A Review of Spencer Fleury’s I BLAME MYSELF BUT ALSO YOU
The scientists and zoologists that first looked at the platypus shook their heads and said it shouldn’t exist. An egg-laying, beaver-tailed, duck-billed, weasel-footed, venomous mammal? Too weird. Must be a prank! Surely! In this collection of short stories we get an American mother who finds odd objects in her non-verbal child’s bedroom: a bus transfer ticket from Buenos Aires, aged foreign coins, even finds him one morning in bed filthy and muddy—before he inexplicably disappears. A man who drives his moped into oncoming traffic in a suicide attempt with a bizarre note in his shirt pocket. A man who wants to live in a tube and become a minimalist—but his possessions keep coming back to him. The dark and the absurd and the bizarre blend together for one of the most peculiar short story collections to hit the shelves in a long time.
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I Blame Myself But Also You is the latest book from Spencer Fleury. This collection of eleven short stories showcases characters on their way to losing their grip on reality and a few that have gone beyond that stage. The stories here have the classic elements of literary absurdism: abasement of reason, dark humor, satire. The experiences of the characters also have the elements of absurdism: their lives are meaningless, incongruous, or irreconcilable and they engage in futile attempts to find purpose. The psychology that drives Fleury’s representation of reality and sanity allow us to trace their smothered outlines. He takes risk—there are so many ways for these stories to go wrong, it’s a delight to see that his daring with the absurd, the mysterious, and the surreal went right.
In the story “The Insomniac’s Guide to the Lost Pyramids of Quartzsite Arizona” the narrator assures us from the start that there are no pyramids in Quartzsite. He had been given a guidebook by a bartender while staying in Texas, a cheaply printed little thing, telling of the pyramids and camels in Quartzsite; and off our narrator goes like a tourist to have a look. He finds nothing of the sort, the people there tell him they’ve never heard of pyramids and camels in Quartzsite, and he goes home disappointed. The story is slyly allusory. In Quartzsite, Arizona there is a monument to a Greek-Syrian man named Hi Jolly (Hadji Ali) who served with the US Camel Corps in the mid 1800’s. The monument is pyramid in shape and has a sheet metal cut-out camel silhouette atop it. (One could possibly assume an acid-tripper saw the monument and wrote the guidebook after a hallucination.)
Fleury’s virtue is his peculiarity—there are times in this collection he seems to lock out absurdism at the front door only to have it sneak in at the back. A couple of teenage boys plot to rob a record store—then perform some bizarre ritualistic liturgy afterward. A man starting his life over moves to San Francisco and uses a dating app to find a girlfriend. Fairly common trope—until painted murals throughout the city begin speaking to him. These stories are managed by tact and brilliance, Fleury moves smoothly between conventional realism and magical realism. After Fleury’s first novel, How I’m Spending My Afterlife (published in 2017), New York Times bestselling author Michelle Richmond said, “Spencer Fleury is a writer to be watched.”
“Mom never stayed in one place long enough for any of them to feel like home, probably because habitual check kiting isn’t really compatible with long-term domestic stability.” That’s one of our characters speaking of his mother—a good example of the wit and smart prose you find throughout all the stories here.” Sara had spent her formative years following her mother and brother from one vaguely grubby apartment complex to the next, crisscrossing the country’s less-upwardly-mobile suburbs just steps ahead of a parade of bill collectors.” Sara’s husband suddenly wants to become a minimalist and discard all their conveniences of modern life—and she ain’t having it after the deprivation she endured growing up. About a man whose girlfriend has ghosted and blocked him from her social media accounts: “The 21st century equivalent of doctoring newspaper photos to remove out-of-favor party apparatchiks.” (Another bit of allusion here, referring to Soviet newspapers cutting Beria out of the photo of him and Joseph Stalin.)
Fleury’s vivid and uninsured sentences show a writer at the top of his game. The rollicking stories show a storyteller at the top of his game.
I Blame Myself But Also You by Spencer Fleury is available from Malarkey Books.
