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In any case, I didn’t have the same problem with Benjamin Percy’s “Refresh, Refresh” that you did initially – I mean about its being “another Iraq piece,” largely because I haven’t run across any other Iraq pieces. Like you, though, I was brought up short very early on, for an entirely personal reason: the narrator lives in Crow, Oregon, which he says is on the eastern side of the Cascades, near Bend. Problem is, I happen to live in Oregon, and my wife spent part of her childhood in Crow, Oregon, and Crow is west of the Cascades, in a very different climate than Percy's fictional Crow. As a writer and as a reader, I find I have more tolerance than most, generally, when the laws of space and time are treated somewhat casually by an author, or geography is adjusted for a bigger dramatic payoff. But man oh man, it bothered me that Percy couldn’t get “Crow’s" location right. It was fine with me that he created a fictional town, but he should’ve checked an atlas to make sure he didn’t pick a name that belonged somewhere else in Oregon. So right away, I didn’t trust him. Later, after I finished the story, I looked him up and found that he grew up in eastern Oregon, in a town similar to the one he describes in the story, but that only made his gaffe worse, as if he had a responsibility to know better, or at least look it up.

Now that I’ve gotten that off my chest, I’ll set it aside for more substantive issues.

Problem is, I think you nailed it. I had hoped to disagree with you more than I do; not only because it would make for a livelier discussion, but also because it’s ungracious for both of us to beat up on a story – makes it seem like a fixed fight. Unfortunately, “Refresh, Refresh” is one of those stories that offers no purchase for someone trying to defend it. Its characters' lack of differentiation is, as you’ve said, its biggest weakness. (The only character who stands out for me is Dave Lightener, who makes free with the wives of enlisted men while ruthlessly recruiting their sons for the war. Percy’s narrator wants us to despise him the way he does – Lightener's the villain of the piece, in part because he’s also the one who brings the bad news to the wives when they’ve been widowed – but Lightener is the one character in the story about whom I felt curiosity and sympathy. Why? Because he was different.) No scene in the story is meant to enthrall – everything is designed to deliver the reader to the final punchline: a debased form of fiction, in my view. Yes, the sentences are nicely constructed, the physical details of place are vividly rendered, and there are dutifully-placed metaphors intended to signal deeper emotional pain, as in “Browned grass crunched beneath our sneakers and dust rose in little puffs like distress signals.” But so what? The boys exist in a constant state of waiting, a stasis consisting of one violent episode after another. I dutifully read through these episodes because they constituted the first story in one of the Big Three anthologies of the year, and because the story had, after all, originally appeared in the Paris Review and ergo, I thought it would go somewhere. But when I arrived at the story’s end -- when the boys receive some bad but predictable news and they join the Marines – I found myself saying, “That’s the story’s big payoff?” And the answer is yes, it is, you’re supposed to feel how lost these boys are, how adrift on grief and uncertainty, and instead I merely felt - ahem - enervated.

“Refresh” hammers away in a repetitive fashion at the characters' anxiety about their fathers' absence. They beat each other into blood pulps in the boxing ring. They pray that Dave Lightener will never come to their doors on official business. While hunting in the woods, they play a little at being soldiers or in a SWAT team, and terrorize the school bully. They watch the news from Iraq. They hit the "refresh" button on their web browsers in case there might be new e-mail from their fathers. On those rare occasions when the e-mail does come, it's generic: "Hi Josh. I'm OK. Don't worry. Do your homework. Love, Dad." And of course, Josh tapes it up on his door, but you wish he didn't. A detail like that might work well in a story with more complicated characters. But Josh isn't complicated, and as you've said, Bill, he's not any different from the other boys his age (where, by the way, are the girls their age?): he's the same character, and he's feeling and doing everything the other boys are doing: waiting. Percy wants this to be poignant, but because he's playing only one note throughout, sentiment decays quickly into sentimentality.

“Refresh” won a $10,000 prize from The Paris Review and was read on Symphony Space, two facts that confirm your theory, I think, about why this story resonates with the intelligentsia. It fails to resonate with me, however. Though it has nicely-written sentences, it was disappointingly forgettable. Consider me unrefreshed.


