Short story collections, particularly in the hands of debut authors, run the risk of feeling like a disjointed assortment of individual stories crafted in writing workshops, each unmoored from the others. Collections need a thread, such as a common theme, setting, or characterization, to tie them into a cohesive package. Thankfully, Daniel S.C. Sutter's debut collection, Debris (Press 53; 160 pages), weaves together an assortment of such threads, with an array of funny, unique characters and plots that operate on the fringes of society's norms.
Sutter's eleven stories unfold in vibrant settings, typically lower-income suburbs and trailer parks along Florida's Gulf Coast. The characters are multi-dimensional and original, torn between past regrets and future uncertainty. The prose is tight, often poetic. It creates suspense and keeps the reader guessing. Just when we expect a zig, Sutter often zags.
The characters in these stories can best be defined in a single word: loneliness. A twelve-year-old boy grapples with losing his best friend and first love to a relationship with his older sister as his family falls apart. A woman claims her community's Flan of the Year award while her Nixon-obsessed husband ignores an impending death. A middle-aged divorcée obsesses over her ex-husband as she seeks companionship in empty sexual encounters. Despite these hardships, the characters are handled with empathy, using humor and absurdity to sidestep despair.
It's ultimately the moments when that loneliness mixes with a sense of hope that the book really shines. In the standout opening story, "Like Always Blooming," a single father learns his precocious daughter, a star pitcher in a boys' baseball league, is moving to Florida to live with her mother and play for an all-girls team. Her looming departure forces her father to acknowledge how little will remain in his life once she leaves. He remarks, "I wondered what color shirt looked best on a man who'd lost his wife, and, in not many tomorrows, would lose his daughter to another state. How do you speak completely, coherently, without stammer, when most of your learned language has closed the door behind it?" Yet the story resists slipping into sentimentality, sappy emotions, or cloying prose. Father and daughter communicate in a language uniquely theirs, revealing their love without saying a word. The father understands his limitations and knows that letting go is the best way for his daughter to reach her potential. Sadness lingers, but his self-awareness and obvious love give the story a wonderful undercurrent of hope.
While many of these stories transact in dark humor, the collection isn't afraid to tread into taboo subjects. In "Rag and Bone," a nine-ball hustler's heroin habit is enabled by his father, and the narrator decides to kidnap his friend's baby in hopes the friend will kill him. "Hounds Run" features a marriage ending after the husband’s affair with a seventeen-year-old friend of his daughter. Some readers will inevitably be turned off by the subject matter, but Sutter doesn't shy away from eclectic characters and showing off their faults. At the risk of alienation, he stays true to what he wants from the story and seems intent on proving the reason behind pushing limits. It's not a collection filled with happy endings, though we get the sense early that we shouldn't expect them.
Some of the best moments occur when the provocative is balanced by tenderness. This stands out in "Lucia," which opens, "The first time I married Lucia, we were in the fifth grade," suggesting a later, real marriage. The shock comes when the narrator’s family adopts Lucia after her mother goes to prison; their adult marriage requires proof they aren't related. The story doesn’t dwell on the adopted-sister angle. Instead, it explores a child’s struggle for love and stability, and the challenge of holding on to someone who resists being tied down. Sutter pushes boundaries, then grounds them with heart.
Even when the stories don't offer overtly questionable storylines, we get little flourishes of impropriety, humorous brushstrokes that tell us we are not dealing with the straightest of shooters here. In "Tucker and Nancy Are Starting a Rock 'N' Roll Band," a divorced couple reunites, drinks, and skips out on their bar tab. In "Mantis," the narrator visits a neighbor to commiserate about his mother's health, and the two pause to inhale nitrous oxide. In "Debris," an elderly man using a voice box to speak has a preteen boy light a cigarette and blow the smoke into his face. These moments can amuse or provoke, sometimes both, depending on the reader.
Debris shows off the deep assortment of tools in Sutter's toolbox. He seems to revel in the strangeness of the human condition but finds a way to ground his stories in concrete places and times, often relying on historical events and political figures such as Watergate, Apollo 11, and Nixon’s impeachment. His best work uses first-person narration (as we see in seven of the eleven stories), and he shows a particularly strong ability to write from a child's perspective. It's a very "Floridian" collection, and an impressive debut from a talented writer.