Kevin Sampsell's Beautiful Blemish: A Case Study review |
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Beautiful Blemish by Kevin Sampsell
Available from Word Riot or Powell's
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In the first story of
Kevin Sampsell’s new collection Beautiful Blemish, a man collects
lost or discarded gloves. He tries to find homes for the used gloves,
either by finding its match, the rightful owner, or even by donating them
to amputees. Even though this is one of the few stories told in 3rd person, this lost glove collector is Kevin Sampsell and this is what he
does: He finds matches for the misfits and freaks of the world, and gives
them accommodating places in his stories. He is a shepherd of misfortune
and imperfections. In Old Man, Sampsell takes in an old homeless
man as a pet. By doing these things, he pares human behavior down to basic
animal instinct. He causes us to take a step back and question the
practices of contemporary human culture. The things that might make
perfect sense or that we take for granted, like having pets, or letting
our elders live homeless, suddenly don’t make sense, and the things that
initially don’t make a lot of sense, like “getting drunk to save your
marriage” suddenly make perfect sense.
… at least in Kevin
Sampsell’s world, specifically Portland, Oregon, where most of the
stories seem to be set. Maybe this collection had special appeal to me,
being that I am originally from Portland, and am of the same generation as
Sampsell. I left Portland when I was 12 and never really looked back, so
in a way, Sampsell’s stories represent an alternate life I possibly
could’ve had if I had remained. And isn’t this what writers are
supposed to do—create lives that you can live vicariously? I actually
took a trip to Portland last month, though coincidentally Sampsell
happened to be in NYC giving a reading so I never got to meet him. I
stopped into Powell’s Books anyway to see if the legend was true, and it
is—an entire city block of books that Sampsell calls home. This was not
at all the Portland I remembered. Back then in the late 70s you just
didn’t venture into the city. We all lived in the suburbs. By the 5th grade we were all smoking pot, vandalizing, shoplifting, stealing our
parent’s liquor, and feeling compelled to have sex before even going
through puberty. That’s just what we did, that was the norm. It wasn’t
until I left Portland (for sunnier Mexico) that I realized this was
strange behavior for kids. Now, as Sampsell has corroborated, Portland is
full of these dysfunctional kids that have never grown up and are stuck in
various jaded states of arrested development. All the girls have become
Suicide Girls. Yes, they all have tattoos, piercings and Betty Boop
haircuts, wear mismatched thrift store clothes, work in coffee shops by
day and strip clubs by night, and if you are willing to look carefully,
each one has some sort of unique and beautiful blemish—maybe they are
missing an eye or a leg, have varicose veins, or are “soft, large girls
with divided breasts.” The man that obsessively court them have crooked
or undersized penises, herpes sores or fetishes for ear holes or
pantyhose. Somehow we find ourselves taking an interest in these
characters in the same way you might be endeared by Robert Downey Jr. or
Dee Dee Ramone. Sampsell helps us to realize that the unblemished ones
that look perfectly normal on the outside are the ones we need to watch
out for.
Sampsell’s approach
is scientific, rooted in acute observation of his real world subjects. He
is a master of painting these blemished people, of accentuating moles to
beauty marks, of finding inspiration in people’s imperfections or
contradictions. The stories are rife with 30-something year old adults
still grappling with adolescence, at parties, at malls, karaoke bars or
dance night at Red Lion Inn. Sure these Diane Arbus-esque characters and
places might seem mundane and too familiar for some, but Sampsell has the
ability to make the ordinary seem extraordinary or relevant. As he reveals
through his narrative in On Your Bed, “I tried to be honest, but
creative. I tried to think of an abstract sort of truth.” And Sampsell
might stand on the shoulders of Ray Carver or Gus Van Sant, but both have
moved on leaving Sampsell the burden of helping to carry this Pacific
Northwest torch in a post-grunge era.
Maybe it was just me,
but I thought the first half of the collection was much stronger than the
second. His stories usually teeter between literature and smutty pulp
(which is refreshing), but the second half seemed weighted towards the
latter. And even though a passage from the title story was good enough to
be nominated for Nerve.com’s Henry Miller Award, to me it seemed
gratuitously raunchy, and one of the weaker links of the collection. When
he is being literary, his warped perversions are reminiscent of Gary Lutz,
and his absurd concoctions reminiscent of Stacey Richter. But always,
Sampsell is readable and funny. Again, revealing his own process through a
narrative from Personal, “I have this funny thing I do when I’m
lying. I laugh.” Sampsell will have you doubled over laughing one
second, and then crying in the next paragraph (then again, I cried at the
end of Short Circuit II). At times, his writing also might seem
fragmented or blemished, lacking a cohesive thread, with short dreamy
vignettes or character studies mixed with longer fictions that are not
always consistent in style and tone—but this only goes to further his
purpose, and after all, isn’t this life? By remaining rough around the
edges and not taking himself too seriously, he remains true to his word
and more believable. His familiar accounts of the lonely-hearted make you
feel less alone. And when you are at least expecting it, you’ll get hit
with a passage like this one from New Suburban Lit:
I
was at a party with my wife and some friends. We were on an outdoor patio
and there was a gathering of snakes on the hillside just underneath the
patio. We leaned over the railing and watched the snakes slither against
each other as we drank. We chatted and laughed at each other’s jokes.
Every few minutes we would get silent and watch the snakes. We began to
realize there were too many snakes.
Other personal
favorites of mine (maybe because my father worked as an insurance salesman
in the very mall where the story takes place) included, Skip the Walker,
in which the narrator, Carol, is stalked by a creepy old mall walker who
ends up seducing her mother. Freaky as it all is (think Cocoon but
even creepier), you can’t help but to get sucked in, “he offered his
arm and as if in a sudden trance I grab inside his elbow and feel myself
being pulled into the suddenly large swarm of mall walkers” (at which
point a combination of all the matching sweatsuits, the muzak and fast
food chains and Christian Supply Centers cause her to go into a seizure
and wake up in a Chick Filet staring at a manager with a name tag). His
writing style is convincing enough that you physically feel sick when the
characters get sick, or you work up a sweat when the characters do.
But the most beautiful
blemish for me was Blowjob, and not so much for the details of the
“blowjob from hell” (of which none are provided), but where the
blowjob takes place (a cemetery) and the anti-climatic aftermath (as he
backs the car out of the cemetery he runs over and gets stuck on a few
tombstones), ending with, “we looked back at the dark landscape, with
all its concrete teeth sticking up and poking out of the ground. The
ground so dug-up and reapplied.”
Sampsell’s Beautiful
Blemish is just that.
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© 2005 by Derek White |