For the dogs

Arthur Bradford crafts troubling tales

By Sam Pfeifle

Arthur Bradford reads with Thisbe Nissen, at Gulf of Maine Books, in Brunswick, August 30, at 7 p.m. Call (207) 729-5083.

CIRCUS FREAK: Arthur Bradford’s stories are hard to turn away from.

The short story is increasingly where new writers make their mark. This is partly because short fiction is a place where you can be experimental, daring, and visionary without worrying that you’re wasting time when you should be crafting an easy novel about relationships that Oprah might like. A young writer gains notoriety with a 2000-word piece in Esquire, Playboy, or Atlantic, and suddenly people pay attention.

People are certainly paying attention to Arthur Bradford, a native Mainer from Downeast, now residing in Vermont, who has burst onto the literary scene by winning a coveted O. Henry Award and getting big props from the uber-hip McSweeny’s crowd. The quotes on the back of his initial release of short stories, Dogwalker (Knopf), are like a blinding light of contemporary-giant praise: David Foster Wallace, Zadie Smith, David Sedaris, David Eggers, the new titans of post-modern (some would say post-post-modern, but that’s getting technical) literature.

It’s interesting that the aforementioned writers all work as much in non-fiction as fiction, or, like Sedaris and Eggers, almost exclusively in the former, as Bradford’s tales have a ring of truth about them that is initially the big attraction to his writing. His prose is spare and inviting, an incredibly quick read through what sometimes are very short stories. And for folks of the 20- and 30-something generation (is that x?), they are very familiar.

Most of us know a drug-dealer or two that has a tendency to turn a little vicious from time to time, but who’s a great guy once you get to know him. We’ve all lived in sketchy places with suspect neighbors to whose private affairs we’d rather not be privy. Or had a revolving front door through which roommates seem to prance.

What Bradford does, however, is take these stories from our collective consciousness and flesh them out with his own vivid, and sometimes regrettably demented, imagination.

Just look at his poor dogs. In “Catface,” a tale about a man whose roommate who comes from circus folk, the protagonist’s three-legged dog gains him a temporary girlfriend. She takes him home to see her collection of mutant puppies, who, for example, are “equipped with a set of four furry fins instead of legs. Flippers, maybe, like those of sea turtles.” They have no eyes, they are missing limbs, they are conjoined.

Bradford, always writing in the first person, comes off as the doggy Mr. Rogers: there is no deformity he can’t love, no absurdity he can’t embrace, no judgment he can pass. Everything is simple and matter of fact.

When presented with a situation in which his neighbor has kidnapped and tied-up their collective landlord, in “Bill McQuill,” Bradford’s protagonist says simply, “Bill . . . This isn’t a good idea.” When he discovers that the stew he’s been offered by this whack-job is full of old bicycle parts, he gently absconds, “I left a note on that bike . . . You were supposed to leave it there.”

It’s an insane, surreal world devoid of emotion and hysterics, as later, when McQuill gets his literary justice of being severed in half by a train, Bradford’s protagonist calmly relates the scene: “The train had run Bill over just below the waist, cutting him in two. It was strange actually, because one of the wheels was still on top of him. His legs and feet must have been over on the other side.”

But Bradford can do one better. It turns out the legs aren’t on the other side, they’re some ways down the tracks, detached, where they’ve been dragged. “When I got the leg out from under the train,” the protagonist recounts, “I tried to pick it up and carry it in my arms, but this turned out to be almost impossible. Bill’s leg squirmed about like a big fish so I dropped it.”

That description is an apt metaphor for Bradford’s work as a whole. It’s a bloody trainwreck. His voice is so wonderful and wholesome that I desperately want to be able to pick up his pretty little pieces and hold them, but it’s impossible. The perversity and lack of feeling cause the stories to squirm away from me (sometimes I even physically put the book down for a while).

The kicker comes in the penultimate tale, “Dogs.” The lead is portent enough. “No doubt you’ll think I’m strange when I tell you I’ve been making love with my girlfriend’s dog,” the protagonist begins. “But that is not my most unsettling secret.” Though the throat catches at the idea of “making love with my girlfriend’s dog” (the mind does also wander: what are the mechanics of such a thing? Would you really call it making love? Would the dog hold still for such a thing? etc.), he is right, there are more unsettling things to come.

As a sample: the dog becomes pregnant, has a little man-child who sings, the man-child dies, but not before impregnating a woman in an iron long, who has talking dog-children of her own, but not before being lauded as the next Mary Magdalene. I know, yikes.

Has Bradford gone too far? It seems that in an effort to show that we can love the sick, embrace the perverted and deformed, he has. Has it gotten to the point where we can chuckle at bestiality, laugh along as a man deals with a blind, deaf, mute child who stabs himself?

Yes, I suppose it has, but I don’t have to like it.

Sam Pfeifle can be reached at spfeifle@phx.com.