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JOE DAVID BELLAMY
don't know -- maybe it seems shameful to bring up -- but isn't that
what some fiction should still concern itself with? just what it feels like
to be inside someone else's bones? How else lay waste the suffocating,
dehumanizing influences of media stereotyping? People constantly need
to find new ways of imagining their own and others' lives. Weaver is very
good at eliciting vicarious participation of this sort.
In Weaver's story "Finch the Spastic Speaks," for instance, the
reader is coaxed into an iden tification with the point-of-view character,
Finch, whose entombment is more than purely physical, though it does
have physical roots. Locked forever in "his prison of chaotic muscles,"
Finch has the additional burdens of sensibility and a high IQ, though he
"must choke and strain like some strangling madman if he is to ask for so
much as a drink of water." Hopeless in social situations, Finch is apt to
generate an impulsive spasm and toss a cup of punch into his own face at
a cocktail party; he is "in danger of drooling idiotically" -- yet he
develops a crush on "the beautiful winner of the regional science fair" at
the university he is attending. He is unutterably fascinated by the perfect
fluidity of her movement, "artless as the flow of water." Finally,
motivated by a report from his doctors that his own miserable body is
atrophying faster than expected, Finch finds the courage to make a date
with this woman of his dreams, which she surprisingly accepts. After a
movie, Finch makes a horrible botch of the love scene, frightening and
pawing the girl unwittingly. Through this episode and the exceptionally
attentive and friendly treatment of strangers, which Finch understands,
which he always understands, we come to see how pathetically cut off he
is
and knows he always will be; the barriers are insurmountable.
Gordon Weaver's book is an impressive first collection in almost
every way, versatile, distinctive, and engaging -- as good as any I have
read in the last few years.
Joe David Bellamy
