“Grammar is a piano I play by ear.” — Joan Didion
What is “up”? A preposition. What is a preposition? A part of speech, often explained to elementary-school students as “anything a frog can do to a log.” Prepositions describe the relation of a noun to time and space — the book on the shelf, the moment after the action. Though they are necessary for (there’s another one!) any attempt at descriptive language, as elements of a sentence go, they are often overlooked. The nouns are the subjects and objects, the protagonist, as it were, of the sentence; the verbs convey the action. They make things happen. Perhaps, though, as a new book contends, prepositions are the unsung heroes of our language.
In About, Above, Around: Stories (Texas Review Press), the new short-story collection by author and former University of Memphis creative writing professor Mark Mayer, a preposition is more than a simple part of speech. Prepositions define relationships, and, as such, they are the key to describing our emotions. People are like haunted houses, Mayer contends, and their emotions are the spirits doing the haunting; the movement of emotions through a person can be best described with the use of prepositions. “The ghost went _____ the house,” Mayer writes. “When she flies through the television or smiles inside the mirror or hovers over the cradle, it’s the preposition as much as the verb that animates her apparition.”
On the surface, Mayer’s premise might sound quite academic — a short-story collection that is as exciting as a diagrammed sentence — but no: There’s visceral truth and feeling to be found here. Beyond (or throughout, beneath, behind) the postmodern approach, About, Above, Around is prose distilled to its most compelling moments.
Written during his time as a creative writing professor at the University of Memphis, About, Above, Around: Stories uses prepositions to frame moments of change, discovery, and dissolution and, in doing so, creates a dazzling glimpse into its characters’ literary lives.
A short story has no time or space for the slow build of a novel, and Mayer has expertly situated each of the entries in his new offering at the moment when a life is defined — when relationships crumble or solidify as a thing itself; when time runs out, in the days after a great loss. His new collection is more than a promising premise; it’s a page-turning examination of how people define themselves in relation to others, and though it is due for release this month, it has already caught the attention of the literary world.
About, Above, Around was selected by Iranian-American poet and novelist Kaveh Akbar, author of the New York Times-bestselling Martyr!, to win the 2024 George Garrett Fiction Prize. “About, Above, Around is thrillingly ambitious and deliciously readable, a remarkable vortex of place and mind and spirit illuminating how our lives are shaped, and how we’re held within them,” Akbar wrote of the collection
Mayer’s bona fides do not end there. Also in 2024, he was an artist-in-residence in our city’s own Crosstown Arts Artist Residency program, and his first novel, Aerialists (Bloomsbury), was shortlisted for the William Saroyan International Prize for Writing. He also was the recipient in 2024 of an Early Career Research Award from the University of Memphis. The awards, residencies, and book blurbs are icing on the cake, however. About, Above, Around stands on its own merits.
Without
photograph courtesy Mark Mayer
Mark Mayer
Mayer measures mortality in bald spots, boxes of Christmas CDs donated to the Salvation Army, secondhand cookie-cutters, and smashed graham-cracker temples. In doing so, he makes the unknowable somewhat measurable. Under his careful tutelage, the reader understands that absence can be a thing itself, something weighty carried as an act of remembrance. The technique of writing about loss by writing about the thousand small ways it changes a life makes such an enormous change more immediate. Beyond the practical efficacy of Mayer’s approach, there exists also ways in which it forces him to convey his meaning by juxtaposition and subtle hints. As an added bonus, his economy of words also yields no end of equally gut-wrenching and witty turns of phrase.
“His wife had thought cremation would let him feel her presence anywhere, but she wasn’t in the poultry section,” Mayer writes in “Without.” In this story, the widower Victor’s grief “surrounded him on all sides, above, about, around.” His wife’s absence is with him in the grocery store, and it waits for him when he arrives home. For his readers, Mayer translates the feeling of loss, into the experience of cooking chicken for one instead of two, or the decision to box up and donate decorations instead of celebrating a holiday alone. From parents in rehab and missing limbs and grieving spouses, the author shows an overflow of emotion as changes in the way his characters inhabit their dramatically altered worlds.
