the bottom, Wallace has taken the smallest of bites from his candy apple, opened up the old woman's hand and placed his change inside it."
*****
My favorite story of his is found within this collection. It is titled: "there is no joy between the last thing and the next thing," and in it, he captures that rare bird of evocative conflict in fiction.
Two favorite lines:
"After a few hours of the big forever out my window, I get off in a town so green it makes my heart seize up."
"I should have tongue kissed a foreign girl with skin the color of a vegetable and bought a Dalmatian named after a guitarist and gotten braces and learned Italian and paid my rent on time and divorced my second wife but maybe not my first, and as people start to look for the end, start to scale buildings to either see into the distance or jump to the bottom, Wallace has taken the smallest of bites from his candy apple, opened up the old woman's hand and placed his change inside it."
*****
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews