Reviewed by Kate Harding

In “Stone Fish,” a story in Gregory Spatz’s recent collection, Wonderful Tricks, a strange woman appears by the side of a pond where a lonely teenaged boy spends his afternoons skating and, after very little introduction, pulls him into a furious kiss. By way of explanation, she offers, “I’m responding to your need--your unhappiness and need. That’s all.”

This moment goes to the heart of Wonderful Tricks, a series of riffs on human connection and disconnection as witnessed, primarily by young boys learning to mask their emotional vulnerabilities and grown men re-learning to reveal them. Spatz’s male characters, young and old, are hesitant to give of themselves--they know that way lies pain and loss--but desperate for closeness. And they are suckers for mysterious women who tantalize them with bold sexuality and striking insights into their weaknesses, only to eventually leave them just as lonely as they began.

Although they are given different names and characteristics in each story, there are essentially only two protagonists in this collection: a boy observing the adults around him, usually single parents and/or mercurial artists, as they struggle with the breaking of hearts, their own and others; and a grown man reflecting on his capacity for love through memories and intense moments of sexual union and emotional distance. It is a testament to Spatz’s gift for writing honest and specific detail that these characters and their experiences are clearly similar and yet never feel redundant. One gets the sense not of an author exorcising his demons by writing the same story again and again, but of a wise observer reminding us that, for all our efforts to outthink our hearts and groins, human beings so often end up living the same story again and again.

“...[T]here can be no me without you, and no you without me because we’re only the things we make of each other, right?” asks the title character of “Lisa Picking Cockles,” a journalist who, while trying to gather information on a temperamental artist, ends up becoming the lover of his teenaged son, Cary. “It’s the loveliest delusion of them all, too. God--and how many times in our lives do you think we’ll have to learn that one?”

Cary is in fact learning about that lovely delusion for the first time, though his relationship with his father has perhaps lent him more insight than the average seventeen-year-old possesses. He’s watched his parents’ marriage dissolve, learned about the female form by being invited to chat with nude models, and concluded that his father’s abstract art “was like a whole secret code for sex that only he would ever see or understand--it was that complicated.” When first getting to know Lisa, he decides her bow legs would be suited to cowboy boots and thus, “I pictured her in cowboy boots and nothing else. That would become her, but she was wearing loafers. I recognized how easy it was, looking at a woman like Lisa, to imagine all these things that were not really her.”

That recognition evinces Cary’s precocious wisdom, even as he simultaneously proves himself to be a typical teenaged boy, picturing a beautiful woman naked. The word choice is evidence of Spatz’s talent for subtle precision--the boots would “become” Lisa by making her more attractive, but the image of Lisa in the boots would also become the whole of Lisa in Cary’s memory, just as his father’s paintings would immortalize distorted depictions of flesh-and-blood women (eventually including Lisa). Cary sees this tendency to reduce people to mere ideas of people--the very delusion Lisa speaks of--in his father’s work and in the adult relationships he’s witnessed. Regarding his parents, he realizes the core tension in their relationship was that:

He wanted the same nothing that would be left after he was dead. He wanted to live with that and feel it all the time, keeping himself pure and cut off from the things in his life. This was why my mother had gone and would never come back for her stuff. She wanted him to be reminded every day of the tricky junk his life was really made of, and all the other people it included. Only, he wasn’t paying any attention.

The “tricky junk” of life--those things that ground people in a reality that so rarely matches their original intentions--is what the protagonists in Wonderful Tricks come up against, over and over. The characters who inhabit Spatz’s stories often express a desire to be free, not only of their unsatisfying relationships, but of the world itself--they try to lose themselves in art, affairs, cycling, swimming, skating, but eventually almost all come to similar epiphanies regarding the ephemerality of joy, of profound connection or vivid sensation, and what they wish for is escape from this maddening inconsistency. One of the few female protagonists here, in the story “Body Imaging,” cycles obsessively, until she reaches a point where she transcends the real feeling of the activity, and it becomes “blandness [that] ground up through her, erasing everything. It felt good to be so erased, because it gave her a kind of tranquility. In fact, that feeling was a little like the greatest pleasure of them all, only opposite; continuous, not momentary; giving her the world back, not taking it away for a few seconds of delight.”

Similar allusions to self-erasure appear throughout the collection. The narrator of “Plenty of Pools in Texas” recognizes that his married lover’s “love for me was not really love but an attempt to forget herself”; the protagonist of “Zigzag Cabinet” prefers amusement park rides “that suck you out of yourself, gently or forcefully;” and even the adolescent boy in the opening story, “Paradise Was This,” kicking gravel and listening to the wind, “...wished this moment would not end, because whatever came after would never be more than a passing shade of what had been...” As soon as Spatz’s characters become engaged with the world, they begin to fear the loss of that feeling, the period of disengagement that’s sure to follow.

It’s surprising, then, that there is a current of real hope underlying all this despair about the very temporary pleasures human beings are allowed. Even as Spatz’s characters muse that things will probably never get any better, one senses that they don’t truly believe it: all of these characters are moving on from one point to another, belying the stagnation they profess to feel and, in that motion, the reader glimpses moments of recognition yet to come, ones that don’t center on disappointment and loneliness.

“Nobody likes it,” says the narrator of “Walking in My Sleep,” “when the world suddenly swings back to real time and all those empty glowing things--the illusions you believed--recede back to the place they came from in your mind. Such times you may think you have the world fully unmasked, as it actually is, but that can never be.” One suspects this is the most important theme Spatz has woven through Wonderful Tricks, despite his repeated depictions of relationships that are ephemeral and unsatisfying: that our ignorance of love’s full complexity keeps us stubbornly striving to plumb the depths of human connection, even if we recognize on some level that the effort is likely to be futile.

Though these characters may not know how to establish lasting and fulfilling relationships, their earnest desire to know is what keeps us reading and caring about them. The best books, like the best rollercoasters, suck you out of yourself, and Wonderful Tricks does just that--gently, not forcefully--disproving its own central claim by making the reader feel a meaningful connection with human beings who are not only flawed and difficult but, even more problematically, fictional. These ten stories provide moments of freedom from life’s “tricky junk,” in which the reader is allowed to feel something more than life ordinarily offers; how could we want to remove ourselves from a world where there might be more stories like these?