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THE KING'S COUNCIL

In which your Sovereign Majesty gets an earful on contemporary literature from your loyal councillors

[PUSHCART PRIZE XXXI: BEST OF THE SMALL PRESSES], Bill Henderson, Ed.

Bill Bukovsan: "Orison" is a synonym for "prayer," but with its Latinate pedigree--it shares a root with both "oration" and "orotund" -- it has an aura of formality, of ritual, about it. It's almost impossible to imagine a child saying an orison before bed; it's not nearly as difficult to imagine a priest offering an orison at the altar of a cathedral.  There is something songlike or incantatory to an orison--Prince Hamlet, interrupted at the end of his most famous soliloquy by Ophelia, says to her (half-mockingly, of course), "Nymph, in thy orisons/be all my sins remembered."
 

We would be in Kafka's territory, or Borges', or Ashbery's ... 

But alas: 

Geiger lacks the courage

of his authorial convictions.

So, if we are hunting for puns, a Frank Orison might be a brief, straightforward prayer, and a Max Orison might be the most fevered, heartfelt appeal to the Almighty imaginable.  In Scott Geiger's story "The Frank Orison", however, a Frank Orison is an irregular metallic polyhedron about two feet tall which a boy named Max Orison discovered at the edge of a local airfield and has decided is his father. Or, rather, this is one Frank Orison, the original Frank Orison--Max is a practical lad, and, recognizing the difficulty he faces trying to drag his bulky and inconveniently immobile parent all the places he wants to take him, he has created several somewhat inferior Frank Orisons out of various more mundane materials, including sugar cubes, cork, and balsa wood.  Max, obviously, is very fond of his Frank Orison, and he is singularly unimpressed by the argument that a lump of some unidentifiable substance cannot really be his father, mostly because he's already aware of this fact. His Frank Orison, artificial though it might be, comforts and instructs him; "He's lucky to have found such a worldly father, too, who so brightly reflects everything around him," says Geiger.  (The Frank Orison is not the only reflecting item in the story; mirrors are everywhere in this piece, almost all of them broken or in some way distorting their surroundings.  It's a resonant, spooky touch.) What more does a growing boy need?

Let me make it clear:  I love this. If this were all there were to Geiger's story, I would have nothing negative to say about it. I might shake my head in wonder and bafflement, but I could not criticize: there would be too much to speculate about, too many possible meanings to examine. We would be in Kafka's territory, or Borges', or Ashbery's -- we would be in the land of signifiers without firm signifieds, of allegories untethered to the real world. But alas:  Geiger lacks the courage of his authorial convictions, and so, inevitably, little Max Orison has a real father somewhere, a real Frank Orison who appears to have abandoned his family to pursue an unspecified career on television. And so, we reluctantly conclude, Max's odd metallic Frank Orison is merely a surrogate for the real Frank Orison, merely a way for him to fend off his hurt and betrayal. Not only that, but the existence of the absent Frank Orison allows for the germ of a plot:  neighborhood boys can tease him about his missing father, teachers can worry over his mental health, his mother can plead with him not to embarrass her. In other words, the story can collapse comfortably into the mundane.

Let me conclude with my own orison:  Oh, Scott Geiger, who shows such promise, who turns such strange, luminous phrases as "mute as a chessman" and "in time the pentagonal asymmetry of his father's face revealed itself", I ask that you forswear what you think your stories should be and accept what they are. I ask that you give up your received notions of plot and of pacing, that you abstain from creating supporting characters indistinguishable from cardboard, that you reject the prevailing myth of our age, which is that all childhood grief stems from a parent's betrayal. In this way, oh Scott, you will win yourself at least one devoted reader.
 

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Benjamin Chambers: You're dead-on, Bill. "The Frank Orison" is so disappointing that it inspires anger.

I was less enamored than you were of the possibilities inherent in the story's symbolism, because the basic concept -- kid desperately trying to replace his absent father -- never leaves the realm of cliché. "Orison" is a one-note story (and incidentally, it's the same note we heard in "Refresh, Refresh," which now seems in retrospect to be virtually architectonic by comparison). The story's incidents consist of a tour around the significant features of Max's life: wagon, airfield, jetty, bullies, teacher, mother. None of these touch him or change him. The bullies don't bully; the teacher doesn't teach; mom doesn't mother; Max doesn't care ... and that dog don't hunt. All that Max's encounters do is underscore the never-very-interesting fact that this kid is consciously calling inanimate objects his father. 

Even Geiger, I suspect, could care less. It shows in the very first sentence of the story: "Max Orison emerges from the garage pulling the type of red wagon forever popular with children his age." That's a rookie mistake, not bothering to make Max's wagon a specific wagon. Instead, Geiger relies on stereotype, and he relies on it for almost everything else in the piece, except the Frank Orison itself. Even the jetty comes from central casting. The airfield, I have to admit, sounds more interesting than most, since it appears to regularly serve jets, biplanes, and blimps simultaneously. But the quirkiness of this detail never goes anywhere, and I concluded that Geiger was not actually in control of his material.

Thank God we've got "The Lion's Mouth" to turn to. 

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