Ordinary People
You Are Not the One
Vestal McIntyre
Carroll & Graf Publishers
The title of Vestal McIntyre's debut short story collection, You Are Not the One, is a vague invocation of the rejected, unpicked, and overlooked characters in its pages. One wonders, were it not for the success of Adam Haslett's similarly titled You Are Not a Stranger Here (2002), would these eight stories be named simply, Octo. The one masterful story in the book, “Octo” tells the story of Jamie, a troubled thirteen-year-old boy whose beloved pet octopus has outgrown its tank and the rest of the family’s tolerance for its strangeness.
In these eight stories, McIntyre shows a gift for discovering offbeat, downbeat, underdog protagonists. With the exceptions of an inadvertently prosperous architect and a best-selling poet, these are ordinary working people: a pastry chef, a busboy, a graphic designer, a medical courier. The handful of protagonists is diverse—children and adults, men and women, gay and straight—but they all belong to the torpid terrain of the collection, which has its geographic center in New York City and outposts in rural Idaho and the hills of the Berkshires.
In McIntyre country, the people are a sluggish lot, suffering dull losses of drive and sensation. The description of the suffering octopus, “curled up, pale now, with dark rings around his eyes,” is a good analogue for their emotional condition. Their problems have to do with feeling different and failing to fit in or connect with others. Unable to accept their difference, to deal with self-disappointment, they seek lowly forms of happiness: a cocaine binge, a thermosful of vodka and ginger ale, hours spent with a suburban call girl. After a heady evening spent dipping into her coke stash and performing bizarre interpretive dance for a group of young partiers, Lynn, the 43-year-old protagonist of “Binge,” fantasizes about time travel: “You go back before you made mistakes,” she thinks, “before you did anything at all, because everything you do is a mistake.”
McIntyre has a storyteller's instinct for throwing low-key characters into high-wire situations. In “Dunford,” an arid company man pursues his soapsud-drenched fantasy of sex in a carwash. The bookworm narrator of “Foray” rescues his Down syndrome cousin from the currents of the Snake River and then heroically reads Moby-Dick aloud to him for the remaining days of summer vacation. In “Sahara,” a forlorn busboy in a kangaroo costume is kidnapped from the restaurant where he works by teenagers who mistake him for a rival school's mascot. The busboy, Les, recounts the story. His impassivity, his heavy failure to act on his own behalf, is intensified by the fact that he keeps the kangaroo head on throughout most of his abduction.
McIntyre is most successful at communicating a protagonist's dilemma in “Octo.” The sad heart of this story lies in our identification of the boy with the octopus. Like Octo, Jamie is ungainly. Shut out of his special education class due to “Fits of Rage,” he pads around the apartment alone all day, except for the hour when a home help aid serves him lunch and medication. His parents fret about him behind their bedroom door, his sister is sick of being teased about her “retard brother,” and, at night, Jamie shames himself with “dirty dream[s]” and nocturnal emissions. Since the octopus's plight is analogous to Jamie's, we are acutely aware of Jamie's emotional landscape. After he is poisoned by Jamie's father, “Octo is white on the orange carpet with all his legs coiled tight to him, polka-dot suckers exposed.” Later, being dumped at the beach, “Octo looks deflated. The water is foggy with brown bits of flesh.” Even as McIntyre builds sympathy for Jamie's plight, the descriptions of the octopus are so repulsive and scary that we must concur with the family: “It's time to get rid of Octo.” But while we are willing to sacrifice Octo, we care for Jamie and want him to grow up, to survive, to get better and not worse.
In other stories, we fail to connect with the protagonists. Their problems are specific, unfortunate, in some cases insolvable, and in other cases solvable if only the character would exert an ordinary amount of effort. These are people who need to wake up, splash cold water onto their faces, and do something with their lives. Their dilemmas are frustrating in their ordinariness. Is this the best they can do?
Some of these characters have inborn excuses for not performing better. The cousin, Vance, in “Foray” has Down syndrome. Les, in “Sahara,” spent his childhood in an orphanage. Raymond, in “Disability,” grew up with a divorced, depressed mother who nurtured him into drug addiction. In the period of his life that he narrates, Raymond is drinking heavily and collecting disability checks for a phantom back injury. If anyone has an excuse for under-performing, this gang does, and some of them know it. The title character in “Dunford” has his wife and son to provide for, so “deep inside, [he] felt a quiet satisfaction that he need not, for the next two years, worry about the fulfillment of his dreams.”
It may seem that McIntyre is suggesting that this, dispirited as it is, is the best his protagonists can do; but the power this writer invests in his nonhuman entities—the novel Moby-Dick, the Snake River, the Bruneau Sand Dunes—belies this. At the best moments of this collection, we feel what it is like to be inert and powerless. Our failure to connect to the stories lies not with the human characters, but with our distance from them. When a life derails, it can be desperately hard to get it back on track. And it is impossible for a writer to depict that highly personal battle without bringing us in closer to his characters.
The story “Nightwalking,” about a small family reunion, has a different feeling. Of the three protagonists, two have advanced beyond their personal torpor. The brother, disregarding the collection's title, realizes that his girlfriend Sarah is the one: “Calvin thought to himself. I will ask her to marry me. Not soon, but someday.”
The stories in You Are Not the One attract and entertain us, like Craig, the freelance office jester in the campy “ONJ.com.” Initially, he captivates Olive with his polished style, his cute cartoons. and his fun bar chatter. Ultimately, though, Olive finds that he is more trouble than she bargained for. As smooth as he is, Craig is also ungainly, like the overgrown octopus, like the cousin in ''Foray'' with his “erection impudently lifting the front of his lime green swimsuit.” Like Olive, who “turned [from Craig] and with a casual air, walked away,” we close this book and walk away, finding it too easy, unfortunately, not to look back.