“That was my mother’s question. What is this about? My mom didn’t insist on good behavior. She insisted bad behavior be about something other than itself,” Mayer writes in “About II,” one of a series of “About” stories. It’s as close as the author comes to telling the reader what his premise is all about, that as humans, our bodies are possessed by and then express emotions, often in ways that appear, at first glance, absurd.
Construction and Deconstruction
About, Above, Around is not only a collection of short stories. The book includes a series of reproductions of oil-on-canvas paintings by Jason Stopa which complement Mayer’s work. The artist’s paintings are abstractly emotive and geometric, subtle creations crafted of colors and shapes. They recall that, at its most basic, the English language is little more than a collection of sounds represented by arrangements of a mere 26 characters. With those two-dozen characters, though, stories, wedding vows, eulogies, patriotic slogans, and more are made. Hearts can be stirred, lives joined or summed up, imaginations kindled with words made of those same letters arranged and rearranged. Similarly, emotions can be evoked with little more than carefully chosen hues and swerves of shape.
The paintings separate sections of stories named after prepositions and presented alphabetically. With each painting and every preposition, the reader is made aware that they are glimpsing a whole in its constituent parts. These stories represent whole lives boiled down to their most defining moments, and the stories themselves are represented by words — “after,” “beyond,” “under” — which in turn define the ways Mayer’s characters relate to their partners and careers, parents and siblings, lovers and losses.
“If you wanted a non-zero vacation, you’d have to never reverse,” Mayer writes in “Aboard,” a story following recently retired high school physics teacher Mr. Memelowski. “It depended on the frame of reference,” he continues. “If your frame of reference was the Milky Way, then even standing over the white board for 37 years was a dizzy forward journey.”
As Mr. Memelowski attempts to defend his life and career by proving he has gone somewhere, achieved something lasting, his story acts as an excellent primer for the collection as a whole. Prepositions, as a rule, are relational. They describe where an object exists in relation to another object. They showcase the pain of comparison, the so-called thief of joy.
“As” follows sisters Angelica Smarts, Ashleigh Smarts, and Amy Smarts, all of whom share initials that spell the titular preposition. Angelica is a middle child, and her place in the world is so often demarcated by her position to others — as tall as, as bright as, as quick as — that for her it is a relief to spend the evening of her birthday alone.
50 Ways to Be Around Each Other
With 50 prepositions to explore, Mayer enjoys the room to be ambitious in his storytelling. Though there are occasionally shades of George Saunders or Kurt Vonnegut in the more experimental short stories, Mayer’s voice remains distinctly his own.
“Around” is experimental, with some text written as though in a screenplay, other sections ringing around an undisclosed center pole. “Like” follows a 19-year-old who feels alien, or almost like a human teenager, prompting the question: Is the sense of alienation a universal feeling?
In “At,” Mogo the comic book writer pays an “unscrupulous professor” to install in his brain a computer chip that causes dull thought to ignite pain. Mogo then begins his Golden Era by creating the Auditor, a withered wooden man driven to name and number everything in the world, and in so doing, to deny the existence of all the world’s mystery and magic. That is, of course, before Mogo is himself driven insane by his unceasing quest for novelty and excitement, his inability to enjoy the mundane repetition that makes up most of life’s scenes.
Most of the stories in Mayer’s collection, however, explore those small but significant personal moments of which a life is made. In “Before,” Marya watches the sunset while dangling her legs over the tailgate of a blue pickup truck on Thunkett Beach, balanced on a pale, precarious line of adolescence between childhood and adulthood. “Down” explores depression, riffing on the idea of someone feeling down, of living in a “bathtub that goes all the way down,” a smooth-sided, unclimbable well.
“Married means you are the primary witness to your husband’s story. You are with him through it, whatever bizarre or tragic twists it may take. It is a lot to ask,” Mayer writes in “With,” a story about husbands Maddock and León. The author views the men’s story through the lens of differing literary tastes, parenting duties, and the warp and weft of romance after they have adopted a child. It is intimate, emotional, at times absurd, and unquestionably beautiful.
From the symmetry of soulmates to string theory to Gertrude Stein’s steam-powered emotions, Mayer’s About, Above, Around justifies its premise by excelling at conjuring the feelings of love and loss, and the myriad emotional shades in between.
Mark Mayer will celebrate the release of About, Above, Around with an event at Novel bookstore on Monday, March 30, at 6 p.m.
