Where I StayBy Andrew Zornoza |
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Reviewed by Matt Bell
Open Andrew Zornoza's novel Where I Stay anywhere and you will be presented with a spread of two facing pages, each wider than they are tall. Given the amount of text and the subject matter—a hitchhiker traveling the American West—you may find them somewhat reminiscent of postcards: On the left will be a title consisting of a date and a location—"Aug. 2, Cheyenne, Wyoming," perhaps, or else, "Oct. 15, Deschutes, Oregon"—and below it a single paragraph composed of a couple hundred words, some slim sliver of experience related by a narrator as poetic as he is desperate, as much a seeker as he is someone trying to finally get truly lost. There is little narrative in these micro-scenes, but lots of resonant images and phrasings. Here is the entirety of one such section, "Sept. 28, Three Forks, Montana":
Two roads meet like a cross upon the earth and there stops a middle aged man and his father and their truck. A dog squirms between them, its tongue dropping pearls of spit upon the upholstery. the younger man gets out, jerks his thumb to the bed of the truck where a sofa is lashed to the floor with heavy chains. The chains are spray-painted gold. The old man runs his liver-spotted hands through the dog's thick black fur, his eyes not leaving the windshield. You'll be king, he says. Alright, I answer. The younger man lowers the bed door, tests the chains. He's right, he says, you'll be king for now. King of the road.
Each right-side page of the book contains a single black-and-white photograph, sometimes seemingly related to the block of text on the left, sometimes not. These too are accompanied by text, evocative captions generally only a line or two long—"I worked at a toy factory, I worked at a restaurant washing dishes. People gave me money. I was ashamed, but I took the money. I never did not take the money"—but sometimes ballooning to paragraphs of their own:
I went to the only friend I had. His parents were Mormon. With his family and other families we drove across the country in a caravan of mini-vans. We camped near the Teton Mountains. There was a three-legged race. I won a medal, printed on the tin, "favorite stranger: favorite new family member." Next year I got another medal, "Best loved hitch-hiker." One of the men worked in vice for the Salt Lake City police. At night he drank beer and I smoked cigarettes and his daughter plucked away at a plastic guitar while she sat on a log away from the fire.
More often than not, Zornoza leaves it to the reader to place these disparate pieces into mental order, to fit them into some understandable arrangement of narrative and photo and caption. The headings on the left, with their dates marching from August to November provide a linearity to the slim paragraphs below them, but this seeming five-month journey is contradicted by paragraphs like the one above, with their claims of a journey lasting not months but years. Without more full-bodied clues as to how the book should be experienced, each reader will invent their own system: Like me, you may find the captions making unbalancing claims to fact from their proximity to the photographs, which make their own claims to truth even in this age of digital manipulation and computer graphics. And so what? Are we faced with a fictional novel on one side, and a factual photo-narrative on the other? Or are there two novels here, one made purely of text, and one of photographs and captions? Or has it been one novel all along, but one in which the narrator is less than reliable, is int the end as fractured as the America he's traveling?
Even if it is a blend of fact and fiction, does that impact the truth contained in the book? Does the presence of the factual increase the truth content of the fiction, or does it detract?
Are these the right questions to ask? Are any of these questions even close?
I'm not sure that Zornoza has put the answers to these questions in the book for us to find. Or rather, I think that it's more likely possible that he's erased the answers, has lost them for us in the same way that this narrator seems to be trying to lose himself. "There are places I keep returning to," he says, in one of the captions from the middle of the book. Later still, the narrator sees a map taped to a wall, one where "lines have been drawn from spots on the map to the margins, each line ending in a crowded scrawl of letters and numbers, coordinates and temperatures, illegible words." The narrator says, "I wonder how long he has been out there."
The narrator says, "I don't know."
He says: "It all gets jumbled together."
He says: "It's all about to be swept away again."
He says: "[The] little home that I had had moved along without me."
He says: "There was nowhere to go, as long as I was myself."
The book closes. The left side—the fiction, the invented narrative beneath the forward march of dates—it folds into the right side, into the photographs and their captured truths, into the captions that illuminate or obfuscate that truth so that it matches or else denies the fiction that faces it.
And then what?
And then the book is inside of us, or at least its contents are, emptied from the fine container Zornoza has built for all of his narrator's contradictions and complications, his precise phrasing and beautiful mistakes. Like any long trip, the months of the narrator's journey and the years of Zornoza's photography that were compressed to make the fiction will probably not stick with you as a cohesive story, but rather as a series of fleeting images: A white dress wet from a river, a drawing taped to the side of a cave, a girl sleeping in an overturned refrigerator, and then many more beside them and also between them. And what's left in the cracks left between? The memory of a person trying to lose his identity a mile at a time, only to find it waiting for him at every destination, on the other side of each one of America's empty spaces as wide and yawning as the ones inside ourselves we spend so many of our years attempting to escape.