A Taste in the Brain
Ben Pester, Am I In the Right Place?
Boiler House Press, 194pp, £10.00, ISBN 9781911343806
reviewed by Tom Conaghan
The stories in Ben Pester’s debut collection are surreal and disturbing, and yet also somehow an uncanny depiction of how we live now. In the same way we don’t notice when we are dreaming, his stories teeter on a margin between the conceivable and the extremely crackers — the ‘just the sort of shit that would happen’ margin. In fact, you might say his stories are less surreal or unfeasible so much as merely unlikely — although who could recognise what’s likely these days as we implement transformative synergy valuing in the middle of mounting global apocalypses.
In the way his characters fail to balance their personal worries with deeply troubling metaphysical catastrophes, and the untenable comforts and consolation they cling to, it’s possible to see Pester’s world as a very close relation of ours. By coupling the mundane with the weird, his stories become a raid on the unremarkable. Sometimes it is the effect of the everyday seen through spoony reflections: in ‘Mother’s Day Card From a Wooden Object’, on holiday in a hotel the mother of the wooden object insists her piece of wood needs its own room, although when they return home she finds she cannot afford the bills.
At other times it is the consequences of the uncanny on the quotidian; in ‘If Yes, Please Explain Your Answer’ an indistinct creature recently hatched in the workplace carries out rituals which lead to company benefits: ‘our productivity increases. Relationships with clients and new leads seem effortless.’
It is a sketch of everyday life but coloured in all wrong. Its anxieties and archetypes that recur in the stories give a folkloric feel to the book, made keen by its recognisable settings. For example, in ‘All Silky and Wonderful’ the liminal space the narrator cannot cross is the rubbery threshold between two train carriages.
The book opens, fittingly, with ‘Orientation’, our (it is told in the second person) first day in a new place of work, with all that entails. Where once Dante was led by Virgil and Scrooge by the Three Spirits, we are guided by ‘Graham’ who speaks in bullet points. But Graham cannot understand us, we fear boring him, he locks a version of us in a cupboard, and finally drives a very long way to confront us with a shameful childhood experience — the orientation, all told, proving highly successful in the way it unmoors us.
It feels like Pester wants to explore how slippery our grip on the world is. And so, where other authors set their stories in motion by dashing conflicting juggernauts at each other, those in Am I In The Right Place? are propelled by the frictionless gliding of people over the face of their lives.
This makes for a skewed and eerie drama. The ‘slipperiness’ carries you further than you would have expected, over bumps you hadn’t known were there until you realise how painful they were. The teachers of the wooden block write genuinely considerate school reports for its mother, writing things like: ‘we really feel as if he is grasping the finer details of the Tudor age.’ Until, in an ending so well-crafted it feels like another opening, Pester changes his grip on the story and we recalibrate what we have read, no longer measuring it by the strains of the mother’s desperation but now instead by her great capacity for love.
Later, in the title story, we see how the slipperiness affects the way we try to express our love. The narrator meets up with his slightly shambling father, both of them trying to find connections, share memories, understand each other. This is a theme which recurs throughout the collection; there are hints of it again in the ‘expressive teal leather luggage’ that belong to Big Andrew in the story ‘All Silky and Wonderful’ — as here, become less able to communicate ourselves, naturally it is our consumer items that have come to articulate us better.
This tension forms the core of ‘Rachel Reaches Out’, perhaps the story with the broadest spectrum in the collection, in which Rachel is asked by a successful New Yorker what she wants in life:
Which sounds impossible for anyone to communicate but, amazingly, is something Rachel is very able to assert, and so she becomes something a little like a success, as, though her dreams are realised, her self-medicating makes her unaware of it.
Without the fixed sunlight of a conventional escalating drama, Pester’s stories grow in strange directions — although, possibly all written in similar modes, there are elements that repeat throughout them. Aristotelian unities are distorted when the protagonists are carried elsewhere; childhood oppressions recur in adult life; bit-part players make surprising intrusions into the main characters’ tales. A central charm to the stories are his narrators’ use of a skaz chatter – with their impermeable neuroses, shifting foundations, with what they imagine doesn’t need explaining — their voices create an extra dimension of story around each piece. This is especially true in ‘How They Loved Him’, a piece led by an unsettling narrator whose unalloyed surety leads us through a tale of middle class self-importance, lust, xenophobia and murder.
