MISADVENTURE: Urgent and Unflinching

Misadventure by Nicholas Grider
Reviewed by Ben

I want to talk about something for a minute here.

I’ve been in Austin since August, so I’m new to the scene and you’ll have to forgive me. It was a couple months after moving before BookPeople took me in from the cold(?), but it didn’t take me nearly that long to hear about A Strange Object here in Austin. Still, when I picked up their second publication, Misadventure by Nicholas Grider, to review, I didn’t really know what I was getting myself into.

But let’s talk about something else. Let’s talk about Nicholas Grider. He lives in Milwaukee and his photography has been exhibited internationally. Misadventure is his first book. Talk about debuts. Before the end of his first paragraph, which incidentally is the entirety of the first story, the ropes had cinched around my wrists and I knew I wasn’t going anywhere until I finished reading the entire collection.

Misadventure is full of characters tied to things. They are bound to chairs and beds, oftentimes with rope or handcuffs, but not always. They are also tied to past romances, to jobs and illness. To obsessions. Grider’s stories are dark and sparse, crafted with attention and purpose that begs you to answer the questions you’d prefer to forget you asked. Such as in “Disappearing Act,” where the narrator tries to understand faraway workplace gossip and what it could mean for his relationship to the person relaying it. Or “Clean and Friendly,” where both a wife and quiet suburb carefully avoid explaining the unsettling presence of what could be blood, or rather, human fluid, in their daily lives. Even a catalogue of exes in “Formers (An Index),” between the frankness and humor, implicates something tragic and human that cannot simply be glossed over, the history of the narrator jumbled and put on display like entries from a journal. Milwaukee acts as a common setting for the majority of stories, but at times, it hardly feels noticeable. It was as if Grider was affirming my suspicions that, yes, this could happen anywhere, to anyone.

Grider’s prose is as observant as it is ambiguous. His structure belies expectations for the traditional narrative and rightfully so. The stories in Misadventure are experimental, but not without purpose. They command us to crane our neck, perhaps uncomfortably at first, to the precise angle from which he wants us to see what it is that takes place. Throughout the collection, Grider has sewn threads to pull it all together, strong and transparent like fishing line. I found myself feeling it in my gut, every time a pair of handcuffs was produced or I thought characters was lying, either to each other or to themselves.

The book is a slim one but don’t be deceived. The tales that Grider has given us are urgent and unflinching, and aren’t for the faint of heart. There is no condemnation of the lives Grider exposes, and some may find less hope than I could upon the book’s conclusion. But I wouldn’t be deterred, dear reader. I think this is a must-read for the opening of 2014. Misadventure challenges us in the way that we hope literature would, in a way that is lasting and genuine. And this is a collection that won’t leave you alone, even once you’ve finished.

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Copies of Misadventure are available on our shelves at BookPeople and via bookpeople.com.