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Kicking In: Stories
Narcotic euphoria meets the demands of everyday life in Richard Wirick’s brilliant new collection of interlocking stories. Whether depicting a Valium-fogged lawyer representing a car painter who cooked a client in his kiln, or revealing a Gulf War orderly’s drift in and out of morphine dreams during an aerial Medevac surgery, Wirick’s stories are rich with the social contexts in which sedation’s acolytes emerge, come forward to flourish, and then often violently explode or fade away.
With a finesse that invigorates and then jars the reader, Wirick maneuvers between narratives of shimmering hallucinations and ecstatic mood-peaks. But Kicking In is not just another drug book. A gut punch to the notion that the drug war stems from society’s fringe element, Wirick shines a light on the ways presumably democratic governments use depressants and stimulants to keep selected segments of the population marginalized and disenfranchised. The result is a masterful collection — a vividly terrifying yet startlingly prosaic consideration of the varieties of drug users’ experience with what Coleridge called “the milk of Paradise.”
With a finesse that invigorates and then jars the reader, Wirick maneuvers between narratives of shimmering hallucinations and ecstatic mood-peaks. But Kicking In is not just another drug book. A gut punch to the notion that the drug war stems from society’s fringe element, Wirick shines a light on the ways presumably democratic governments use depressants and stimulants to keep selected segments of the population marginalized and disenfranchised. The result is a masterful collection — a vividly terrifying yet startlingly prosaic consideration of the varieties of drug users’ experience with what Coleridge called “the milk of Paradise.”
192 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2010
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August 17, 2016
By the third story, “The Way it Came,” I’m thinking, it can’t get any better than this. And then it did. By the time I finished, Richard Wirick’s KICKING IN there were underlinings on almost every page, corners folded over.
First, Wirick’s exquisite observation of others: “Each of them was immaculate, clean-shaven. The whites under their nails were like pale, clear quarter moons. They wiped them after each squeeze of a lemon, after each oyster.” That last sentence about the lemon putting the observation over the top. Fastening words onto that smallest gesture.
And the humor: The main character in “Self-Portrait with Wounded Eye” who lies in a hospital bed with bandages that didn’t look so bad “in the mixed opacity of the television images.” But all of that changes, “…when Dan Rather wore a dark a cardigan (he was ding that then, along with President Carter), suddenly I could see the giant bandage that I was at the bottom of the screen, superimposed on his solemn, trustworthy Texas profile.”
The vividness of language, of carefully chosen metaphor is undeniably a gift here: stepping on dead flies, a body dead three or four days, the flies had gotten all over him, laid their eggs, some hatched into maggots…the sun hit the room, heating it enough to kill the larvae that dried and turned to husks, “It was like walking through boxes of spilled Rice Krispies, or listening to the hiss and rustle of a stiff-hemmed dress.”
The language is beautiful, which to me means, economical, swift, curated, embodying many refusals—of clichés, of pomp, of jargon for shock value, of irony-- all these smaller domains where other word choices could take us. But no. Not here. These feats of language are never extraneous. They are like glasses through which to not just see but behold a character.
There is Wirick’s gift of understatement that kept me tied in. Not feeling manipulated. Not being manipulated. The chilling last line of “Angel of Sleep” where “The parents went on as normally as they could after their daughter died…..It was her pants and shoes and a snowsuit they were trying to sell, for more pills.” And it’s not just understatement. It’s the absence of moralizing judgment. I’m reminded of Greg Boyle’s invitation in TATTOOS ON THE HEART (Free Press, 2010) that we “stand in awe of what others have to carry rather than in judgment of how they carry it.”
There is the kid “whose awkward lankiness always left him fighting his own body,” in the “Getting Hector” story that begins with an epigraph from Homer. “And when they went to bring back the body of Hector, there was sorrow upon the land, sorrow like a river; sorrow to which no further sorrow could be added.”
This awkward kid, this character Tom Margavich is linked to one of the foundation texts of western culture, to the ILIAD. Whether this kid is entirely fictive or entirely historical is a distinction that instantly moot in reading of KICKING IN because we are trained by these juxtapositions, fictive or historic, to widen our vision.
Whether by metaphor or by epigraph the juxtapositions assert a deep humanism that crosses time and space, pungent, surprising and real. It is exhilarating to be reminded of this. The particular, the modest, shabby, violent, invisible, ordinary, neglected, scorned set with the iconic, the noble, the visionary, the penetratingly observed. This is a collection of stories but it is a curriculum in radical compassion. An assertion that there is no “high” and “low.” That we belong to each other. That there is not one among us who is not precious, whose life is not of incalculable value.
