The writing in Greg Jackson’s first book of stories, “Prodigals,” is so bold and perceptive that it delivers a contact high. You know from the first pages that, intellectually, you’ve climbed into a high-performance sports car. Only one question remains: Will the author smash it into a tree?
Mr. Jackson is a student and a satirist of elite lives. His characters are filmmakers and architects and writers and tennis pros, some of them newly released from “one of those prestigious East Coast schools whose graduates are cagey about where they went.” A few are flourishing; others hang on by a fingernail.
Most are in their late 30s and approaching reckonings of various sorts. There are flashbacks to slightly earlier times, when there was indiscriminate sex and cocaine inhaled from the keys of ecologically responsible cars.
The micro-details of previous lost weekends pile up: “We smoked cigarettes and joints, sucked on lozenges lacquered in hash oil. We tried one another’s benzos and antivirals, Restoril, Avodart, Yaz, and Dexedrine, looking for contraindications. We ate well: cassoulets, steak frites, squid-ink risotto with porcini, spices from Andhra Pradesh, Kyoto, Antwerp. Of course we drank: pure agaves, rye whiskeys, St-Germain, old Scotch.” Two women are said to be “so oppressively hip there are about four square blocks in the world where they can exist.”
Clearly, Mr. Jackson’s characters can sometimes be easy to dislike. They know this about themselves. This gives these stories some of their tang. No one is overly interested in being kind. When one man meets his wife’s old friend, that friend “looked me over like a rental billed a notch or two above its class.”Photo
Greg Jackson CreditShelton Walsmith
These characters play rough, and for keeps. “We grow into our toughness like snakes,” one of them thinks, “molting hope.” They are past embarrassment. Their plain-spokenness gives Mr. Jackson’s dialogue a lot of topspin. One woman speaks for many of them when she comments, “I can’t be held responsible for every dreadful remark that escapes my mouth.”
Mr. Jackson enters these worlds with wit and sympathy and a good deal of heart. In terms of the entitled milieu, you may sometimes feel you are reading a furious, Instagram-era updating of Ann Beattie’s short stories, which makes a certain amount of sense: Mr. Jackson was her writing student at the University of Virginia.
There’s also the crunch of writers like Ian McEwan and Martin Amis in Mr. Jackson’s prose. Best of all there’s that sense — only the excellent ones give it to you — that whatever topic the author turns his mental LED lights toward will be powerfully illuminated.
I’m not sure I’ve read a better description of what it feels like to drink two bourbons on an empty stomach than this one: “That sunburnt feeling is moving inside of me, like light breaking in double time over the crops.”
And I’m not sure I’ve read a better description of a certain kind of successful man in late middle age, the kind who is “giving off the captured firelight of time spent in the timbered lodges of Jackson Hole” and has “the vital febrility of coronaries survived.”
There is goose-pimpling writing about Terry Gross(“demotic ur-parent, Catcher in the WHYY”), envy (“You need people well enough informed to understand just how enviable you are”), and the odd poignancy of The New York Review of Books, which “continued to devote such good minds and scholarship to what after five minutes in the desert sun, driving with the top down by imitation-adobe strip malls full of nail salons and smoothie shops and physical therapy outlets, was almost painfully irrelevant.”
This collection is front-loaded; the best of these eight stories come early. One is about a young couple in France, visiting a reclusive tennis star and his wife. Another is about a man and his female therapist, who are forced to share a long car ride to escape New York City during a hurricane. Other stories deal with families, especially siblings. Mr. Jackson has a special interest in friends and lovers who meet again after years apart, so he can explore the gaps between what is and what might have been.
The later stories in “Prodigals,” on the figurative B-side, are more experimental and a bit less persuasive. One of them, appropriately enough, is titled “Metanarrative Breakdown.” Yet none are a waste of time. None are car crashes.
What makes these stories radiant, rather than merely prickly, is how invested Mr. Jackson is in peeling off the rind of life, in getting to the juice. “For what if not pockets of intensity,” one of his characters thinks, “were we in the business of living?”
If these people are often brash, well, they have observed that “life gave its fruit to the bold, the unhesitant.” There is no small talk. One character describes himself as “a person who doesn’t believe in rules or in standing on ceremony, life’s too strange.”
When Mr. Jackson’s characters can’t (or won’t) hold one another up, they find solace in stories. One man in extremis says: “In the days that follow, it is books and books alone that make me not want to die.”
This man discovers that “literature was the only sort of arrival I could count on, an intimacy that wouldn’t desert me, that didn’t ask too much or fray fatally in the endless conflict of our competing needs, that permitted — or maybe simply was — the passage of experience back through us, our way of ravaging the endless ravishment of life.”
“The passage of experience back through us” — that’s a powerful line, and it represents what this young writer is capable of delivering, right now and, if fortune smiles, long into the future.
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