Home \| Final Issue \| King's Council \| Books We Love \| Books You Love \| Archives \| Blog Who We Were ▪► Submit ▪► Links ▪► E-Mail THE KING'S COUNCIL *In which your Sovereign Majesty gets an earful on contemporary literature from your loyal councilors* [PUSHCART PRIZE XXXI: BEST OF THE SMALL PRESSES], Bill Henderson, Ed. [Final Issue] ▪ [King's Council Table of Contents] ▪ [Next Review] "Refresh, Refresh," by Benjamin Percy Bill Bukovsan: To be honest, by the time I was two pages into Benjamin Percy’s “Refresh, Refresh”, which kicks off the 2007 anthology, I was thinking, Oh no, not another Iraq piece. Now, before you think me overly harsh, let me assure you: I think that some good fiction will eventually come out of this war—I’m just skeptical that it’s going to come out any time soon. Iraq is a tricky issue to write about right now, not least because public opinion—not just the opinion of people who are likely to read The Paris Review, where Percy’s story was originally published, but the opinion of nearly everyone, the great unwashed American Idol-watching public—has turned so loudly against it. Couple this with the fact that the few who still support the war are equally as vociferous (not to mention in power), and you have what amounts to a national debate over a cartoon: all subtlety is swallowed up in the heat and noise of the argument.
I will give Mr. Percy this: the incidents in his story are both inventive and believable ... The problem is that the characters don’t seem to have good reasons for anything they do—or, rather, they have a single reason for everything they do, and it’s a cop-out.
I guess you could argue that this represents ideal territory for a writer—after all, it’s a writer's job to lay nuance bare, to reveal the squirming, messy truth of a given situation. The difficulty is that if you’ve already chosen your side, it’s nearly impossible to see the other—and everyone in America (including, it seems, Mr. Percy) has already taken a side. Mr. Percy wants to show us that the Iraq war is hard on working-class communities, and that it is particularly hard on the adolescent sons of the men who are called away to fight. And so it is—we have newspapers to tell us so, in case we don’t happen to know it already. But “Refresh, Refresh” (the title refers to the time the narrator spends in front of his computer, awaiting e-mail from his reservist father) is here to tell us again, here to deliver a lecture in the guise of fiction. The young men who occupy the story’s pages engage in various forms of bad behavior, from reckless sledding to irresponsible sex with sad women, and to kidnapping. (In one particularly gruesome scene, the protagonists terrorize some local rivals with a costume fashioned from a freshly slain deer.) I will give Mr. Percy this: the incidents in his story are both inventive and believable. I was repeatedly surprised by the boys’ antics, and I never felt my credulity strained past the breaking point. The problem is that the characters don’t seem to have good reasons for anything they do—or, rather, they have a single reason for everything they do, and it’s a cop-out. Their motivation is this: their fathers are in Iraq. That’s it—that’s the only thing that motivates them, the only explanation for their behavior. Now, granted, absent fathers can be powerful motivators, and absent fathers in grave danger even more so. The thing is, every one of Percy’s young men seems to react to the fact that his father is off fighting a war in exactly the same way—by a heightened display of machismo. What we have here are not characters, but subjects in a sociological study, statistics swaddled in (make-believe) flesh and bone. (You can easily imagine the accompanying text: “Subjects were observed to be more prone to violent fantasies and to have difficulty with impulse control. Most reported a heightened degree of anxiety.”) But people do not all respond the same way to the same things—sure, some boys in the situation Percy’s characters find themselves in might behave the way he describes, but it’s not a given that all boys will. Where one kid might grow more aggressive, another might retreat into himself; where one might decide to exact revenge on the school bully, another might decide to hide in the closet. Hell, depending on what sort of relationship a son had with his father, he might even be grateful or relieved that the old man’s out of the country and in harm’s way. But we don’t know—we never know. All of the fathers are exactly the same—pointedly so. Percy says it explicitly: “Our fathers … were like the other fathers in Crow. All of them, just about, had enlisted as part-time soldiers, as reservists, for drill pay: several thousand a