EDITORS' CHOICE

Greg Downs, Spit Baths: Stories. Athens, Georgia: The University of Georgia Press, 2006.

Winner of the Flannery O’Connor Award for short fiction, Spit Baths takes us straight to the heartland and lets us into the strange inner lives of an array of characters who are defined by where they are—whether in Kentucky, Tennessee, Hawaii, or yes, even the bathroom.

Like Flannery O’Connor, Downs gives us a nuanced view of an imperfect life in the South through hints of racial tension, outlandish actions, and the sometimes self-inflicted social displacement of people from all walks of life. Adding to their sense of displacement is the frustration these characters experience as they struggle to navigate flawed relationships using language that fails them more often than not. The characters that populate Downs’ debut fiction are hauntingly vulnerable; their unique voices capture their desperation—be they poor Southern whites, confused teenage boys, or gutsy matriarchs.

Downs captures with visceral accuracy the longing that children feel for a missing parent or a place they’ve called home. In the title story, Crawford’s mother temporarily leaves him in Kentucky with his grandmother while she starts a life in Missouri. As Maw-Maw offers Crawford life lessons over baseball—a language her eight-year-old grandson speaks—the boy begins to doubt his mother for deserting him. At first Crawford can’t wait to leave his grandmother and “her silly rules and her strange smells,” but in the end he cannot take the step forward to his mother and their new life. This ultimate moment is dreaded, painful; he punches himself in the stomach. We feel the impact of that punch, what it means to leave and be left.

In “Domestic Architecture” an adulterous father thinks he can fix his family’s problems by moving them to Hawaii for a fresh start. The father calls his son Eugene by the nickname of “Champ”—not because he won anything—but “because he’s my Champ. . . . It doesn’t get any simpler than that.” The boy resents his father for moving the family and is forever searching for a way to feel at home. As Eugene tries to find solace in the wind, we are witness to some of Downs’ most beautiful prose: “When the gusts battered the mountainside behind the house, they gave up their haul of rainwater, and shuffled off to the coasts. His father called it their own private concert, the Kauai symphony. . . . Eugene thought it was a message coming to them from home, a language he could no longer understand.”

In “Indoor Plumbing,” it is the language of racism the protagonist, Charlie, struggles not to heed: The boy develops a hang-up about public restrooms after his bigoted grandfather tells him that white people should use the stalls and black people the urinals. In “Black Pork,” a black and a white family live side by side and are friendly in the yard; they look out for each other. However, the adults only set foot in each other’s houses twice a year—on Thanksgiving and Christmas, while a nosy neighbor writes venomous letters warning the white boy to stay away from the black girl he’s known his whole life. Here, the children break the barriers, “pass[ing] back and forth between the two homes all the time,” creating a language of their own that originates in love.

These are, at the core, stories of miscommunication and disappointment. In observing a friend’s dysfunctional relationship in “Nashville Love Affairs,” Leonard recognizes a true, desperate love there—and realizes that his friend’s wife will never love her husband the way he loves her. Leonard looks at his own marriage; when his wife Embee touches him, he thinks: “You can’t tell someone you don’t love them as much as you should, as much as you want to. Soon as you say that, they’re gone thinking you don’t love them at all, don’t want to be with them. What you say and what they think you mean are not the same. So you can’t say anything at all.” Downs consistently shows us people’s insecurities during starkly honest moments. Yet he seems to suggest through these revelations that imperfection is not just to be borne, but that real beauty lies in this bared humanity.

In this book’s most experimental story, a teaching intern named Eric finds himself on a class trip to see his parents at his childhood home. A bizarre fantasy, “Field Trip” humiliates the protagonist on the most basic level: Eric repeatedly gets dressed and is told at every turn that he is naked. His father presents a slide show with photos of Eric’s life—fully exposing his son’s messy relationship; he reveals that Eric would not use birth control “but instead kept himself above it, entertaining himself with video games while his girlfriend sat alone in a doctor’s office.” Throughout the day, Eric’s mistakes are shockingly disclosed to his students and colleagues—leaving him to wrestle with the question of how, if possible, to explain himself and make things right.

When it comes to making things right, Downs’ characters arrive at breakthrough understandings about their lives and ways of talking to one another that rarely yield clear-cut answers. Instead, Downs leaves the door ajar.

Christine Condon