Buy This Book to Be Cooler Than Your Cool Friends
But seriously, get Parker Young's new collection of short stories
This week the English Department and our Creative Writing program hosted a PC alum, Parker Young, who came down from Chicago to read from his new short story collection, Cheap Therapist Says You’re Insane. Parker graduated in 2011, before I started, so it was nice to meet him and hear about his life after graduation, L.A. to Chicago, where he did his MFA at the Art Institute.
I hadn’t had a chance to read the stories before he read them to our students and faculty on Wednesday night, and it was a real treat to just be immediately shocked when he started things off with “Oven Blew Up”:
“One day, our oven blew up. No food was inside, so we didn’t miss a meal, but still it was a problem. We installed another oven. That oven blew up too. We gave up on ovens altogether and put an armoire full of knick-knacks there. The armoire blew up” (56).
The students all immediately started paying more attention, and I thought, what the hell are these stories? Parker grew up in South Carolina, and the stories have the feel of old time Southern yarns meet millennial anxiety meet a stripped down, casual almost-fantastic. Like if Gabriel García Marquez had been born at the end of the twentieth century and just couldn’t be magical anymore, because climate change and then the economy collapsing.
Each story could be something a patient tells a therapist, or they could be snippets of dreams, but all of the stories in the collection evoke a strong affective response without very many adjectives, which I think is really impressive, to use an adjective myself. (García Marquez was ok with adjectives but HATED an adverb, and apparently by the end wasn’t using any at all). Most of the stories are indeterminate, where you never know quite what is happening or why, but they’re so vivid and stay with you, so I think it’s worth it to read them and feel the feelings they’ll probably evoke (anxiety, dread, fear, exhaustion, grief, loss, but also connection and a removed sense of wonder).
In research methods this week we were talking about how particular societies produce certain kinds of art—the idea that economic, technological and social structures determine the form art will take. Literary critics look back and group art together—find patterns and threads to have categories like“modernist” or “postmodern” fiction. I’ve always wondered what our early 21st century will be, and I think Parker Young’s work might help define it. Read it alongside Paul Murray from Ireland or Anna Dorn’s lesbian novel Exalted and I think we’re starting to get a picture. Buy this book—you’ve not read anything quite like it.
Back next week with a catchup on a new lawsuit challenging the SC six-week abortion ban, and more about Stewart Jones running for the U.S. House seat Jeff Duncan is vacating. We knew he’d do it. You’ll love who’s running to replace Jones in the SC legislature—Luke Rankin. A real gem.