Valparaiso, Round the Horn by Madeline FFitch
reviewed by Jen Hinst-White
I like stories that leave me feeling I’ve encountered a living creature, or eaten a spicy meal, or sat stunned in a light-drenched temple. When a book feels like that, I want to offer a chili-studded forkful, or make urgent gestures: Feral pigs that way!
In the case of Valparaiso, Round the Horn, the debut short story collection by Madeline ffitch—which does, in fact, include feral pigs, along with myriad other wild creatures—I would hand it to you green and dripping, like a poultice of macerated plants, as an antidote to ennui.
Start with a paragraph from “The Storm Beach”:
Granddad took me in his freckled arms when I was three days old, and he sat me in Grandmother’s largest wooden mixing bowl, and he balanced his way down the black rocks to the Storm Beach. Pissing on myself and howling, I didn’t look at all like the hero he hoped I would become one day, but he baptized me in salt water, and one thing about the modern world is, you’re not allowed to just do whatever you want to do with your dead anymore….
The speaker is Edmond, a young man living in Seattle, but raised on a wild island off the coast of Washington State. The Granddad is the dead man. Edmond has returned to the island upon Granddad’s death because he has promised to “heap up beech bark out on the Storm Beach, stick a sheaf of Winston Churchill’s best speeches in [his] breast pocket, and light the whole thing on fire.” In Seattle, you cannot burn your grandfather on the beach. On this wild and never-named island, you can—or could, if you knew how. First, though, you have to get the body out of the refrigerator where Grandmother has been keeping it and down the cliffs to the beach below.
An oath to complete an unusual task in an inaccessible place: what an auspicious start for a story. “Storm Beach” is bracing and funny and urgent, full of fisticuffs and redolent of the earth from which it springs. Just as the grandfather once carried Edmond down to the beach “pissing and howling” for his baptism, Edmond returns the favor. But after hours of arduous work—hefting the body into and out of a wheelbarrow, dragging it across rocks, fighting the tide, building a funeral pyre, beating the crabs off the dead man, and many more ordeals I will let you enjoy for yourself—Edmond cannot get the body to burn. This is a more interesting problem than any I’ve had all year.
Interesting problems in interesting places would, in fact, be a fitting subtitle of this collection. Many of the stories are set on the coastlines of the Pacific Northwest, and in the book’s most triumphant endings, characters escape to wild places. Sometimes it’s to sea, as in the title story, “Valparaiso, Round the Horn,” which is also the refrain of a sea chantey sung by a cartoonish captain who sweeps the characters off to sea at the end. Sometimes they escape to the woods, where they “sew together buckskin breeches” and “carve [their] dugout canoe for the unfathomable trip.” ffitch herself homesteads in Appalachian Ohio, where she “raises ducks, goats, and her small son, Nector,” and that life makes its way into her stories, which are full of plant names, animal trapping, and women of fairy-tale-giantess proportions who chop wood at age six or emerge from the woods with a “dead goat yoked around her shoulders.” Indeed, many of the stories feel as if the writer hunted them down and returned with them yoked around her shoulders.
Amidst all this vigor, however, we find lulls of quiet depth. In “Fort Clatsop,” the eccentric Frank, a school janitor, and his young daughter, Huck, are struggling “in a world of plain men and women.” Frank often recounts his imaginary travels with Johnny Appleseed, Woody Guthrie, Wyatt Earp, Elvis Presley, and other historic figures. When Frank and Huck’s house is condemned, they secretly move into the basement of the school where he works and she attends sixth grade, killing Huck’s hope she might one day fit in.
This unshakeable feeling of being different shapes the story. To the outside, their “differentness” looks like poverty and oddity. But Huck comes to understand that whatever their current circumstances, there is something desirable in their way of seeing the world, if only they could translate that vision into a sustainable way of life. She tries to explain this to a new friend, who has never heard of any of the famous iconoclasts her father claims as “his crowd,” “that these were our talismans, our measure of the brightness that had occurred, that could occur again.” Translation: Once upon a time, these singular people lived and became radiant in their time. We live in a world that values sameness, but it could happen again.
ffitch, likewise, tells stories in her own idiosyncratic, resolutely ffitch-like way, and as I hand you this particular poultice against ennui, here are the fine-print warnings—possibly polarizing aspects, elements that readers may find distracting.
First: The endings often swerve suddenly. “Valparaiso, Round the Horn” seems to be a third-person tale—until the final paragraph, when a first-person narrator appears, and we realize the entire story has been a prelude to a proclamation of undying love. In one story, the world abruptly ends in cosmic fireworks; in another, the characters realize they are separated-at-birth twins. Are these off-kilter endings crafted to shift a story’s meaning, like the unexpected twist in a parable, or for the sheer pleasure of the strange? Up for discussion. You may say, as some of us do at the end of Haruki Murakami novels, “no fair”—or you may love the rebellious weirdness and re-read the story, as I did, to see if you can uncover the logic behind the end.
Second: The dialogue in these stories is often Wes-Anderson-weird—the way people might talk if they were simultaneously as honest as children, awkward as adolescents, and sharp as quick-witted adults. In the title and first story in the collection, a lovelorn character named Abie is receiving advice from his boss, Phil, on how to talk to women. Phil says that women might like Abie better
…if he said something like this to them: “There’s a tiny little owl, the strangest, cutest owl. Yes, it has been appointed the cutest owl, and the strangest owl.” If he spoke from the heart. If he asked her questions about herself, questions such as, “Is it cuter, do you think, than those two kittens there, fitted together sleeping like beans?”…
“What if she asks what the tiny owl is called?” Abie asked.
