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4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
A Startling Richness, February 20, 2008
Sean Dungan is a writer new to me and if I'm not mistaken this is his first collection of stories. I was at San Francisco's Silverman Gallery for the "Nothing Moments" exhibition, in which the evocative originals of Gail Swanlund's illustrations for this book were hung, and something about them arrested me; the gallerist indicated a shelf where the "Nothing Moments" books were to be found and I wound up walking away with "Unwelcomeness" tucked into my pocket. The book has its problems but on the whole it's one of the more exciting short story collections I've read in a while and brother, I read a lot.
From a few readings, I can sort of grasp Dungan's general outlines as a fictioneer and the topics that seem to interest him most. He is interested in the half-formed and the mutant: his characters often seem incoherent, and male; young men with problems of communication but a desperate desire to get their story out to the world. They are trapped in a hellish society in which individual freedoms are regularly denied, and a inchoate group consciousness emerges in absentia. Though primarily a writer of disconnect and alienation, he is capable of a generally savage, sometimes tender comedy that gives dimension to his narratives, and from what I've read, his imagination is vast as Vonnegut's, jampacked with insane nooks and alleys. Here and there I thought of Benjamin Weissman, the LA-based fiction writer and a stablemate of Dungan's at "Nothing Moments" (I walked out of the exhibition with a new book by Weissman as well). Indeed, if the story "Ski Club" in UNWELCOMENESS wasn't actually written by Weissman himself, then it is a loving tribute from an apprentice to il miglior fabbro.
Yet Dungan has his own voice and when it makes itself heard it's a strong one. "Number One Nears the End" mashes the pared-down, elliptical dialogue of Hemingway's Nick Adams into the backwoods camp of TV's Grizzly Adams, then halfway through makes an abrupt right turn and emerges into a quiet, savage place of death, denuded of fun. It's Dungan's sincere attempt to get to some awful truth about fathers and sons. In "Wilderness Year," a dejected grunt prowls the heat stricken parking lot of a mysteriously degraded supermarket, trying to stay cool in the face of general rejection and an ontological horror of being. That's work for you, Dungan seems to say, and yet his hero finally does come across as heroic, in the old fashioned existential way, for daring to live through a meaningless job and keep sane. And three or four of the other stories in the book are equally excellent and memorable. Maybe his female narrators are a little on the flimsy side, straw men (straw women I guess) mouthing the author's trademark vacuities. But even they come thisclose to a certain kind of reality that we just don't get enough of in fiction today. If ever I head down to Los Angeles again I'd like to hunt this guy down and shake the hand of the man who wrote "Secret Boyfriend" and many of the other marvelous tales in "Ulwelcomeness."
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 Unwelcomeness 1934500208
Sean Dungan
Nothing Moments
Unwelcomeness
Books
A Startling Richness
Sean Dungan is a writer new to me and if I'm not mistaken this is his first collection of stories. I was at San Francisco's Silverman Gallery for the "Nothing Moments" exhibition, in which the evocative originals of Gail Swanlund's illustrations for this book were hung, and something about them arrested me; the gallerist indicated a shelf where the "Nothing Moments" books were to be found and I wound up walking away with "Unwelcomeness" tucked into my pocket. The book has its problems but on the whole it's one of the more exciting short story collections I've read in a while and brother, I read a lot.
From a few readings, I can sort of grasp Dungan's general outlines as a fictioneer and the topics that seem to interest him most. He is interested in the half-formed and the mutant: his characters often seem incoherent, and male; young men with problems of communication but a desperate desire to get their story out to the world. They are trapped in a hellish society in which individual freedoms are regularly denied, and a inchoate group consciousness emerges in absentia. Though primarily a writer of disconnect and alienation, he is capable of a generally savage, sometimes tender comedy that gives dimension to his narratives, and from what I've read, his imagination is vast as Vonnegut's, jampacked with insane nooks and alleys. Here and there I thought of Benjamin Weissman, the LA-based fiction writer and a stablemate of Dungan's at "Nothing Moments" (I walked out of the exhibition with a new book by Weissman as well). Indeed, if the story "Ski Club" in UNWELCOMENESS wasn't actually written by Weissman himself, then it is a loving tribute from an apprentice to il miglior fabbro.
Yet Dungan has his own voice and when it makes itself heard it's a strong one. "Number One Nears the End" mashes the pared-down, elliptical dialogue of Hemingway's Nick Adams into the backwoods camp of TV's Grizzly Adams, then halfway through makes an abrupt right turn and emerges into a quiet, savage place of death, denuded of fun. It's Dungan's sincere attempt to get to some awful truth about fathers and sons. In "Wilderness Year," a dejected grunt prowls the heat stricken parking lot of a mysteriously degraded supermarket, trying to stay cool in the face of general rejection and an ontological horror of being. That's work for you, Dungan seems to say, and yet his hero finally does come across as heroic, in the old fashioned existential way, for daring to live through a meaningless job and keep sane. And three or four of the other stories in the book are equally excellent and memorable. Maybe his female narrators are a little on the flimsy side, straw men (straw women I guess) mouthing the author's trademark vacuities. But even they come thisclose to a certain kind of reality that we just don't get enough of in fiction today. If ever I head down to Los Angeles again I'd like to hunt this guy down and shake the hand of the man who wrote "Secret Boyfriend" and many of the other marvelous tales in "Ulwelcomeness."
Kevin Killian
February 20, 2008
- Overall: 5
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Location: San Francisco, CA United States
New Reviewer Rank: 363
Classic Reviewer Rank: 71
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