High Horse

By Reese Sawyer

In a recent interview with Graham Holmes, featured in the Porter House Review, Joy Williams said, “…the short story—it works in such a different way than the novel does. It’s got more power just going directly to the heart than a novel.” Drew Buxton’s debut collection, So Much Heart, works towards this end. Little vignettes chained together, snippets of time where someone is called to action, to catharsis, and where the reader is called to bear witness, without judgment or relief. 

Which is all to say, there’s an immediacy to the prose and the situations Buxton’s characters are faced with. Every movement, every scene, is of the utmost necessity. The style, too, reflects this. Short, declarative sentences, dialogue written in the American, as Don Delillo might favor it, rather than some convoluted vernacular. A lot of first person narrators who probably have shitty healthcare and no retirement, in some cases because they are literal children, but are excellent at conveying what happened, and letting you decide the rest for yourself. 

Still, there is an undercurrent of the absurd running through these stories, though never outright magic or fancy. Tillikum the Whale is revivified into the Arkansas River, a young boy and his friend discover the corpse of DB Cooper while on the trail for Bigfoot, an elementary student named Eric builds an oversized replica of his crush’s noggin using K’NEX. More often than not, however, these moments of suspected magic are broken up by the harsh realities of being, death and disappointment, loneliness and self sustaining cycles of paranoia. 

Clearly, Buxton is a student of the 80’s and 90’s realists of yore, the school of Carver, Ford, and Johnson, writers who have perhaps fallen out of fashion in recent years, but who once defined the short story form, and still maintain a cult of quasi-hermetic followers and devotees. But there’s something else here, too, which is sometimes absent from minimalistic or realist short fiction, an acknowledgement of grace, maybe, a sympathy for the desires of the characters being tried. This is where Buxton stakes out a new territory for himself, and pulls forward the old tired tropes of the Carver-esque short story. 

Buxton doesn’t spend all his energy playing mournful fiddle, however. Every story in this collection contains something which is objectively funny, bringing you up while at the same time you can tell that most certainly things are going down. Buxton’s unadorned voice, his ability to face up to mental illness, to neglect and abuse without flinching, allows him to demonstrate the utter humor which lies at the heart of suffering in a country where every person imagines themselves as being a few lucky breaks from royalty, from fame and glory, and salvation of one kind or another. 

One wonders how Buxton’s style might translate to a longer form. Alas, the ever present quandary for writers of short fiction in our age. But what of the novel? You must write the novel. Writers like Williams, however, remind us that perhaps no medium is better indicative of an American style than that of the short story. At their best, they can stand toe to toe with the greatest of novels, and exceed them too, if rendered with the proper attention and care. Buxton’s stories are of the fullest potential, potential mostly fulfilled and not hinted at, assuredly staking their claim as to where and what is America, and where me and you sit in it, buddy, whether we acknowledge it or not. 

“I made a sandwich (and ate it) even though it was gross…” so says the narrator of the title story. I say—we’ve all eaten a gross sandwich, and surely will again, before all is said and finished. In the meantime, let us be thankful, for how long has it been since a work of American fiction opened with a refrain from Cool Hand Luke, and ended with a character nearly admitting they shit themselves on purpose? Too long. Maybe never. Such is the nature of So Much Heart, and why we all should be looking forward to and anticipating with great ceremony and excitement Drew Buxton’s next effort.