Greetings from Below. David Philip Mullins
Table of Contents
True Love Versus the Cigar-Store Indian
Crash Site on a Desert Mountain Outside Las Vegas
for Seraphim—who else?
. . . as this appalling ocean surrounds the verdant land, so in the soul of man there lies one insular Tahiti, full of peace and joy, but encompassed by all the horrors of the half known life.
—Herman Melville, Moby-Dick
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The stories in this book have appeared, in slightly different form, in the following publications:
Cimarron Review (“A Familiar Place”)
Ecotone (“Arboretum”)
Fiction (“Longing to Love You,” as “The Last Thing in the World”)
Folio (“Crash Site on a Desert Mountain Outside Las Vegas”)
The Massachusetts Review (“Glitter Gulch”)
New England Review (“Driving Lessons”; “True Love Versus the Cigar-Store Indian”; “First Sight”)
The Yale Review (“This Life or the Next”)
I would like to thank the following editors for their faith and guidance: Ben George, Clay Matthews, Andrew Lieb, Sean Santa, David Lenson, Liz Harris Behling, and J.D. McClatchy. I would especially like to thank Stephen Donadio, longtime editor of New England Review, for taking a chance on me back in 2000; if he hadn’t, I may have given up.
Many thanks to the folks at the Sewanee Writers’ Conference—most notably, Don Waters, Margot Livesey, and Randall Kenan—as well as to everyone at Yaddo, where a part of this book was written. Thanks, too, to my friends and teachers from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, particularly James Alan McPherson, Chris Offutt, Marilynne Robinson, ZZ Packer, Thisbe Nissen, Ethan Canin, James Hynes, Jim Crace, Connie Brothers, Jan Zenisek, Deb West, and Frank Conroy.
For their belief in my work and for their tireless efforts to see it published, thank you to Nat Sobel, Julie Stevenson, Cate Peebles, and everyone else at Sobel Weber Associates, Inc.
Huge props to all those who critiqued early, execrable drafts of these stories, including Christian Brebbia, Neil Evans, Adena Williams, Matthew Vollmer, Amy Grace Loyd, and Ian Stansel. My heartfelt gratitude for the time and input. A very special thank you to John Irsfeld, one of the most generous human beings I’ve ever known, for patiently editing almost every sentence of fiction I’ve ever written and for eighteen long years of coaching and encouragement.
For various acts of kindness, big old thanks to Rick Moody, Joyce Carol Oates, Jack Brebbia, Teri Tobias, and Rachel Donadio. Thanks also to Lisa Lenzo and Jamie Enus for serendipitous inspiration.
Thank you to David Means for selecting this book for the Mary McCarthy Prize, as well as to Sarah Gorham and the rest of the Sarabande team for handling it with care.
For support, motivation, and, most importantly, love, I owe thanks to my mother, Marie Mullins, and to Flemming Loevenvig. I also owe thanks to my father, Jim Mullins, for inculcating me with a respect for literature and for keeping a copy of Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction in his sock drawer—finding it changed my life forever.
My eternal appreciation to Zoey and James, for giving me a reason to believe in our species and for making me try harder in everything I do.
Finally, the biggest thank you of all to my loving wife, Seraphim, whom I owe everything I have. Without her companionship, sacrifices, editorial insight, and unending aplomb, this book could never have been written.
D.P.M.
Foreword
TO FIND A BEAUTIFUL COLLECTION OF STORIES IN A PILE OF manuscripts is, for any judge of any contest, a wonderful surprise, a kind of revelatory experience. This comes in part from knowing––as most writers know––that a good short story is a balancing act, a tightrope walk of innumerable elements all working together for a short duration to draw out and reveal a particular mystery. It’s one thing to read a good story in a magazine, singular and alone, but it’s another to find an entire book of them, fully realized, each one honed to perfection, neat and tidy, into a collection that holds together like one of those great pop albums of yore, producing a cohesive aesthetic experience. What a pleasure to find not only a strong collection of stories, but a distinctive voice, clear and precise, and a vision that is unique and new while at the same time rooted in the traditions of the form, echoing Ernest Hemingway, Frank O’Connor, Flannery O’Connor, and all of the other great practitioners who took the risk of writing short fiction. As Frank O’Connor pointed out, each attempt at writing a story contains “the possibility of a new form as well as a possibility of a complete fiasco.”
Well, David Philip Mullins risked a fiasco and instead created a highly original collection of short stories. Mullins understands that inventiveness arises from acute attention to the demands of each story and respect for the material itself. Every writer finds a way into the work: Chekhov leaned close and, with his ear cupped, caught the intimate conversations between lovers––and serfs and masters––watching them move in what seemed to be isolated chambers of their desires. Borges sealed himself into a diving bell of his own fantastic style, plunging deep into seas of time and culture. Alice Munro maps expansive topographies of relationships, mostly female, using her utterly and deceptively unique style to reveal the complex meeting points of personal history, geography, and destiny. And Mullins, for his part, gently threads the narrative of a single character through a hole of paternal loss, watching carefully as he passes through early boyhood up through adulthood (and we’re talking real adulthood, not the delayed adolescence so