Pester seems less interested in forming his writing into well-proportioned stories and more about pursuing a taste in the brain. Why are they so delightful and, in many places, very very funny? We don’t know immediately, maybe the unconscious that suggested his ideas resonates symphonically in us, maybe he is mining a rich seam of hysteria, uncovering where our misses go when we fail to articulate ourselves.
In the way his characters fail to balance their personal worries with deeply troubling metaphysical catastrophes, and the untenable comforts and consolation they cling to, it’s possible to see Pester’s world as a very close relation of ours. By coupling the mundane with the weird, his stories become a raid on the unremarkable. Sometimes it is the effect of the everyday seen through spoony reflections: in ‘Mother’s Day Card From a Wooden Object’, on holiday in a hotel the mother of the wooden object insists her piece of wood needs its own room, although when they return home she finds she cannot afford the bills.
At other times it is the consequences of the uncanny on the quotidian; in ‘If Yes, Please Explain Your Answer’ an indistinct creature recently hatched in the workplace carries out rituals which lead to company benefits: ‘our productivity increases. Relationships with clients and new leads seem effortless.’
It is a sketch of everyday life but coloured in all wrong. Its anxieties and archetypes that recur in the stories give a folkloric feel to the book, made keen by its recognisable settings. For example, in ‘All Silky and Wonderful’ the liminal space the narrator cannot cross is the rubbery threshold between two train carriages.
The book opens, fittingly, with ‘Orientation’, our (it is told in the second person) first day in a new place of work, with all that entails. Where once Dante was led by Virgil and Scrooge by the Three Spirits, we are guided by ‘Graham’ who speaks in bullet points. But Graham cannot understand us, we fear boring him, he locks a version of us in a cupboard, and finally drives a very long way to confront us with a shameful childhood experience — the orientation, all told, proving highly successful in the way it unmoors us.
It feels like Pester wants to explore how slippery our grip on the world is. And so, where other authors set their stories in motion by dashing conflicting juggernauts at each other, those in Am I In The Right Place? are propelled by the frictionless gliding of people over the face of their lives.
This makes for a skewed and eerie drama. The ‘slipperiness’ carries you further than you would have expected, over bumps you hadn’t known were there until you realise how painful they were. The teachers of the wooden block write genuinely considerate school reports for its mother, writing things like: ‘we really feel as if he is grasping the finer details of the Tudor age.’ Until, in an ending so well-crafted it feels like another opening, Pester changes his grip on the story and we recalibrate what we have read, no longer measuring it by the strains of the mother’s desperation but now instead by her great capacity for love.
Later, in the title story, we see how the slipperiness affects the way we try to express our love. The narrator meets up with his slightly shambling father, both of them trying to find connections, share memories, understand each other. This is a theme which recurs throughout the collection; there are hints of it again in the ‘expressive teal leather luggage’ that belong to Big Andrew in the story ‘All Silky and Wonderful’ — as here, become less able to communicate ourselves, naturally it is our consumer items that have come to articulate us better.
This tension forms the core of ‘Rachel Reaches Out’, perhaps the story with the broadest spectrum in the collection, in which Rachel is asked by a successful New Yorker what she wants in life:
‘Well-’
‘No. Don’t do it straight away. I don’t want your blurty Britsy bullshit, ‘K? I want to know what you want – right down in the burn of your heart.’
Which sounds impossible for anyone to communicate but, amazingly, is something Rachel is very able to assert, and so she becomes something a little like a success, as, though her dreams are realised, her self-medicating makes her unaware of it.
Without the fixed sunlight of a conventional escalating drama, Pester’s stories grow in strange directions — although, possibly all written in similar modes, there are elements that repeat throughout them. Aristotelian unities are distorted when the protagonists are carried elsewhere; childhood oppressions recur in adult life; bit-part players make surprising intrusions into the main characters’ tales. A central charm to the stories are his narrators’ use of a skaz chatter – with their impermeable neuroses, shifting foundations, with what they imagine doesn’t need explaining — their voices create an extra dimension of story around each piece. This is especially true in ‘How They Loved Him’, a piece led by an unsettling narrator whose unalloyed surety leads us through a tale of middle class self-importance, lust, xenophobia and murder.
Pester seems less interested in forming his writing into well-proportioned stories and more about pursuing a taste in the brain. Why are they so delightful and, in many places, very very funny? We don’t know immediately, maybe the unconscious that suggested his ideas resonates symphonically in us, maybe he is mining a rich seam of hysteria, uncovering where our misses go when we fail to articulate ourselves.