Tunneling to the Center of the Earth

by Kevin Wilson

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Tunneling to the Center of the Earth

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Although Tunneling to the Center of the Earth, Kevin Wilson’s first collection, includes two relatively realist stories“Mortal Combat,” about two teenage boys discovering their sexual attraction to each other, and “Go, Fight, Win,” about a teenage girl falling in love with a preteen boymost of the stories are propelled by various “what if” social or conceptual premises, primarily about nonexistent and unusual jobs. For example, the opening story, “Grand Stand-In,” one of the most intriguing and socially significant stories in the book, imagines what it would be like if there existed an organization that rented out grandparents to families who had lost them. The narrator of the story is a grandmother-for-hire who works for Grand Stand-In, a Nuclear Family Supplemental Provider. She admits that the concept of renting a grandparent is undeniably strange (as is true of most of Wilson’s stories); however, she says, once one accepts the concept, it begins to make a bizarre kind of sense. After all, contemporary society is largely populated by mobile couples, many of whom have lost their own parents. Such couples may believe that their children are missing out on an important part of their life experience.

The fifty-six-year-old narrator of “Grand Stand-In” serves as a grandmother to five families, traveling to each as called for but ready to disconnect from each when necessary. The twist of her current assignment is that the family’s real grandmother is still alive. However, because she has suffered a stroke and is in a home for the elderly, her son wants to start fresh with a grandmother with whom his child can interact and build good memories. When the grandchild asks for a lullaby that the stand-in does not know, she breaks the policy of the Supplemental Provider and becomes personally involved with the family by going to visit the real grandmother, only to find out that the son has hired a stand-in granddaughter to come and visit her. It is all finally too much for the narrator, so she quits, asking the company to kill her off for all her families. Wilson makes renting a grandmother a significant trope for society’s willingness to find faux substitutes for the lost “real thing.”

The concept, one is tempted to say “the gimmick,” in “Blowing Up on the Spot” is also an absurd but somehow believable job held by the story’s narrator. He works in a Scrabble factory, which creates letter tiles for Hasbro, Inc. The factory is made up of five large sorting rooms, each one with hundreds of workers who sort through all the wooden tiles that drop from an overhead chute. The job of the protagonist is to search for Q tiles, only one of which is included in each game of Scrabble. He has held the job for three years. He gets a bonus for each assigned letter he finds, managing to find approximately fifty to sixty Q tiles each day.

The invented job is a clever metaphor for meaningless, repetitive work, as well as a narrative means for focusing on a young man, lonely and alone, who seems to have no real purpose in life. The narrator’s main obsession is counting the steps it takes him to go back and forth to work. He lives with his brother in a small apartment above a confection shop, and the owner’s nineteen-year-old daughter, Joan, climbs up a ladder to his room each night to talk with him. Three years previous to the story, his parents blew up; they simply spontaneously combusted, and he now worries that the same thing might happen to him.

The narrator...

(This entire section contains 1901 words.)

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imagines various scenarios of his parents’ death, supposing that it occurred either because they suddenly realized that they did not love each other or because they had a moment of such happiness and love that they exploded wrapped in each other’s arms. Finally, he decides how he wants to imagine their death: His father looked at his mother and knew that she was on the verge of spontaneously combusting; he took her hand, pulled her close to him, and covered her body with his own, so they exploded together. After accepting this version of his parents’ death, the narrator quits his job and runs back to the candy shop to Joan, no longer trying to count the steps that he has always counted before.

The narrator of “The Museum of Whatnot” also has a strange job: She is the curator of the Carl Jensen Museum of Whatnot, which houses things that are ordinarily considered junk but that have been transformed into something interesting and valuable simply because someone collected them. One display is a row of jars that a man has filled with his toenail clippings; another is a set of eight thousand Cracker Jack toys. An exhibit she prepares for a special opening showing consists of letters of the alphabet cut out from magazines and books by a teenager who used them to spell out messages, the way kidnappers do in ransom notes. What makes them particularly suitable as a museum exhibit is that the boy used them to spell out his suicide note, “I don’t think I belong here.” The narrator wonders how many letters it took before the boy realized with despair that they would never say the things he wanted them to say.

