In Paul Luikart’s stories, raw strength and immense depth work side-by-side
The Realm of the Dog by Paul Luikart. J. New Books, 2024. 206 pp., $19.00
When I was first learning to write serious fiction (back in what seems like a vanished age of innovative energy and online anger mixed with cheerful, untroubled fraudulence—0h, wait . . . ), some reviewers thought it sounded stylish to call short fictions “shards” and to talk about how handling them might cut you, make you bleed. The sense of danger was meant to signal praise. Perhaps it was also there to fight off a sense that the short work, so easy to consume, had been easy to write or would be equally easy to digest. Fiction was supposed to stick in your craw back then. It was supposed to trouble you, trip you up, stop you in your tracks.
But what real craftsman wants his work to harm those for whom he made it? The real trick for a work of fiction, it seems to me, is to heighten the sense of risk and stakes without inflicting new wounds. In his new collection of short stories, writer and fiction professor Paul Luikart ratchets risk up to breathless heights in a way that allows his reader to experience danger from within the contours of safety.
But safety for the reader is not safety for the character. Nor is it emotional safety, a guarantee that we will not experience anything hard. Quite the opposite: The tragedy of the title story is so swift and horrifying as to be almost unbearable. No, the security in these stories is not an assurance that nothing will be allowed to hurt us. It is more a feeling that what hurts us, even terribly, will not be allowed to harm us.
To put it as simply as I can, these stories have the pure soundness and validity of the virtue of art. When I say virtue, don’t hear the word as if it meant something sanitized or evenly sanded. There is a raw strength in these stories, an unpredictability. Whatever simplicity they telegraph is only the surface of immense depth, as with Emily Dickinson’s poems, which, for all their beauty, are anything but pretty.
I will resort here to another common review word, unflinching, which you’ll often hear writers use to signal praise. Why should unflinchingness be thought good, you might ask, in a medium we’re told is meant to convey beauty? Surely we shouldn’t need to flinch from beauty? We forget too easily that beauty is not necessarily soothing. It can equally well be terrible, threatening—“as an army with banners.”
Think of unflinching instead as the beauty of moral courage, and you’ll strike closer to the heart of the matter. Unflinching is the quality of soul captured in the Psalmist’s line “I have set my face like flint; I will not be moved.” This quality is also on display in Phil Klay’s Missionaries, where soldiers and journalists accustomed to witnessing battle must now learn a different kind of war, the struggle for self-control while listening to stories of atrocities suffered by those who could not fight for themselves. By being unflinching—by listening in silence without commentary, by conquering their inclination to react or cover or run away from pain—characters, and by extension readers, become capable of participation in the healing of people who have suffered terrors most can barely begin to imagine.
The parallel between this dynamic and Luikart’s work dwells in the role of attention. Unlike Klay, whose characters sometimes seem not even to go out for a jog without connecting to geopolitically significant truths, Luikart focuses tightly on the quotidian and the so-called commonplace, on characters whose daily acts will never be even a footnote in a news piece. Luikart pursues (usually) a closer psychic distance and (always) a far smaller canvas. But look closer. Luikart’s characters, just like many of Klay’s, are what the world really is and persists in being, while pundits and campaigners stay busy distracting us from ourselves with smoke-and-mirror tricks and loading us down with a burden of adjectives so heavy it crushes us (while lifting not one finger to carry it themselves).
And this world is without doubt troubled. Even moments of apparent relaxation are charged with past and potential future tragedy, as in the story “CDHS.” In a quest reminiscent of a Coen Brothers film, two employees of the Chicago Department of Human Services are tasked with tracking down a missing man. On the outskirts of the city, workers trudge through “layers of drifted snow and iced-over garbage and half-skeletonized vermin in which the process of decay had been suspended for months by the temperatures”—a dystopian Purgatory which surely did not get that way all by itself, or in one afternoon, or without a lot of blind eyes being turned to a lot of interrelated problems.
Without spoiling the startling dissonance of what they find there, I can tell you that the note of emptiness is sounded so loud it rings like cathedral bells. And the choice of ending point matters immensely to the achievement of this effect. All sense of completeness in fiction is, in some way, an illusion. Endings serve to confirm that illusion in the reader’s mind. The danger a writer faces with an ending is how to make it feel, not arbitrary or manufactured, but logical and inevitable. Luikart has mastered the secret of the inevitable ending. These stories’ landing point always appears to be chosen not for minimalist ease but for maximum impact.
Here is the great service, at once aesthetic and moral, done by these stories’ brevity: By taking firm hold of individual moments that might be lost in a longer piece, Luikart carves away everything else that might obscure each moment’s significance. The succinct, focused result not only sets action and metaphor in relief, it also orients us directly toward the larger point of all that painstaking activity. This is to get an unburdened look into the core of things, as refracted through another human mind and the wild diversity of possible minds it invents. And what we find at that core, in this book, is a pattern of perception we might characterize as Christian-existentialist: Either Jesus really redeemed all this, or else none of it is worth enduring.
But it is worth enduring, as Luikart shows us. And so, in a logic that may be cried down as circularity but which I would prefer to consider a sphere—global, cosmic—it must also offer moments of redemption.
Now if pain seems hard to render in fiction, try rendering redemption. Most often, what ends up on the page sounds saccharine and redacted. Surely, thinks your reader, it can’t have happened that way. Surely you are putting your thumb on the scale, failing to tell me some detail of doubt or pain or shame. Luikart never leaves us in this kind of doubt because he never shies away from the detail of doubt or pain or shame. We can believe in his redemptions and epiphanies because we can see what they have cost. And we can believe in his glories in part because they are such modest sparks. They seem to make themselves smaller than they might be, so as not to overwhelm us.
This tension, this vision that makes credible a deeper reality that both holds and transcends the problem of pain, is the essence of desirable sharpness in literary art. It is the sharpness of a scalpel, not of shrapnel. Where Luikart’s work cuts, it does so as a wise surgeon cuts flesh: to excise disease, to save what of health and strength can be saved. Though a surgeon cannot always rebuild what has grown awry, nor always rescue every patient, right intent is restorative. Luikart’s grasp of his art is too fine to spare pains—in either sense of that phrase—but it is an art that knows the difference between hurt and harm. It knows, too, that the Cross is real—but also that the Cross is not all that exists.
Katy Carl is writer in residence at the University of St. Thomas in Houston, editor in chief emerita of Dappled Things magazine, the author of As Earth Without Water and Fragile Objects, and a senior affiliate fellow of the Program for Research on Religion and Urban Civil Society. She lives in the Houston area with her husband and family.