Book Review: Asunder, by Robert Lopez
Review by Tyler Gillespie
Robert Lopez’s new collection of short stories Asunder takes readers on a dirty-ash tray trip into the lives of characters more familiar with sex than love. Lopez’s quick-paced narratives usually last the attention span of the Adderall-generation, but the awareness of detail in the stories makes them something much more difficult, more special.
I found myself chain-smoking the collection’s stories, reading and re-reading its sentences. There is a subtle lyricism in the stories, mixing dark humor with destruction. It was a late-night literary orgy with some shady characters with whom I gladly partied. Lopez confronts the world of page-long descriptions and destroys the notion that a good story needs to be overly saturated. It’s almost as if some recent literature has trained us to expect heavy, twisting language that distorts the fact that the story isn’t actually that good. The opposite could be said of the stories in Asunder.
In a world of noise, Lopez offers quiet. There is a tremendous restraint to the language in the collection. The prose is simple and powerful; it reminds the reader that sometimes more is conveyed in silences. Lopez provides narratives surrounding characters that are usually in the periphery – loners, outsiders – rather than the forefront. Lopez’s concise style may frustrate some readers, but the payoff, the gasoline-soaked insight, is worth the time.
Throughout the collection, Lopez examines the almost inherent dysfunction present in modern relationships. It’s like a Rated-R version of a Raymond Carver story. In “Priapism” Lopez reiterates a similar narrative concentrating on nuances and standards in the evolution of a sexual relationship:
The man has an erection and the woman is locked in the bathroom. The children are downstairs playing with toys. The dog is in the yard. The back door has been left openand the light in the hallway is on and so is the television in the living room.
This collection is not for the faint-of-heart, it’s more for the 2 AM reader, the whisky drinker. It’s for people who constantly live in the eye-of-the storm and are okay with it, revel in the chaos. Lopez has a way of exploiting his character’s insecurities and capturing the innate self-doubt that lies in even the darkest of hearts. The collection poses new questions to old answers, and it forces the reader to come to their own conclusions about morality and boredom. “Scar” details the physical and mental differences between two lovers, showing the thought-process of sex.
I don’t know what she sees in me, if anything. My body is smooth and unbroken. No runs, no hits, no errors. I don’t have anything to say and though I listen to people when they talk, I don’t think that makes me good at it.
In “To Death I’m Starving,” Lopez writes a lover-scorned rage. “I have no recollection of what I was feeling while I was shooting him repeatedly only that at the end of it I was tired of the noise and mess.” The breakup of a union manifests in an actual murder scene – something anyone who has ever been in a bad relationship can picture. In this way, readers are allowed to experience twisted fantasies through Lopez’s work without breaking any laws.
Some of the short stories are kind-of dense, but more often than not, Lopez excels in bringing out the very best – or in their case, worst – in his subjects. Some may prefer in-depth narratives, but Lopez’s style is not one to give simple solutions. For me, Lopez’s short story collection was like finding money in the washing machine – an unexpected surprise that left me with the question “what should I do with it? Get drunk or pay the bills?”
Included in Asunder is Lopez’s “a novella in shorts” titled The Trees Underground. In this novella, Lopez chronicles the life of an unpaid – “this is what they’ll pay me for when they do finally pay me if that sort of miracle is even possible” – worker in a home for the blind. The worker’s job is to “walk [the] blindsters around obstacles and fill up their lunch trays at lunchtime.”
Similar to the short stories in Asunder, the novella’s narrative is very concise. Each chapter (about two or three pages) makes a conscious effort to reiterate the one before it – sometimes repeating exact phrases. Some people may find this style a little too repetitive, but the prose allows for a deeper understanding of the story. The narrator takes care of “oldsters” with names like Blind Betty and Pity Jimmy. Through the worker’s relationship – irritable and bitter – with the blind, the narrator questions the reliability of his own senses.
Blind Betty knows about the TV and refrigerator because I told her once. The blindsters always remember what it is you tell them. Must be because they’re blind and don’t have to remember what anything looks like.
A running theme is the parallel between lost eyesight and the forgotten memory of home. The worker loses his ability to remember his home – his attachment to tangible possessions. In many ways the narrator is more in-the-dark about his life than the people he is in charge of assisting. The narrative questions if “reality” is defined by only what the eye observes, and if so, how much people are actually seeing.
Tyler Gillespie recently graduated from the University of Central Florida with a B.A. in English Literature and a B.S.B.A. in General Business Administration. His short stories and opinion pieces have been featured in several publications.