year for a private and several thousand more for a sergeant. Beer pay, they called it …” And then, a few lines on, the narrator refers to the missing fathers as “the men we knew: Coors-drinking, baseball-throwing, crotch-scratching, Aqua Velva-smelling fathers.” They are homogeneous, undifferentiated. Not one of them goes so far as to throw a football instead of a baseball, or to drink Jim Beam (or even Bud!) instead of Coors. (Imagine, if you want to scare yourself, a whole town where every man smells like Aqua Velva.) They are not really men at all, of course, not really characters: they are simply a political statement—war is bad because it takes fathers away from sons. To be fair, there is more to Percy’s thesis than that: he is also saying, I think, that war is bad because, in the absence of fathers, boys do not know how to grow up to become men. And this may all be true; indeed, it probably is. But just because a story’s politics are good doesn’t make it a good story. What I think has happened with “Refresh, Refresh” is this: the literary establishment is hungry, with the sort of blind hunger that only the utterly powerless can have, to land some good punches on the architects of the godforsaken mess our country is in, and so it’s leaping at pieces that affirm and reinforce its own values and insights. Let’s face it: the people who sit around reading literary magazines are not likely to have ever been anything other than opposed to the war (and in this they differ from the vast run of their fellow citizens, who, I think, were either warily patriotic in the wake of September, 2001 or simply too busy to pay much attention), and are also, curiously, among the least likely to be directly affected by it. “Refresh, Refresh,” therefore, is the kind of piece that can allow them (and by "them" I mean us, well-educated middle-class liberals) to feel good about their own judgment. Not only does the story say tell us what we already know, it has the distinct virtue of being about people who are not like us, people who it’s acceptable to pity. In the end, it leaves us safe and sound, exactly where we were before we started reading it. It does not change us, and so it will not long linger in our memory. (Exercise for the reader: create a sympathetic, non-delusional, thoughtful character who is in favor of the Iraq war. Such folks are out there in contemporary life; why not in contemporary fiction?) One more observation, and then I’ll turn it over to you: we live in a time of intense national moral anxiety. If there’s one thing that Americans seem to have in common at the moment, it’s a defensiveness about their place in the world. Being the world’s only superpower has its advantages, maybe, but it also leads to a surfeit of apologizing for and/or justification of the situation. In this climate, it’s natural that American fiction—this piece included—would turn outward, make some attempt to grapple with our recent history. (How many books about 9/11 have there been in the past few months? DeLillo’s the latest to join the caravan, I see …) I don’t think this is, in and of itself, a bad thing—after all, a similar climate in Britain produced Kipling on the one hand and Dickens on the other. But I think there is a trap in it as well, the same trap into which “Refresh, Refresh” fell, only writ large—in attempting to speak for or about all Americans, you run the risk of assuming Americans are more alike than we actually are. (And no, I’m not talking about conventional notions of diversity, cultural or otherwise—not about differences among subgroups of Americans, but about the differences from one solitary person to another.) If you try to describe the character of a nation, you are in danger of overlooking the character of an individual. But we read alone and think alone; our experience of the world begins in our own heads, and if it extends beyond them a lot of the time, that’s still where it always finishes up. A writer, if he or she wants to move a reader, must bear this in mind. ▼▪▲ Benjamin Chambers: I don’t have as lofty a goal for this exchange as you do, Bill. I just like talking about fiction, about what makes stories work or not. To the extent that I find that the Pushcart stories meet my standards of excellence, then I’ll know, at most, the extent to which my taste and standards are consistent with their editor, Bill Henderson. (Though I haven’t finished reading all of the fiction in the anthology, I can tell already that Mr. Henderson and I disagree on a lot.)
I had hoped to disagree with you more than I do; not only because it would make for a livelier discussion, but also because it’s ungracious for both of us to beat up on a story – makes it seem like a fixed fight.
