New player in the ring

The Correspondence
J D Daniels
Penguin
2017, pp 126, Rs 1,059

Don’t make your books any shorter, please,” Graham Greene begged his friend Muriel Spark in a 1974 letter, “or you’ll disappear like Beckett.” J D Daniels’s first book, The Correspondence, is all of 126 pages. It’s so slim you can use it as a bookmark inside another book. It’s so slim it’s over before it’s quite gotten going.

But from the moment you crack it open, you’re in the presence of an original voice. Daniels is a young writer, raised in Kentucky, who lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts. His book comprises a series of letters with titles like Letter From Majorca and Letter From Kentucky. These aren’t addressed to anyone in particular. Each could profitably be called, to borrow the title of a James Baldwin essay, Letter From a Region in My Mind.

Four are billed as essays; two are said to be short stories. Each originally appeared in The Paris Review, a magazine that, under the editorship of Lorin Stein, has been on a hot streak. The writer Tom Franklin once described a certain kind of Southern literary voice as “the sensitive guy at the dogfight.” There’s some of that quality in the first essay here, Letter From Cambridge. Instead of dogfighting, there is mixed martial arts. Daniels is newly divorced and finally sober. He decides that it might feel good to hit people, or to be hit, as if in agreement with the novelist Harry Crews, who wrote, “Nothing gets you back in touch with yourself like a little of your own blood.” Living in Cambridge, Daniels begins to study Brazilian jujitsu.

He’s the kind of mild guy other fighters call professor. But he gets quite adept at violence; he grows feral. His girlfriend asks, “What happened to the bookish layabout I fell in love with?” He finds himself thinking while running: “Cambridge is lousy with runners, and every time one of those scarecrows breezed past me and my knee brace, I thought, I’m glad you can run, because when I catch you, the E R nurse is going to pick your teeth out of my elbow the way Mamaw picked raisins out of her slice of cake.” This passage is both typical of this book and startling. It’s typical because Daniels leans on his rough upbringing in Kentucky, and violence is never far below the surface of these letters. It’s startling because The Correspondence is also thoughtful and almost self-consciously literary. This same chapter includes a long, knowing evaluation of the state of Brazilian literature.

These essays and stories move high and low at once. Some read a bit like the earthy and doomed short stories of the West Virginia writer Breece D’J Pancake, as tweaked by an ironic miniaturist like Lydia Davis. It’s an intoxicating combination. We read about the blue-collar jobs the author has worked, about his uncle who once woke up in a dumpster, and about his sometimes abusive father, a Vietnam veteran. We read about his long nights, before he was sober, doing things like snorting pills off the back of filthy toilets in bars. “I was a promising young drunk,” he tells us, “bad with women and an easy vomiter.” He gets freelance writing assignments from national magazines (The New Republic, GQ, The London Review of Books) but mostly blows them. He wants to write something larger and better, but he thinks to himself: “There was nothing the matter with me that was not also the matter with everyone else.

I was not as interesting as I thought I was. My major problem, inadequate or inappropriate love from my parents, was as common as dirt.” He begins to write the letters in this book. His life improves. The problem that confronts the reader of The Correspondence is that, after the near-brilliant first three essays, the pieces begin to display glitches. The second half of the book (two stories and another essay) is lesser work, uneven in tone. Given that the first three essays fill only 76 pages, this entire book begins to seem like a premature birth. The second half can’t come close to cashing the check the first half has written. This is a book proposal as much as a book. The short stories are of a piece with the essays; they’re essentially written in the same voice and fit inside the same loose narrative arc. But they lack the gravitas of the earlier letters, and the wit fizzles.

In Letter From Devils Tower, billed as fiction, a woman hands a man her purse (he doesn’t want it), and she says to him: “Be careful. Don’t touch it. You might break out in little purses and purse yourself to death.” It’s impossible to imagine a line this fancifully dead in the first half. There’s a sense of genuine solitude in the best letters in The Correspondence. Other people — a wife, friends, employers, lovers — flicker in and out, but Daniels makes his way very much alone, in front of his laptop, in the ring and everyplace else.

“Fighting was an adequate substitute for writing,” he writes. “I got in a couple of fights, under controlled circumstances, almost every day, sometimes before breakfast. A fight is a story. It offers the shaped comfort of narrative: a beginning, first this happened, and a middle, then this happened because of that — and, if it is not interrupted, an end.”

The Correspondence doesn’t have a proper ending. But its beginning is packed with so much promise that 2017 looks better already.