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meredithjao's review
4.0
Milling around the 2015 Pitchfork Music Festival Book Fort, I was unaware that the man in front of me was the founder and editor of HOBART: another literary journal and the author of Backswing, the collection of short stories I held in my hands. After a disjointed encounter in which I asked for his recommendation, and Aaron Burch responded that he could not give out a recommendation at that time (as the book was his—a very modest man), I bought it and somewhat guiltily downed the promotional warm whiskey shot that came with the book, which I did not particularly want at eleven A.M.
This is not to say I bought the book out of guilt—Burch’s name has been popping up on my radar for some time, and after reading Backswing it became clear to me that this is a face everyone is going to and should know when casually milling around a festival. The characters in the book are racked with loss and deficiency, and attempt to transform themselves into something better, more hopeful—looking for redemption in their straying lives. Burch’s skill comes with his ability to hover in the moments that are most relatable and human, sometimes even commonplace—in “Fire in the Sky,” for instance: “We weren’t running toward anything, except a destination chosen at random because we could see it from a distance, and we weren’t running away from anything, except whatever was behind us.” Burch’s characters don’t know what they’re doing and neither do we. This much is clear in the first story of the collection, “Scout,” as the narrator’s wife is cheating on him and, after a stretch of built-up rage when he and his wife sit in silence in their garage watching Netflix in separate cars, he feels it best to take out his emotion with a club on a golf ball sweeper at the driving range.
This violence and unrest can be found in almost every story. In “Prestidigitation,” a magician slices open her arm and sews up the cut with her own exposed vein; in “Unzipped,” a boy discovers a zipper running up the length of his chest with no idea what lies beneath until his first kiss reaches beneath his shirt and begins to unzip it; all bodily, personal stories, all uniquely human. The characters often lose a part of themselves, quite literally— in “Flesh & Blood,” a young man named Ben falls from grace on his skateboard and creates a sizeable hole in his jaw, and the narrator of “Fair & Square” pulls out his teeth in the upstairs bathroom of a stranger’s house “to empty [himself] and start anew.”
Things are taken, lost, and sacrificed in Backswing, from simple household objects to teeth or part of a jaw. In “Church Van,” a man is so desperate for this sort of spiritual reunification that he eats the padding from his childhood church van backseat. After his feast, “he could feel every piece of the van inside him,” essentially consuming his own childhood in the form of glass when he starts in on the windshield. It is grotesque in the same manner as the boy with the zipper, but purifying in its own weird way.
Burch’s most intricate and successful instance of world-building is in “The Stain,” where young children who have been conditioned to forget language and the outdoors notice a blood stain on the street outside their window. They remember the word for “stain” almost instantly, but do not know how long ago they had forgotten it, trapped in one room for what is implied to be a large chunk of their lives. The perpetual unrest of “The Stain” is a frightening reminder of our ability to forget. In “The Apartment,” as well, a man stumbles around an apartment building he thinks is his own, but is unable to find his way home. Burch depicts the confusing jumble of life we all experience, but to a frightening degree.
My own world intersects with the protagonist of the story “Fire in the Sky” when he drives from Chicago through Indiana, alongside billboards advertising for “Krazy Kaplan’s” Fireworks. If you live in the Chicago area, you would likely recognize the allure of these signs over the Indiana border, where fireworks are legal to purchase. Maybe you, too, will find a piece of yourself in Backswing—a deeply personal collection of stories colored by adult loss, where forgetting is as violent as prying out your teeth and remembering is sacred.
This is not to say I bought the book out of guilt—Burch’s name has been popping up on my radar for some time, and after reading Backswing it became clear to me that this is a face everyone is going to and should know when casually milling around a festival. The characters in the book are racked with loss and deficiency, and attempt to transform themselves into something better, more hopeful—looking for redemption in their straying lives. Burch’s skill comes with his ability to hover in the moments that are most relatable and human, sometimes even commonplace—in “Fire in the Sky,” for instance: “We weren’t running toward anything, except a destination chosen at random because we could see it from a distance, and we weren’t running away from anything, except whatever was behind us.” Burch’s characters don’t know what they’re doing and neither do we. This much is clear in the first story of the collection, “Scout,” as the narrator’s wife is cheating on him and, after a stretch of built-up rage when he and his wife sit in silence in their garage watching Netflix in separate cars, he feels it best to take out his emotion with a club on a golf ball sweeper at the driving range.
This violence and unrest can be found in almost every story. In “Prestidigitation,” a magician slices open her arm and sews up the cut with her own exposed vein; in “Unzipped,” a boy discovers a zipper running up the length of his chest with no idea what lies beneath until his first kiss reaches beneath his shirt and begins to unzip it; all bodily, personal stories, all uniquely human. The characters often lose a part of themselves, quite literally— in “Flesh & Blood,” a young man named Ben falls from grace on his skateboard and creates a sizeable hole in his jaw, and the narrator of “Fair & Square” pulls out his teeth in the upstairs bathroom of a stranger’s house “to empty [himself] and start anew.”
Things are taken, lost, and sacrificed in Backswing, from simple household objects to teeth or part of a jaw. In “Church Van,” a man is so desperate for this sort of spiritual reunification that he eats the padding from his childhood church van backseat. After his feast, “he could feel every piece of the van inside him,” essentially consuming his own childhood in the form of glass when he starts in on the windshield. It is grotesque in the same manner as the boy with the zipper, but purifying in its own weird way.
Burch’s most intricate and successful instance of world-building is in “The Stain,” where young children who have been conditioned to forget language and the outdoors notice a blood stain on the street outside their window. They remember the word for “stain” almost instantly, but do not know how long ago they had forgotten it, trapped in one room for what is implied to be a large chunk of their lives. The perpetual unrest of “The Stain” is a frightening reminder of our ability to forget. In “The Apartment,” as well, a man stumbles around an apartment building he thinks is his own, but is unable to find his way home. Burch depicts the confusing jumble of life we all experience, but to a frightening degree.
My own world intersects with the protagonist of the story “Fire in the Sky” when he drives from Chicago through Indiana, alongside billboards advertising for “Krazy Kaplan’s” Fireworks. If you live in the Chicago area, you would likely recognize the allure of these signs over the Indiana border, where fireworks are legal to purchase. Maybe you, too, will find a piece of yourself in Backswing—a deeply personal collection of stories colored by adult loss, where forgetting is as violent as prying out your teeth and remembering is sacred.
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