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The World of Glass

Eugene Wildman. The World of Glass. South Bend, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2003. 159 pp. $16.50 Through the past four decades, Eugene Wildman's fiction has marked a passage from the breakdown and exploration of narrative to a careful reevaluation of the possibilities of storytelling. This, though, has not been a circular journey. During his editorship at the Chicago Review from 1964 to '67, Wildman invited work from world contemporaries who were fully committed to narrative play. The Review's Anthology of Concretism (CR 19:4,1967) was the first anthology of visual poetry to be published in this country. With Experiments in Prose (Swallow, 1969), he introduced readers to pieces as diverse and "unmeasured" as Richard Kostelanetz's "Rain Rains Rain Variations" and John Matthias's "Bucyrus." Wildman himself pressed narrative's limits in his own work, yet frustrated with the inevitable formal demands of narrative experimentation, he abandoned this play very consciously in the 1980s. Since then he has preferred to examine how a character's shifts and shapes reflect larger cultural trends. The result of this play is his present collection of short stories, The World of Glass, which explores the possibilities of the "character," told in the flux of recent U.S. history. In an editorial comment in 1967, Wildman noted, "We have no sense of what it is to be without books. I mean not what it is for them to be absent for us personally, but what it is for them to be absent totally, culturally as an idea. And so in the end we do not know what it is to be with them either." Neither do we often know what to do with characters. The delight or horror that we feel for them comes not from their human likeness or resemblance, but from the slips between the physical and psychological movements of the character's "I" and the physical movement of the reader's own eye. The old pun goes on, although in these new stories, the reader turns back and forward in an attempt to nail down the narrating identity. In a sense, reading may be more about losing one's place than staying on the narrative course. Wildman's stories celebrate this condition. The World of Glass goes I-ing through the varying sense of movement and stasis in "Todd White," the central presence in these stories. Wildman chronicles Todd's bump against history and the reader's expectations through the themes of discovery and detachment. he is the expatriate, the vandal, the boy exploring the abandoned movie studio. Reader compare. In the American epic, the "hero" waits to be discovered. Until that time, he crouches in a detached sense of anticipation, waiting for the precise moment to be revealed. Todd is a floating presence in these stories, frozen in detachment and often disappointed in discovery. In the collection's final story, "Ash Wednesday," history reawakens the characters (and reader), bringing us back to Manhattan, 2001. The stories move through "half-expected disappointment" and into discovery, but not in expected routes. In "Todd in Venice," waiting is the dominant activity. Todd distractedly fills out postcards and consults the I Ching in a seaside Thai town. he waits for the shadowy appearance of Kwan. He waits for the story of the legendary American expatriate Jim Thompson to cement itself on the page in front of him. he marks time, pieces out a life in Thailand, "loves being a foreigner," and relishes not being immediately identified as "American." Meanwhile, he mentally troubles his ex-wife's affair, wondering, "surely she wanted to be discovered." he fiddles with the memory of the hickey on her shoulder. all this, as he hustles through town, just a few steps ahead of a couple of U. …