NEXT TO NOTHING—Keith Banner

He whispers, real sexy with closed eyes, smiling without showing any teeth: "Pepsi Edge. Pepsi Edge. Pepsi Edge."

—from "Queers Can't Hear"

Next To Nothing can mean a a number of things. It could be a reference to the Carveresque minimalism Keith Banner occasionally goes for in his stories of mostly younger queer working people. (Raymond Carver? More like Gaymond Carver, amirite?) Or it could refer to what these members of the neoliberal precariat own, or have to look forward to. In the title story "Next to Nothing", the narrator tells us, "I don't get sad." He's closing down a Ponderosa Steakhouse. Coffee and caffeine gum are his homebrew anti-depressants. He has a crush on his sister's loser husband. They like to get high together—"the Sick Fag and the Low-Achieving Husband." Neither of them has health insurance, we find out, after hubby tries to kill himself and is hospitalized. But "Next to Nothing" isn't an Issue Story or an examination of how The Other(ed) Half Lives—it's a breezy, conversational narrative.


Let's go hang out in the parking lot of the abandoned Wal-Mart and get high.

Most of the stories in Next to Nothing are. Mostly first-person narrators, working in stores and restaurants, eating at cheap family restaurants and getting hurt, filling their prescriptions at Walgreens, having sex during commercial breaks, trying to navigate domestic worlds dominated by angry straight women. There are few pleasures left in the world, but here's one people don't talk about much—coming home from work, frazzled and smelling like work, and actually being home. Home to get high, or watch TV, or have sex, or enjoy air conditioning and music, all without having to still be mentally at work thanks to one's laptop, or cell phone, or ambition to be in a band or an MMA fighter, or to get a 4000th Twitter follower. Banner's characters still struggle against the laws barring smoking in most workplaces and restaurants. There's rough stuff too; in one story a kid gets gay-bashed and in addition to being horrible, it's also terrible—the kid didn't even have a boyfriend.

Is that all? Why, do you need more? Some of the stories in this collection were previously published in literary journals and anthologies like Lodestar Quarterly and Keeping the Wolves at Bay: Emerging Writers—the milieu in Banner's stories are as foreign and strange to whomever reads those venues as post-human colony under a dome floating on the methane oceans of Titan are. They just assume without knowing that these stories are pitch perfect, and they are. "How To Get from This to This" spells out it all out though in the narrator's epiphany:

"This is the secret nobody ever tells you: there is so much happiness when you finally give in, a kind of happiness you can't imagine until you hit the very bottom. It's a magical pond you slip into headfirst, drowning quickly, though you take your time. There's quiet, and then there's not even quiet, It's just like that. And you're grateful."

There's a tiny revolution, right there. Carver and a generation of epigones would write about these existences as though they were lives of quiet desperation. But Banner's character here is happy. Most of them are happy, after a fashion. It is extremely difficult for realists not to write about sad people who have some sad realization like, "I am sad, and I guess my parents were as well. We're all sad, aren't we? Yes, yes we are."

Well, actually, we're not. Buy this book.