“Tell her it’s called the xenoglaux,” Phil said. “The Strange Owl.”.........................................
In the case of Valparaiso, Round the Horn, the debut short story collection by Madeline ffitch—which does, in fact, include feral pigs, along with myriad other wild creatures—I would hand it to you green and dripping, like a poultice of macerated plants, as an antidote to ennui.
Start with a paragraph from “The Storm Beach”:
Granddad took me in his freckled arms when I was three days old, and he sat me in Grandmother’s largest wooden mixing bowl, and he balanced his way down the black rocks to the Storm Beach. Pissing on myself and howling, I didn’t look at all like the hero he hoped I would become one day, but he baptized me in salt water, and one thing about the modern world is, you’re not allowed to just do whatever you want to do with your dead anymore….
The speaker is Edmond, a young man living in Seattle, but raised on a wild island off the coast of Washington State. The Granddad is the dead man. Edmond has returned to the island upon Granddad’s death because he has promised to “heap up beech bark out on the Storm Beach, stick a sheaf of Winston Churchill’s best speeches in [his] breast pocket, and light the whole thing on fire.” In Seattle, you cannot burn your grandfather on the beach. On this wild and never-named island, you can—or could, if you knew how. First, though, you have to get the body out of the refrigerator where Grandmother has been keeping it and down the cliffs to the beach below.
An oath to complete an unusual task in an inaccessible place: what an auspicious start for a story. “Storm Beach” is bracing and funny and urgent, full of fisticuffs and redolent of the earth from which it springs. Just as the grandfather once carried Edmond down to the beach “pissing and howling” for his baptism, Edmond returns the favor. But after hours of arduous work—hefting the body into and out of a wheelbarrow, dragging it across rocks, fighting the tide, building a funeral pyre, beating the crabs off the dead man, and many more ordeals I will let you enjoy for yourself—Edmond cannot get the body to burn. This is a more interesting problem than any I’ve had all year.
Interesting problems in interesting places would, in fact, be a fitting subtitle of this collection. Many of the stories are set on the coastlines of the Pacific Northwest, and in the book’s most triumphant endings, characters escape to wild places. Sometimes it’s to sea, as in the title story, “Valparaiso, Round the Horn,” which is also the refrain of a sea chantey sung by a cartoonish captain who sweeps the characters off to sea at the end. Sometimes they escape to the woods, where they “sew together buckskin breeches” and “carve [their] dugout canoe for the unfathomable trip.” ffitch herself homesteads in Appalachian Ohio, where she “raises ducks, goats, and her small son, Nector,” and that life makes its way into her stories, which are full of plant names, animal trapping, and women of fairy-tale-giantess proportions who chop wood at age six or emerge from the woods with a “dead goat yoked around her shoulders.” Indeed, many of the stories feel as if the writer hunted them down and returned with them yoked around her shoulders.
Amidst all this vigor, however, we find lulls of quiet depth. In “Fort Clatsop,” the eccentric Frank, a school janitor, and his young daughter, Huck, are struggling “in a world of plain men and women.” Frank often recounts his imaginary travels with Johnny Appleseed, Woody Guthrie, Wyatt Earp, Elvis Presley, and other historic figures. When Frank and Huck’s house is condemned, they secretly move into the basement of the school where he works and she attends sixth grade, killing Huck’s hope she might one day fit in.
This unshakeable feeling of being different shapes the story. To the outside, their “differentness” looks like poverty and oddity. But Huck comes to understand that whatever their current circumstances, there is something desirable in their way of seeing the world, if only they could translate that vision into a sustainable way of life. She tries to explain this to a new friend, who has never heard of any of the famous iconoclasts her father claims as “his crowd,” “that these were our talismans, our measure of the brightness that had occurred, that could occur again.” Translation: Once upon a time, these singular people lived and became radiant in their time. We live in a world that values sameness, but it could happen again.
ffitch, likewise, tells stories in her own idiosyncratic, resolutely ffitch-like way, and as I hand you this particular poultice against ennui, here are the fine-print warnings—possibly polarizing aspects, elements that readers may find distracting.
First: The endings often swerve suddenly. “Valparaiso, Round the Horn” seems to be a third-person tale—until the final paragraph, when a first-person narrator appears, and we realize the entire story has been a prelude to a proclamation of undying love. In one story, the world abruptly ends in cosmic fireworks; in another, the characters realize they are separated-at-birth twins. Are these off-kilter endings crafted to shift a story’s meaning, like the unexpected twist in a parable, or for the sheer pleasure of the strange? Up for discussion. You may say, as some of us do at the end of Haruki Murakami novels, “no fair”—or you may love the rebellious weirdness and re-read the story, as I did, to see if you can uncover the logic behind the end.
Second: The dialogue in these stories is often Wes-Anderson-weird—the way people might talk if they were simultaneously as honest as children, awkward as adolescents, and sharp as quick-witted adults. In the title and first story in the collection, a lovelorn character named Abie is receiving advice from his boss, Phil, on how to talk to women. Phil says that women might like Abie better
…if he said something like this to them: “There’s a tiny little owl, the strangest, cutest owl. Yes, it has been appointed the cutest owl, and the strangest owl.” If he spoke from the heart. If he asked her questions about herself, questions such as, “Is it cuter, do you think, than those two kittens there, fitted together sleeping like beans?”…
“What if she asks what the tiny owl is called?” Abie asked.
“Tell her it’s called the xenoglaux,” Phil said. “The Strange Owl.”.........................................
