Short Fiction Round Table: The Drowned Life by Jeffrey Ford

This review was due a couple of weeks ago but the end of year article and the holidays kept pushing it back. I only mention this because in waiting so long to write the damn thing Brian Evenson, in the end of year article, expressed in a single line about Jeff Vandermeer’s The Situation what I had been thinking about Ford’s The Drowned Life, and much much better and more succinctly I might add.

“It recognizes that such realities are best expressed by acknowledging them for the absurdities that they really are.” — Brian Evenson

Because what I liked best about The Drowned Life , what resonated the most, was the modernity of it. As a grown man with children in the 21st century it spoke to my reality in a way that a medieval fantasy never could. This is fantasy at its most powerful because it isn’t escapist but embracive. It doesn’t shy away from problems or cast them in a historical light to provide perspective; it absorbs them, examines them from all sides and sees them as they are. It stands there and loudly proclaims that shit is fucked up and so whacked out and twisted that it’s not “normal” any longer. But more importantly it speaks to our leveling out. We’ve become so used to the turned about way of things that we’ve found our sea legs and it doesn’t bother us anymore. Our baseline has adjusted and that may speak more to us then to the situation.

One of the things that I found myself reminded of with Fords writing here is Charles Willeford and his essay New Forms of Ugly in which he writes of the immobilized hero and his views on fiction and modern life. For example look at this quote from Willeford “the veneer of our modern American civilization is as thin as the gold on a rented wedding ring.” It would be easy to write this comment off as hard-boiled cynicism except for the truths that it contains, especially as exemplified by the current economic woes.

Once the thin veneer is rubbed off in The Drowned Life the craziness that existed in the abstract comes to life and is literalized. It’s the protagonist being chased by literal demons.

I think the connection to Willeford is an interesting one for what it suggests. If there are echoes of some of Willeford’s writing in some of Fords writing then maybe it taps into a larger question; a larger question of possibility, something broader. Is Ford’s writing, specifically The Drowned Life, cast from an older, almost Depression-era model with dare I say, proletarian heroes. I think that there may be a case to be made here that The Drowned Life (along with Vandermeer’s The Situation) is a 21st century proletarian story of the fantastic.

If the two best fiction tools that we posses to describe the insanity of the new century is the language of crime fiction and the language of the fantastic then Jeffrey Ford in many ways represents the perfect nexus point of these two languages. It’s from this synthesis that the power of the story is derived. I think that Ford is in a unique position to write some of the more powerful fiction of our times because of how well versed he is in both modes.

All of this speaks to Fords ability to talk frankly and directly to us as one of us.

The Drowned Life is a dead on classic and you should go read it now.

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_{This is part of the BookSpot Central Short Fiction Round Table spotlight on stories that will be included in Best American Fantasy 2008 edited by Ann and Jeff VanderMeer and forthcoming from Prime Books. Please see the intro to the spotlight.}

About Brian

Brian loves both kinds of books -- fiction and non-fiction. He is an all around book john and reviewing roustabout. His semi-regular columns at BSC include BSC Radar Screen, The Electric Mayhem, Conversations with the Bookless and Short Thoughts on Short Fiction. He blogs at Observations From the Balcony.