In any case, I didn’t have the same problem with Benjamin Percy’s “Refresh, Refresh” that you did initially – I mean about its being “another Iraq piece,” largely because I haven’t run across any other Iraq pieces. Like you, though, I was brought up short very early on, for an entirely personal reason: the narrator lives in Crow, Oregon, which he says is on the eastern side of the Cascades, near Bend. Problem is, I happen to live in Oregon, and my wife spent part of her childhood in Crow, Oregon, and Crow is west of the Cascades, in a very different climate than Percy's fictional Crow. As a writer and as a reader, I find I have more tolerance than most, generally, when the laws of space and time are treated somewhat casually by an author, or geography is adjusted for a bigger dramatic payoff. But man oh man, it bothered me that Percy couldn’t get “Crow’s" location right. It was fine with me that he created a fictional town, but he should’ve checked an atlas to make sure he didn’t pick a name that belonged somewhere else in Oregon. So right away, I didn’t trust him. Later, after I finished the story, I looked him up and found that he grew up in eastern Oregon, in a town similar to the one he describes in the story, but that only made his gaffe worse, as if he had a responsibility to know better, or at least look it up. Now that I’ve gotten that off my chest, I’ll set it aside for more substantive issues. Problem is, I think you nailed it. I had hoped to disagree with you more than I do; not only because it would make for a livelier discussion, but also because it’s ungracious for both of us to beat up on a story – makes it seem like a fixed fight. Unfortunately, “Refresh, Refresh” is one of those stories that offers no purchase for someone trying to defend it. Its characters' lack of differentiation is, as you’ve said, its biggest weakness. (The only character who stands out for me is Dave Lightener, who makes free with the wives of enlisted men while ruthlessly recruiting their sons for the war. Percy’s narrator wants us to despise him the way he does – Lightener's the villain of the piece, in part because he’s also the one who brings the bad news to the wives when they’ve been widowed – but Lightener is the one character in the story about whom I felt curiosity and sympathy. Why? Because he was different.) No scene in the story is meant to enthrall – everything is designed to deliver the reader to the final punchline: a debased form of fiction, in my view. Yes, the sentences are nicely constructed, the physical details of place are vividly rendered, and there are dutifully-placed metaphors intended to signal deeper emotional pain, as in “Browned grass crunched beneath our sneakers and dust rose in little puffs like distress signals.” But so what? The boys exist in a constant state of waiting, a stasis consisting of one violent episode after another. I dutifully read through these episodes because they constituted the first story in one of the Big Three anthologies of the year, and because the story had, after all, originally appeared in the Paris Review and ergo, I thought it would go somewhere. But when I arrived at the story’s end -- when the boys receive some bad but predictable news and they join the Marines – I found myself saying, “That’s the story’s big payoff?” And the answer is yes, it is, you’re supposed to feel how lost these boys are, how adrift on grief and uncertainty, and instead I merely felt - ahem - enervated. “Refresh” hammers away in a repetitive fashion at the characters' anxiety about their fathers' absence. They beat each other into blood pulps in the boxing ring. They pray that Dave Lightener will never come to their doors on official business. While hunting in the woods, they play a little at being soldiers or in a SWAT team, and terrorize the school bully. They watch the news from Iraq. They hit the "refresh" button on their web browsers in case there might be new e-mail from their fathers. On those rare occasions when the e-mail does come, it's generic: "Hi Josh. I'm OK. Don't worry. Do your homework. Love, Dad." And of course, Josh tapes it up on his door, but you wish he didn't. A detail like that might work well in a story with more complicated characters. But Josh isn't complicated, and as you've said, Bill, he's not any different from the other boys his age (where, by the way, are the girls their age?): he's the same character, and he's feeling and doing everything the other boys are doing: waiting. Percy wants this to be poignant, but because he's playing only one note throughout, sentiment decays quickly into sentimentality. “Refresh” won a $10,000 prize from The Paris Review and was read on Symphony Space, two facts that confirm your theory, I think, about why this story resonates with the intelligentsia. It fails to resonate with me, however. Though it has nicely-written sentences, it was disappointingly forgettable. Consider me unrefreshed. ◄▪► [Final Issue] ▪ [King's Council Table of Contents] ▪ [Next Review]