The poet Frank Bidart says that all good writing is the product, or the exercise of, a compassionate imagination. And I think this is true.
Goya, da Vinci, Auden, Whitman, Nabokov, Nietzsche, the Sistine Chapel ceiling where “The old bearded man reaching down to Adam. Their fingers touching, the fire passing between them that started everything”—these references are never decorative. Never a counterweight, never some kind of preaching coverlet over the plights of the characters that live in these pages. Instead, they are companions, equals to these characters, peers, living underneath the stories as a kind of wide and generous and profound holding.
Reading this book now, in 2016, I am late to the party. But very glad I came. This is why I go to fiction and to poetry and to the visual arts and to music and architecture and fashion and industrial design and all inclinations toward the beautiful. For what is here. This depth. This breadth. This humanism. This compassionate imagining. This vision.
First, Wirick’s exquisite observation of others: “Each of them was immaculate, clean-shaven. The whites under their nails were like pale, clear quarter moons. They wiped them after each squeeze of a lemon, after each oyster.” That last sentence about the lemon putting the observation over the top. Fastening words onto that smallest gesture.
And the humor: The main character in “Self-Portrait with Wounded Eye” who lies in a hospital bed with bandages that didn’t look so bad “in the mixed opacity of the television images.” But all of that changes, “…when Dan Rather wore a dark a cardigan (he was ding that then, along with President Carter), suddenly I could see the giant bandage that I was at the bottom of the screen, superimposed on his solemn, trustworthy Texas profile.”
The vividness of language, of carefully chosen metaphor is undeniably a gift here: stepping on dead flies, a body dead three or four days, the flies had gotten all over him, laid their eggs, some hatched into maggots…the sun hit the room, heating it enough to kill the larvae that dried and turned to husks, “It was like walking through boxes of spilled Rice Krispies, or listening to the hiss and rustle of a stiff-hemmed dress.”
The language is beautiful, which to me means, economical, swift, curated, embodying many refusals—of clichés, of pomp, of jargon for shock value, of irony-- all these smaller domains where other word choices could take us. But no. Not here. These feats of language are never extraneous. They are like glasses through which to not just see but behold a character.
There is Wirick’s gift of understatement that kept me tied in. Not feeling manipulated. Not being manipulated. The chilling last line of “Angel of Sleep” where “The parents went on as normally as they could after their daughter died…..It was her pants and shoes and a snowsuit they were trying to sell, for more pills.” And it’s not just understatement. It’s the absence of moralizing judgment. I’m reminded of Greg Boyle’s invitation in TATTOOS ON THE HEART (Free Press, 2010) that we “stand in awe of what others have to carry rather than in judgment of how they carry it.”
There is the kid “whose awkward lankiness always left him fighting his own body,” in the “Getting Hector” story that begins with an epigraph from Homer. “And when they went to bring back the body of Hector, there was sorrow upon the land, sorrow like a river; sorrow to which no further sorrow could be added.”
This awkward kid, this character Tom Margavich is linked to one of the foundation texts of western culture, to the ILIAD. Whether this kid is entirely fictive or entirely historical is a distinction that instantly moot in reading of KICKING IN because we are trained by these juxtapositions, fictive or historic, to widen our vision.
Whether by metaphor or by epigraph the juxtapositions assert a deep humanism that crosses time and space, pungent, surprising and real. It is exhilarating to be reminded of this. The particular, the modest, shabby, violent, invisible, ordinary, neglected, scorned set with the iconic, the noble, the visionary, the penetratingly observed. This is a collection of stories but it is a curriculum in radical compassion. An assertion that there is no “high” and “low.” That we belong to each other. That there is not one among us who is not precious, whose life is not of incalculable value.
The poet Frank Bidart says that all good writing is the product, or the exercise of, a compassionate imagination. And I think this is true.
Goya, da Vinci, Auden, Whitman, Nabokov, Nietzsche, the Sistine Chapel ceiling where “The old bearded man reaching down to Adam. Their fingers touching, the fire passing between them that started everything”—these references are never decorative. Never a counterweight, never some kind of preaching coverlet over the plights of the characters that live in these pages. Instead, they are companions, equals to these characters, peers, living underneath the stories as a kind of wide and generous and profound holding.
Reading this book now, in 2016, I am late to the party. But very glad I came. This is why I go to fiction and to poetry and to the visual arts and to music and architecture and fashion and industrial design and all inclinations toward the beautiful. For what is here. This depth. This breadth. This humanism. This compassionate imagining. This vision.
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