Burn Man: Selected Stories by Mark Anthony Jarman
Burn Man: Selected Stories
by Mark Anthony Jarman
Biblioasis, 2023; 320 pages; $26.95
Reviewed by Jessica Poon
Mark Anthony Jarman writes like a linguist’s wet dream. Burn Man is a wicked compilation of twenty-one short stories selected from the past four decades. The stories are genuinely odd, sometimes depressing, and often beautiful. You don’t really read Jarman for plot; you read him for how he describes things. This is not to say that his stories are fashionably plotless, though they are voice-driven. In any case, he writes like a barely domesticated unicorn — the words are recognizable, but they’ve been pretzeled into divinely weird combinations, with judicious repetition, contrastive similes, and a predilection for alliteration.
“Burn Man on a Texas Porch,” arguably Jarman’s most well-known story, is about a man who suffers extensive burns and becomes, in his words, “different animals now.” He laments the impossibility of ever achieving handsomeness. Poignantly, he states “. . .we insist appearance counts for very little, but then I am walking at you, an ancient bog monster limping on the teensy sidewalk with my face like a TV jammed on the wrong channel, and at that sideways juncture ALL of us, ME included, decide shallow is not that bad. Let us, we decide, worship and grovel at the church of the shallow.” Whatever the mendacious platitudes people like to dispense on beauty — beauty is in the eye of the beholder; everyone is beautiful; beauty is skin deep — it is abundantly clear to anyone with the slightest capacity for insight, that looks do indeed matter. You can graft skin, but you can’t graft handsomeness, let alone societal reintegration. This story is easily the most spectacularly beautiful story about ugliness ever written.
In an interview with The Danforth Review, Jarman said he wanted to do a “travel road piece... and I wanted a sex scene on an ironing board” — the result is “Cowboys Incorporated,” which features the state of Wisconsin and a woman named Virginia, who slaps a man for attempting anachronistic aphorisms like “A woman is a support system for a cunt.” other noteworthy sentences: “A legless cowboy sells pencils from a wheelchair, duded up for the tourist kingdoms of heat and light.” And my personal favorite, “Glaucous gulls, polygot.”
In “19 Knives,” a father juxtaposes drug addiction with his tender feelings towards his son. For all Jarman’s creativity, he knows when to keep things simple to evoke regret: “once I bought my boy a hot dog at the zoo and he dropped the hot dog on the ground and I hit him on the stomach and said, ‘What the hell are you doing?!’ and now I wish I could tell him that it’s OK to drop his hot dog, that there are worse things I know of now. I wish I could say to him admirable things, buy him that booster pack of Japanese pokémon cards . . . ”
In “Flat-out Earth Moving,” a brother and sister gorge themselves on donuts and the cops don’t get any. The opening sentence, “[t]he stolen van was home to one thousand donuts, some laced with crimson jelly; some lacking,” is memorably ludicrous. And then, “[a] rich person, a smarter person, might decide not to eat an Econoline full of someone else’s jelly donuts. Is this solemn choice one part wisdom or two parts repression?” My vote is yes, it is. There are women in these stories, but Jarman’s focus is on disgruntled men, men who say things like, “I like loser bars. They’re quiet and I can think,” and, “I discover we are fretful devices wrapped in such thin skin.” Even the most utilitarian triteness in a writer’s playbook — mentioning the sun — evinces poetry: “The afternoon sun hides a thief in my eye.”
I can’t do Jarman justice with truncated passages or grossly blurb-y adjectives bordering on hysterical enthusiasm. It’s best to read him slowly, to savour. For anyone suffering from creative blockage, who is tired of carefully precise, down-right homogenous fiction, enter the flames of Jarman’s incendiary word playground; you will get burnt. And you will like it.