A Review: The Uninnocent by Bradford Morrow

12:48 pm - December 15, 2011: 1 note

A Review: The Uninnocent by Bradford Morrow

It is difficult to read Biblical stories unattached, without religious sentiment—positive, negative, ambivalent—creeping in. But, Christian or not, they are stories and great ones. In college, I took a Religion class titled “The Genesis Narrative,” the name implying a kinship with my English Literature studies. In it, we studied the Book of Genesis as a text, a semester of Biblical exegesis. Narrative structure, character consistency, the potential of each story to represent some Greater Truth, which reliably seemed to be: death, destruction, damning.

Like the Book of Genesis, Bradford Morrow’s first story collection contains a lot of pain. Trials and tests, fratricide, incest. Vengeance, theft, an Ark. Morrow’s stories sing a tune of isolation. In “The Hoarder,” the first story in the collection and one of the strongest, a young man catalogues his habit of hoarding objects, beginning with seashells and butterflies and ending with furtive photographs of his brother’s girlfriend. Our narrator remarks that, in observing his brother and the object of his obsession,

…I learned how lovers speak, what kind of extravagant lies they tell each other, the promises they make, and all I could feel was gratitude that my brand of intimacy didn’t involve saying anything to anybody.

His “brand of intimacy” being lurking about town and the mini-golf course where he works, observing others’ emotional and physical intimacy, and (yes) hoarding his own potential for human affection until a critical moment. Though Morrow himself beautifully communicates human frailty—weakness and sin on a Biblical level, truly—his characters possess none of their creator’s comfort with words. Most, as the narrator in “The Hoarder,” are monosyllabic around others and alarmingly incompetent in social situations, if not downright malevolent. When lucky connections are made between two of Morrow’s characters, though, the result is nothing short of miraculous. When our unnamed hoarder does connect with his brother’s one-time girlfriend, Penny, words are not even needed: “Cognizant or not, she’d been witness to the character, the nature, the spirit of my gaze.” The isolated characters in The Uninnocent, characters who have lost parents, siblings, lovers, seem almost to be saved by moments like this. The stories tell of their retreat into themselves, but, occasionally, as when the hoarder looks at Penny, we see their potential for redemption.

The Uninnocent recasts original wickedness in many different ways within its twelve stories. The stories lack some variety, certainly; there is redundancy as character after character loses parents, obsesses over objects, feels alone, kills. But the carefully constructed tragedy and illuminating language of each story compensate. “All the Things that Are Wrong with Me,” a clever story in which the narrator must list seven things that are wrong with him for therapy, hints at incest, though he hardly considers it one of his faults: “I’m embarrassed by how good and natural our prepubescent marriage was.” His gravest fault, one which, again, he hardly counts, was corralling animals in his home. Beyond the obvious dogs and cats, he acquires possums, lizards, a blind raccoon, and, finally, his pièce de résistance and his downfall, a baby mountain lion named Kitty. Another of Morrow’s loners, he seems less desperate to replace human affection with animal affection than, like Noah, privy to the sins of the world and preparing for its destruction.

While each of the stories’ narrators has his faults, his insanities at times, we easily forgive each because Morrow adeptly illustrates that, truly, it is the world that is depraved. Generally, the characters’ misdeeds stem from attempts to restore harmony, to ameliorate others’ deficiencies. After committing murder, one character muses:

To say one is proud of taking a life is fundamentally unethical, morally wrong—I know, I know. But […] taking him out of the picture seemed more an act of domestic warfare than anything else.

Of course, original sin cannot be righted—certainly not with more sin. Morrow’s stories elucidate this predicament in a beautiful, distressing, and wholly contemporary way. Even the cleanest characters, the ones we might just believe in, fall when the world fails them. Morrow’s is a swirling world of sin, inescapable, uninnocent. Yet, as readers, we are given the power to forgive the characters’ wrongs. And as a testament to Morrow as a skilled creator of lives, we do.