Reviewed by Julienne Isaacs from uncorrected proofs
Writing about the body is difficult because bodies are difficult: they are beautiful and awkward, strong and vulnerable, and if they frame the soul, they also house a host of unspiritual urges. Entropic, R.W. Gray’s second collection of short stories after 2010’s Crisp, is all about the body, and Gray hones in on all of these contradictions with writing that is as visceral and demanding as its subject.
Gray is a writer and filmmaker with an impressive list of achievements. Along with his literary publishing credits, he has also produced ten screenplays, among them the award-winning short films Blink and Alice & Huck. He holds a PhD in Psychoanalysis from the University of Alberta, and now teaches film at the University of New Brunswick in Fredericton.
Gray’s background in film informs these stories’ vibrant settings, but he attends equally to psychology. Several stories in Entropic contain surreal elements that underscore questions about sex and identity.
In “Blink,” which opens the collection, the protagonist fears losing his girlfriend; he lives “braced for this pain now, braced waiting for the next sink hole.” Their shared life is, to all appearances, perfect—but he senses his imperfections, held against his girlfriend’s flawlessness, will drive her away: “I look out over the catalogue-photo-ready living room, the sofa, the cushions, the blinds, and see the apartment is a reflection of her; I am redundant even here.” And then he discovers her secret editing room, hidden behind a wall in their apartment, where she trims the ugliness from their lives:
On the table in front of her, the masses of film stock curling around the room in dark waves. I reach down and lift one strand, hold it up to the light box above her desk. Us, having breakfast, eating omelets. I look angry. We never had this breakfast. Not that I remember. Why was I angry? It seems familiar. Possible.
“Blink” feels like a thought experiment, and Gray sometimes gives in to the temptation to editorialize instead of simply telling the story (“Editing, it turns out, is an invisible business. We all do it. Blink and you’ve edited”). But he is attentive to the psychological ramifications of the story’s central conceit. Editing away one’s perceived flaws or the flaws of another person until personhood begins to erode could be construed as a monstrous crime. But Gray’s protagonists are not monsters—they are people attempting to “experience this moment. To see one another.” They just want to make life easier. And aesthetic self-editing is a ubiquitous, even expected, ritual in social media culture. Gray is carefully light-handed with this critique, and the point makes itself.
Without a doubt the collection’s strongest piece is its title story, “Entropic.” “M.” is a man of otherworldly, “unmanageable” beauty, so attractive that others physically accost him but rarely engage with him on any other level than the physical. Finally, exhausted by others’ constant sexual yearning, he enlists the narrator’s help to put him into a coma for a weekend. Anyone who wishes can sign up to spend forty minutes alone with M’s naked body, discretely supervised by the gentle narrator, who will clean the body and ready it for the next visitor, and the visitor after that. The intent: “the end of beauty,” release from others’ unspoken desires through the fulfillment of those desires.
The conflict here is only M’s on a theoretical level; it really belongs to the narrator, who must watch every visitor expend their energy on M’s body and protect him from violence, and afterward, “wash the whole body… starting with his hairline, precise, down his face and neck, behind his ears, rinsing the cloth every few wipes… to erase any trace of the intensity.”
These short scenes are enormously compassionate: it would be easy to judge M’s visitors, but Gray notes instead their hunger, their “grim sadness.” Most of them use M’s body as a site for sexual gratification, but some of them do nothing but cry. The last visitor is a man eerily like the narrator, who “thrums with all he wants.” But the narrator’s wanting is the most sympathetic kind—the kind that wishes for gratification to be mutually desired, the kind that longs for companionship, not simply sex, and for other unidentifiable things that cannot be named. “I don’t know how they all did it,” he thinks when M offers him his own time slot with his body. “How did they know what to do? I am a lesser person. I do not know what I want.”
When Gray anchors his stories in the immediate—in the body—his writing is sensitive and complex. Other stories in Entropic are far less effective, such as “The Beautiful Drowned,” a seaside ghost story redolent with overused genre types, and “Sinai,” a bizarre surrealist escapade set in Egypt.
In the latter, Eric, an aimless backpacker, sets out alone into the Sinai desert and becomes entangled in a conflict between the Biblical Lazarus, reworked as a The Mummy-style undead wanderer, and a mysterious, ancient seductress who, Eric imagines, has a mouth that is “round but languishing at the edges. Cinnamon with melancholy. Thirsty.” Occasionally this story is beautiful despite itself (as when a withered Lazarus contemplates what remains of his life—“a slim numbness to the beauty of leaves on the olive trees, an insensitivity to stars”) but it cannot hold up the weight of its overwrought metaphors and almost comically clichéd fantasy imagery (“her robes billow in currents, the stream running on without her… if I could smell, I know I would smell her stench of the departed sea, the wreckage of seaweed and shattered shells.”)
These stories jar in the collection; those with gentler surreal elements work much better, such as “Mirrorball,” the final piece, in which two gay men encounter younger, almost mirror-image versions of themselves, and relive their own long-ago breakup through watching the younger men. Again, Gray anchors this story in the physicality of love and memory, and his unwavering attention to the body allows other questions to arise naturally from the story. In the narrator’s frustrated attempts to physically revisit the scenes of an expired love affair, Gray seems to suggest that people require more than remembered moments or immediate gratification for fulfillment. This notion might also be a cliché, but Gray makes it feel new with pathos that is almost palpable.
“Where does one go after this?” the unnamed narrator of “Mirrorball” wonders when the time comes to extricate himself from the past. It’s a good question, and Gray writes it extremely well. In Entropic, the answer is rooted in awareness of the present moment—its dangers, its potential, and its great beauty.
