The Emerald Light in the Air

Donald Antrim has long been admired for his twisted and complex novels, but the short story may be an even better form for his fictional talents. The brief, powerful bursts of narrative in "The Emerald Light in the Air" -- all stories that have been published in The New Yorker over the past 15 years -- often require more than one reading to fully appreciate.

Antrim's sentence structure moves from ordinary to wildly complicated, filled with qualifiers, parentheticals and dips in and out of various points of view. Time is seldom linier; events can jump around and repeat themselves. Vague and general happenings suddenly become detailed and mysteriously specific. Almost archetypical characters are textured by a bombastic realism, leaving the reader in a world that doesn't seem real at all. And occurrences are magical without containing anything supernatural.

If you read the first story in this book, "An Actor Prepares," (you can find part of it in this book excerpt) you may get a mistaken idea of what the rest of the book contains. The story is a darkly humorous, wildly madcap, completely relatable yet somehow unbelievable depiction of a student production of Shakespeare in the park. Though it's almost a farce, it veers in strange, unexpected directions.

On the other hand, the title story "The Emerald Light in the Air" perverts our expectations in its very lack of sensationalism. Here a depressive "gun nut" travels into the backwoods of North Carolina with a Browning .30-06, ammo, and mementos of his childhood and the lost love of his life. Chekhov's rule is respected. The gun goes off, but the effect is nonchalant, haunting rather than dramatic.

Perhaps the most interesting story in this collection explores the loneliness and desperate romantic connections between two couples in New York. In "Another Manhattan," the setup is comical and too perfect, a duel affair takes place where a couple independently pursues infidelities with the members of another couple, their best friends. But rather than becoming an outright comedy this story leaves the reader at just the right time with a dull, throbbing ache and some profound things to think about.

"The Emerald Light in the Air"
By Donald Antrim
Picador
Trade Paperback | $16.00
us.macmillan.com/books/9781250074706