The narrator becomes involved with an older doctor who comes regularly to see a spoon collection in the museum. When she finds six additional spoons in the basement, he is so moved by them that he asks her out to dinner, explaining that the spoon collection belonged to his father and that he recognized one of those she found as being from his childhood. When she gets word that the museum is to receive the collection of whatnots of the famous writer William Saroyanboxes of rocks, garbage bags filled with rubber bands, balls of aluminum foilshe has difficulty seeing them as anything other than junk. The doctor tells her that everything becomes junk at some point; all museums are filled with junk from some previous civilization. She accepts that there is something pleasing about allowing something to fill up one’s life, however trivial it might be, and she welcomes the kisses of the doctor as something that can fill up her own life.

The collection’s final weird-job story is “Worst-Case Scenario,” featuring a man with a degree in Catastrophe, for which he studied the way that things fall apart. He advises businesses on such possibilities as how many people would be killed if a disgruntled worker came back to take revenge on his former coworkers or how many people would die if a bus were stuck in a freak blizzard during rush-hour traffic. Although he is only twenty-seven, the protagonist is losing his hair, which he saves and puts in a small pillow. Worried that his girlfriend will no longer love him when he is bald, he constantly asks for her reassurance. When a woman hires him to calculate how safe her baby is in her home, he develops several scenarios, all of which show unlikely but potential danger. For example, the mother might drop a jar of preserves on the floor and miss a piece of glass when she sweeps it up. The baby might then cut itself on the glass fragment, get gangrene, and need to have its arm amputated.

The protagonist’s girlfriend leaves him, saying she is sadder than she was before she met him. When his client asks him how she can accept the things he has told her about her baby, he reworks the numbers on his computer program and shows her an animated scenario in which a boy swims in a pool and rides a bike, all in safety. The final animation shows a family sitting on a porch, happy and safe. When she gives him the baby to hold, he says, “Everything is going to be okay,” and, even though he is aware of all the scenarios that refute this reassurance, he makes himself believe it is true. In an interview at the end of the book, Wilson says this is his favorite story in the collection because it is the first hopeful story that he ever wrote.

“Birds in the House” is not about a strange job but rather about a weird and wonderful contest. It is narrated by a twelve-year-old boy who has been asked in the will of his Japanese grandmother to be witness to the curious contest, between his father and three uncles, to see who will inherit their mother’s house. Each brother must make 250 origami cranes, label them with his initials, and place them on a large table. Four giant fans at the corners of the room will then be turned on simultaneously to blow the paper birds around, until only one is left on the table. The owner of the “surviving” crane will inherit the mansion. The boy’s father, however, has made two extra origami birds and instructs his son secretly to place them on the table near the end of the contest. When the fans are turned on, the brothers scramble around the floor looking for their initials, and they begin to fight fiercely. Refusing to cheat, the boy releases the two birds into the current created by the fans. As the birds fly throughout the house, suddenly one remains suspended in the middle of the table by the competing force of the four fans. The boy hopes it will never fall, that it will stay suspended there forever. The hundreds of white birds filling the house and flying out the window create an ethereal image in contrast to the fighting and scrambling brothers.

The collection’s title story is about three college friends who have just graduated with useless degrees in gender studies, Canadian history, and Morse code. They decide one morning to make tunnels underneath the town in which they live. After several months of digging and living underground, the narrator’s two friends decide abruptly that it is time to leave. When his parents talk him into coming back to the surface as well, a psychiatrist tells the protagonist that he has been postponing his life, hiding in tunnels to avoid the responsibilities of the real world. However, he feels that there was more to the tunneling than that, that it had something to do with making contact with the reality of the earth. The narrator becomes a landscape gardener. Sometimes, he digs his fingers into the ground, thinking he hears a thumping soundas if the earth were speaking to him in Morse codeonly to realize that it is his own heart, and he feels happier than anything on top of the earth.

When Wilson was asked how he balances the real and the strange in his stories and keeps the narratives believable, he responded that he works hard at embracing the ridiculous nature of the stories without making the concerns of the characters ridiculous. He also suggests that if authors incorporate strange and perhaps impossible phenomena into their stories without emphasizing those phenomena, they become more readily accepted by readers. Although Wilson’s stories are not as complexly critical and satirically biting as those of George Saunders, with whom he has been compared, they are imaginative explorations of intriguing “what if” scenarios.

Bibliography

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Booklist 105, no. 16 (April 15, 2009): 24.

The Boston Globe, April 9, 2009, p. G14.

Kirkus Reviews 77, no. 4 (February 15, 2009): 170.

The New York Times Book Review, April 5, 2009, p. 5.

Publishers Weekly 255, no. 48 (December 1, 2008): 25.

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