NeWest | 180 pages | $18.95 | paper | ISBN # 978-1927063866
‘Entropic’ by R.W. Gray
Book Reviews
Writing about the body is difficult because bodies are difficult: they are beautiful and awkward, strong and vulnerable, and if they frame the soul, they also house a host of unspiritual urges. Entropic, R.W. Gray’s second collection of short stories after 2010’s Crisp, is all about the body, and Gray hones in on all of these contradictions with writing that is as visceral and demanding as its subject.
Gray is a writer and filmmaker with an impressive list of achievements. Along with his literary publishing credits, he has also produced ten screenplays, among them the award-winning short films Blink and Alice & Huck. He holds a PhD in Psychoanalysis from the University of Alberta, and now teaches film at the University of New Brunswick in Fredericton.
Gray’s background in film informs these stories’ vibrant settings, but he attends equally to psychology. Several stories in Entropic contain surreal elements that underscore questions about sex and identity.
In “Blink,” which opens the collection, the protagonist fears losing his girlfriend; he lives “braced for this pain now, braced waiting for the next sink hole.” Their shared life is, to all appearances, perfect—but he senses his imperfections, held against his girlfriend’s flawlessness, will drive her away: “I look out over the catalogue-photo-ready living room, the sofa, the cushions, the blinds, and see the apartment is a reflection of her; I am redundant even here.” And then he discovers her secret editing room, hidden behind a wall in their apartment, where she trims the ugliness from their lives:
On the table in front of her, the masses of film stock curling around the room in dark waves. I reach down and lift one strand, hold it up to the light box above her desk. Us, having breakfast, eating omelets. I look angry. We never had this breakfast. Not that I remember. Why was I angry? It seems familiar. Possible.
“Blink” feels like a thought experiment, and Gray sometimes gives in to the temptation to editorialize instead of simply telling the story (“Editing, it turns out, is an invisible business. We all do it. Blink and you’ve edited”). But he is attentive to the psychological ramifications of the story’s central conceit. Editing away one’s perceived flaws or the flaws of another person until personhood begins to erode could be construed as a monstrous crime. But Gray’s protagonists are not monsters—they are people attempting to “experience this moment. To see one another.” They just want to make life easier. And aesthetic self-editing is a ubiquitous, even expected, ritual in social media culture. Gray is carefully light-handed with this critique, and the point makes itself.
Without a doubt the collection’s strongest piece is its title story, “Entropic.” “M.” is a man of otherworldly, “unmanageable” beauty, so attractive that others physically accost him but rarely engage with him on any other level than the physical. Finally, exhausted by others’ constant sexual yearning, he enlists the narrator’s help to put him into a coma for a weekend. Anyone who wishes can sign up to spend forty minutes alone with M’s naked body, discretely supervised by the gentle narrator, who will clean the body and ready it for the next visitor, and the visitor after that. The intent: “the end of beauty,” release from others’ unspoken desires through the fulfillment of those desires.
The conflict here is only M’s on a theoretical level; it really belongs to the narrator, who must watch every visitor expend their energy on M’s body and protect him from violence, and afterward, “wash the whole body… starting with his hairline, precise, down his face and neck, behind his ears, rinsing the cloth every few wipes… to erase any trace of the intensity.”
These short scenes are enormously compassionate: it would be easy to judge M’s visitors, but Gray notes instead their hunger, their “grim sadness.” Most of them use M’s body as a site for sexual gratification, but some of them do nothing but cry. The last visitor is a man eerily like the narrator, who “thrums with all he wants.” But the narrator’s wanting is the most sympathetic kind—the kind that wishes for gratification to be mutually desired, the kind that longs for companionship, not simply sex, and for other unidentifiable things that cannot be named. “I don’t know how they all did it,” he thinks when M offers him his own time slot with his body. “How did they know what to do? I am a lesser person. I do not know what I want.”
When Gray anchors his stories in the immediate—in the body—his writing is sensitive and complex. Other stories in Entropic are far less effective, such as “The Beautiful Drowned,” a seaside ghost story redolent with overused genre types, and “Sinai,” a bizarre surrealist escapade set in Egypt.
In the latter, Eric, an aimless backpacker, sets out alone into the Sinai desert and becomes entangled in a conflict between the Biblical Lazarus, reworked as a The Mummy-style undead wanderer, and a mysterious, ancient seductress who, Eric imagines, has a mouth that is “round but languishing at the edges. Cinnamon with melancholy. Thirsty.” Occasionally this story is beautiful despite itself (as when a withered Lazarus contemplates what remains of his life—“a slim numbness to the beauty of leaves on the olive trees, an insensitivity to stars”) but it cannot hold up the weight of its overwrought metaphors and almost comically clichéd fantasy imagery (“her robes billow in currents, the stream running on without her… if I could smell, I know I would smell her stench of the departed sea, the wreckage of seaweed and shattered shells.”)
These stories jar in the collection; those with gentler surreal elements work much better, such as “Mirrorball,” the final piece, in which two gay men encounter younger, almost mirror-image versions of themselves, and relive their own long-ago breakup through watching the younger men. Again, Gray anchors this story in the physicality of love and memory, and his unwavering attention to the body allows other questions to arise naturally from the story. In the narrator’s frustrated attempts to physically revisit the scenes of an expired love affair, Gray seems to suggest that people require more than remembered moments or immediate gratification for fulfillment. This notion might also be a cliché, but Gray makes it feel new with pathos that is almost palpable.
“Where does one go after this?” the unnamed narrator of “Mirrorball” wonders when the time comes to extricate himself from the past. It’s a good question, and Gray writes it extremely well. In Entropic, the answer is rooted in awareness of the present moment—its dangers, its potential, and its great beauty.
NeWest | 180 pages | $18.95 | paper | ISBN # 978-1927063866