Matt Bell’s How They Were Found: A Review by Troy Urquhart

No matter what I write here, I cannot tell you how great this book is. In fact, I’m not even sure I know how to write a review that will  do it justice. So let’s just agree on this point from the start: however great you think Matt Bell’s new collection might be after reading this review, it’s better.

As I’ve read and re-read the stories in  How They Were Found over the last several weeks, I’ve found myself telling everyone who will listen about it. These stories are infinitely compelling, poised exactly on the brink of explosion, the perfect balance of potency and control. The other night, I passed my copy over to my wife Melissa, wondering if her reaction to it would be anything like mine. When she finished the first story, “The Cartographer’s Girl,” she turned and looked at me, wide-eyed, and I knew I was not the only one to see: this book is breathtaking.

In this first story, a cartographer searches for his lover, who has disappeared. He makes maps, traces their relationship on paper with a system first of complicated symbols and then of words, which prove to be an equally complicated set of symbols. Despite his careful mapping, these marks he makes on paper lead him nowhere, reveal nothing to him except his own desire:

No matter how hard he tries, the cartographer cannot keep to ground truth, cannot render the streets and landmarks in precise relation to each other. No cartographer can.

This problem of representation is, perhaps, one of the central issues of the collection: the symbol cannot ever accurately describe the thing it claims to represent. Characters in these stories are searching, trying to make sense of their past, to make meaning in their present, but the symbols are inadequate at every turn.

In “Her Ennead,”  for instance, a short piece in (appropriately) nine sections, Bell explores language as a way of representing a child from conception to birth. The unborn child is “a joke,”  “a seed,”  “a bird,”   or “a knife” becoming at last “a possibility, or, rather, a string of possibilities and potentialities”.

And in “His Last Great Gift,”   the protagonist struggles to understand his own writing, which he believes to be divinely inspired:

When he reads over what he has written, he recognizes that the blueprint he has been given is something that could not have originated from within him. He can barely comprehend it as it is now, fully formed upon the paper…

But it is not simply that, not simply a matter of trying to make things make sense. It is also a problem of obsession: over and over again, we see characters return to these symbols, these imperfect manifestations of what has been beautiful or tragic–but mostly tragic–in their lives. The narrator of “Mantodea” puts it this way:

I swallowed hard, and when I didn’t die I went back for more.

And in “Ten Scenes from a Movie Called Mercy”  the narrator tells us:

Guilt is a loop of footage repeated ad infinitum.

It’s the inescapability of an often tragic past that drives many of these stories. The protagonist of “Dredge” tries to recover the memory of his mother through acts that simultaneously disgust and fascinate me. The ex-lovers in “The Leftover” re-live the early parts of their relationships. And the characters from “Wolf Parts” play out their roles compulsively, in every possible permutation, each devouring the other again and again.

And perhaps what I mean when by this feeling of disgust and fascination is that this collection also confronts the reader with a crisis of identification. Like Kafka, like O’Connor, like Nabakov, Bell presents characters in a manner so compelling that they are intimately human, even when performing the most inhumane of acts. The narrator of “Hold on to your Vacuum” says:

The line between voyeur and participant blurs.

And it’s true. I not sure whether I’m watching these characters with a sort of sick fascination, or if I’m identifying with their struggles, with their pain, and even with their actions.

These stories are so perfect in their narration, so finely crafted, that I finish each of them with the thought, “I could write a story like that.”  But of course, I haven’t. And, if we’re being honest here, I don’t know that I ever really could.

All the while, I know that Bell is there, behind the curtain, pulling strings and levers to make these stories come to life, but there’s never a slip, never a gap in the curtain to reveal his presence. Instead, I find myself fully taken in by the worlds he creates, startled perhaps by the bizarre turns that he sometimes takes, but always believing, always believing.

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How They Were Found is out on the 5th of October from Keyhole Press; it is now available for pre-order.