More Than Spectacle

Champion series: Andrew Robert Colom

We’re missing three things that the most fortunate of writers from years gone by had. By my title, you know the Literary Salon is one, but I didn’t adopt the title with the idea that I was the second coming of Gertrude Stein. This newsletter began as a private affair, a handful of authors supporting one another, and I pictured Ms. Stein looking down over us. Eventually, I found my way to writing about prose style on these pages, which is appropriately fitting for that title, if unexpected, accidental, and more than a bit embarrassing with all the talent that surrounds us.

That very talent often goes unnoticed, and that brings us to the second of the three fortunes, the one that’s created this series—the writers of legend had champions that heralded their cause, brought attention to their talent, and insisted that due be given. In this series, guest authors become that champion for an author they admire. Today, I write the first by championing Andrew Robert Colom.

Colom brings with him a reputation for the third lost fortune, an honest critique of a writer’s work. Twenty years ago last month, I founded Better Fiction and suffered through my fair share of bruised egos, writers shattered by an inability to take anything but praise. Accepting the truth about our work is a skill, one we have to train, but if we can take that criticism, we then have the potential to improve.

All of that converges to make of me a coward. If I’m phony in my assessment and championing of Colom’s work, he’ll know it. He values what’s real and the brash confrontation of everything unworthy of those who claim the title writer. Every word on this page must be a well-considered truth.

Let’s begin.

More Than Spectacle

For his work, Colom chose the tile Rap Fiction, which I naively interpreted as literal and not a spiritual statement. He isn’t laying down rhymes that tell a story. Instead he’s from that world and writing of that world, both literally and in metaphor, with his story “I Gave You Spectacle” falling in the latter and “Beef”, in the former. Both hit hard. Both make you want to up your game and give no quarter, because you know in the reading that Colom isn’t backing down.

Recent history to the contrary, I read his work and know I’ve been taught to be too nice and too self-defacing—not ever imagining there was a space for literature with this kind of certainty. He does more than give us art; he gives us an example of the artist and asks: are you one of us, or is it pretense and play?

In “I Gave You Spectacle,” Colom takes the inner struggle I’ve been facing with style and story, solves it, and tells me to move on and do the same. In a literary work he goes surreal. You don’t have to see too many of my covers to find a love for the surreal, but the more I try to break beyond the styles I’ve used before, the more I felt the fantasy of the language demanding a reality of subject matter. It’s not the primary premise of the story that proves me wrong. It’s a thinking-truck story, told from its POV, but that’s a comfortable, if fun, concept. He’s made Pixar literary, which I love, but the details later in the story, details I’m sure I’m yet to understand, are what take this into the surreal while keeping it real, because truth is Andrew Robert Colom’s thing.

Cigarette’s flung from a window and a turtle attempting to sweep up condoms are the achievements in this piece that challenge me the most. The turtle and condoms are brightly colored lampoons but the cigarettes hurt me. The story often hurts me, in ways I’m glad to be reminded that other people hurt. In plot, it’s the retirement of a truck, the henceforth immobility of a truck—the A.I. (Stephen Spielberg’s and Stanley Kubrick’s A.I.) of Monster Truck stories—as the world around him becomes the tale.

As a reader, I love “Beef”, but as a writer, “I Gave You Spectacle” gives me hope. The stories I love can be told with the prose I love, and to live in that space is my foundational desire as writer. It’s been achieved before, but it’s a possibility that must always be proven again. Too often, people define fiction by its past and not its potential.

If you’re a regular in the literary world (or the rap world) check out “Beef”, but if you’re not sure about literary fiction, holding to stories you know will satisfy, “I Gave You Spectacle” is a proper introduction to flavors of literary fiction that don’t match your preconceptions.

BEEF: VOLUME I

I Gave You Spectacle

— Thaddeus Thomas