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shimmer's review
4.0
As others have said, the pieces collected in American Gymnopédies aren't "stories" so much as moments, perhaps the germs of stories or even the longing for stories. I liked how each moment is grounded bodily and materially, because for such short fragments most of them offer a real sense of physicality and presence and that prevents the collection from becoming too ethereal even while it is otherwise ambiguous. At the same time, most of the stories feel like moments en route to somewhere else – characters look over fences to long for what's in the distance, they stop at hotels before reaching their real destination, and they daydream through the dark tunnel of a cereal box. So each story ends up feeling both grounded and untethered at the same time, an alluring and sometimes jarring sensation, and one that is increased by the book's lack of geographic detail. Although each story is named for a city, there's rarely any detail of those cities offered so I found myself wondering what about a moment was specifically "Duluth" or "Atlanta" or "Boston." There's an occasional street name but that's about it, so rather than the cultural details of place we're offered a purely experiential landscape, one in which cities only exist as our private, minute memories of and encounters with them and in which one place is more or less the same as another except for what might happen to us there (if anything does). At first that lack of clear geography felt like a missed opportunity to me, and I wished Garson had made these places more particularly themselves, and though it stopped bothering me as I fell into the daydream state of the collection, that's what I mean by a "longing" for stories. These moments almost seem to wish they meant more, or were clearer, and I felt like I was trying to make sense of a larger landscape by focusing intensely a whole bunch of individual points that may or may not be connected. My impulse as a reader was to project my own knowledge of these cities onto the stories, trying to fill in the gaps, but they resist that so firmly that I never stopped feeling adrift, and got used to the feeling instead.
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