rev. of Dangerous Men by Geoffrey Becker

Dangerous Men
Stories by Geoffrey Becker. Univ. of Pittsburgh, $22.50 cloth. Reviewed by Fred Leebron.

For fifteen years, the Drue Heinz Literature Prize has been awarded to a first book of stories by an enormously talented writer, and this year’s selection,
Dangerous Men by Geoffrey Becker, is no exception. Marked by precise and evocative language and a vision of the world as injurious but not always fatal, Becker’s fiction is populated by musically inclined characters, most of them in their late teens or early twenties, who are willing to abandon all comforts for a chance to dance with danger.

In the title story, three bored Boston music school summer students swallow a lot of acid and ambivalently quit their apartment in the hopes of finding a few homosexuals to terrorize. It is the night of Nixon’s resignation, and their search is convoluted by a car accident and their own increasing paranoia. Virtually every page is filled with surprises in language and plot. “There was a kind of purity to the moment, as when a thick August afternoon finally transforms itself into rain,” says the narrator. “This was where we’d been heading tonight, after all. If we couldn’t beat up fags, we could at least beat up each other.”

“The Handstand Man” chronicles the doomed relationship between Jimi-John, a handstanding busker making his way through Europe, and Jenny, a wanna-be theater type with indeterminate but decisive ambitions. To win her over after she ditches him back in New York, he transforms his wretched apartment into a beach scene from Spain, replete with a roomful of sand, a palm tree, and a blue ceiling, and announces that he is going back to Europe. When Jenny tells him she’s staying put, he is “surprised to find that this didn’t really disappoint him. It was as if the place in him that had ached for her all this time had grown so large that, like an expanding star, it had given up all its energy. Instead, he felt only a quiet, spinning coolness.” In this story and in others, Becker never uses his characters’ youth as an excuse for a simplicity of emotion, but instead reveals a profound depth of fear, hope, and despair.

In “Magister Ludi,” seventeen-year-old Duney is trapped in the boredom of the summer before her departure for college, wishing “something would really happen sometime.” While she is “sentimental about the dumbest things: certain buildings in town that she’s never been inside, an ancient bike rack that used to be as tall as she was, a particular section of cracked, heaved-up sidewalk she’s walked over a thousand times,” she wonders what it is that she and her best friend are “hoping so much to preserve, and whether five years from now they’ll be sorry they tried.” Duney gets more than she bargains for in the form of a twenty-three-year-old rock guitarist named Riggy, who takes her for a swim in an isolated quarry. Even though she tries to keep her distance in the water, she can’t help but allow him to catch up. Here, and throughout
Dangerous Men, Becker’s characters must embrace the danger that only they create, for it is both part of their passage to the adulthood which they so desperately seek, and a form of expression which provides a certain and absolute release.

Only three of the eleven stories feature characters without any connection to music. “Taxes” is a deeply felt and ambitious story about two black brothers, Ronnie and Pretzel, and an old Jewish accountant, Fishman, who is Pretzel’s piecemeal employer. While Ronnie is the dangerous man Pretzel has worked so hard not to become, he is also the vehicle for danger that Pretzel cannot, ultimately, avoid. Their conflict is resolved with a broken bottle and a knife: “Pretzel swings high toward Ronnie’s face, feels himself connect with the side of his head, feels for just a moment a wonderful satisfaction, as if he has solved an impossible math problem. Then a bright comet of pain in his side as the knife enters almost effortlessly, his head seems to come untethered from his body, and the sound suddenly goes away.” The intimacy accomplished in this section speaks to the vision of an author in touch not only with the music of music, but with the music of portraying difficult characters with dignity and grace.

Throughout
Dangerous Men, Becker’s young men and women dance to a vivid and distinct language, in a world that waits to consume them while all they want to do is prevail. It is a heartbreaking and striking collection.

Fred Leebron’s first novel, Out West,
will be published by Doubleday in 1996. He is the co-editor of the forthcoming Postmodern American Fiction: A Norton Anthology.