Waves of mutilation Davy Rothbart's Lone Surfer BY SAM PFEIFLE
	THE LONE SURFER OF MONTANA, KANSAS By Davy Rothbart | Simon | $12 |162 pages | Space Gallery, Portland | Monday, Sept 19 | 207.828.5600

It’s hard to disagree with Arthur Miller. Right here on the cover of Davy Rothbart’s debut collection of short stories, The Lone Surfer of Montana, Kansas, we find one of the deans of American literature proclaiming, "Davy writes with his whole heart. These stories are crushing."

Couldn’t have said it better myself. Leave it to an exemplary wordsmith to perfectly capture just what it is that Davy Rothbart does better than anyone I’ve read in a long time: write from the heart. God that’s corny. But so are love and family and sorrow, themes that Rothbart has chosen to embrace instead of avoid or deride or simply poke at. Maybe it’s not what you’d expect from a rapper and documentary filmmaker who’s made a name for himself by collecting scraps of other people’s lives in his Found magazine, possibly the most logical extension of post-modern literary thinking.

Why write a magazine when you can compile one from what’s already been written by other people for a different purpose entirely?

With his stories, Rothbart seems to be saying that we write nowadays if only to feel, and we read if only to remember that other people feel the same things we do. The characters who populate Rothbart’s stories may or may not be representative of his readership, however. Two of the protagonists are prisoners. Three others risk jail with their actions. All of them reside in a very grey moral reality — the spectrum runs from playing peeping Tom on Grandma to scalping tickets to working for pimps to hitting someone upside the head with a shovel.

Somehow, though, none of these first-person narrators are detestable. Instead, they’re pathetic, nearly one and all, in the way mangy stray dogs are — you feel bad for them, sure, but you’re not all that psyched about taking them home with you. Rothbart has a powerful capacity for empathy, it’s clear, and also seems to be writing more than a little from personal experience.

It’s interesting to note what’s lacking here. Any healthy relationships? Nope. The guys here are all either scared to death their gals are on the way out, are pining after 14 year olds, or fantasize themselves right into ridiculous situations. Nuclear families? Not many. The protagonists to a man lack mothers and fathers, all of them living with grandparents if with parental figures at all. And the one nuclear family we’re shown is cursed with a daughter dying of cystic fibrosis. How about a steady job? Uh-uh. These guys either have plenty of time to drive around aimlessly and loaf about with the elderly or they make their money skimming quarters at the airport or scamming truckers into whoring around at dive bars in Mexico.

Like more than a few of his contemporaries — Arthur Bradford, Lewis Robinson, David Foster Wallace, George Singleton (read The Half-Mammals of Dixie for Rothbart’s southern literary doppelganger) — Rothbart revels in shining a hard-to-offend light on America’s underbelly (which may actually be located in Ypsilanti, Michigan). But where others seem to be doing it just because they can, Rothbart succeeds in making us care for the underbelly’s mistake-prone residents. We believe that he cares. We know that he knows that feeling we get sometimes where we almost don’t want good things to happen because we’re worried we’ll just fuck it up.

In the collection’s title story, Gulliver and his girl come upon a kid "half-standing on a plank that rested in a hammock slung between the dead hulls of two enormous tractors," along a road in the barrens of Montana. They become mesmerized. They kiss. Suddenly, Gulliver realizes the kid is surfing.

"In my excitement my left foot slipped off the clutch and the car stalled and jerked forward. The kid whirled his head and shoulders around like he’d been shot at and in that sudden torque lost his balance and tumbled backward wildly from his board. He hit the ground with a cinder-block thump."

Rothbart needn’t worry. His stories ride waves of melancholy like an old pro, and never fall down.

Sam Pfeifle can be reached at sam@phx.com