“Kevin is good with stories and always has been …” - Kevin Brockmeier,
A Few Seconds of Radiant Filmstrip
Kevin Brockmeier’s A Few Seconds of Radiant Filmstrip (Pantheon, $24) appears at first to be a modestly intended experiment, a side project for a novelist while he recharges and waits for the mania to once more descend. It is most simply an account of the Little Rock author’s seventh-grade school year and, while some of the names are changed (probably more out of respect for the feelings of individuals than any legal caution), the book has the chime of remembered truth.
And yet it is more, a delicately rendered memoir that bathes the invariably painful past in a kind of gold-glowing tenderness.There is a huge empathy moving beneath these pages, a kindly intelligence that notes and investigates - that susses and groks - each tort committed and indignity endured. In the end, forgiveness is available to all. One gets the feeling that while the experience described is universal, it is not the sort of book that many of us could have written.
The Kevin Brockmeier in this book is 12 years old, and a young, naive 12 at that. He’s much younger than say, Huck Finn, who was 13 when he floated down the river with Jim, or the pair of 14-year-olds at the center of Jeff Nichols’ movie Mud (to whom Brockmeier could be a citified younger cousin).
Brockmeier begins the book as a child. He is smaller than most of his classmates, bookish, nonathletic and prone to exercising his college-level vocabulary. Yet while he bears some of the hallmarks of “the weird kid,” he does not, at least at the beginning of the book, seem to be particularly unpopular.
But this is the seventh grade, the beachhead of adolescence, the thresher of one’s childhood notions about oneself. This is where you begin to learn all about your limitations, about the futures that will be forever foreclosed to you. This is where you begin to understand how circumscribed your particular talents may be, how tenuous the bonds you’ve formed with others are, how indifferent the larger world is to your particular specialness.
Brockmeier and his “friends” - his peers - have just dragged their unformed carcasses up and out of the primordial soup of elementary school. How they might evolve is anyone’s guess; some have traits that will allow them to adapt and thrive more quickly than others. Others will struggle. None of them can know that, as they blink in the dawn of their new lives and, for the first time, change classes with every bell and mix with students of adult proportions.
One of the structural strengths of the book is that Brockmeier is not a precocious narrator, like Scout in To Kill a Mockingbird or the polymath at the center of Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close or the autistic teenager in Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night. Brockmeier is the protagonist, but not the storyteller, and our observation of him isn’t filtered through his consciousness. This lends a certain almost journalistic quality to the book that contends with Brockmeier’s trademark style, which is one of general dreaminess through which certain vividdetails regularly punch.
Brockmeier and his peers at Central Arkansas Christian will cook for years before beginning to think of themselves as fully adult, if they ever manage that. Seventh grade is just the induction center, a place where you might be sorted into castes, where you might begin to collect some signifiers of what you will eventually come to think of as yourself.
But at first all you have are Eddie Murphy routines and the involuted plots of comic books to drape over your narrow, childish shoulders. At the beginning of Radiant Filmstrip, Brockmeier, who spent the summer with his father and stepmother in Mississippi, has just come home to his mother’s house in Little Rock “to his records and comics and his room with the big wooden K on the door … to his friends and their ten thousand changes. Suddenly everyone is saying bada** rather than awesome, lame rather than stupid, gaybait rather than faggot, and mostly the gaybait is him ….”
Still, Brockmeier is one of the guys, climbing the wall behind Mazzio’s Pizza, shattering bottles in its parking lot and consternating its teenaged manager. (Those familiar with Little Rock in the ’80s will recognize the after-image of that lost city here.) But as the school year goes on he becomes increasingly aware of his oddness - and of the fickle nature of those he thinks of as his friends.
Brockmeier realizes he “cries too easily and laughs too easily” to be considered cool, despite his intention to stop being that kid with whom the girls seem perpetually unfascinated. He goes on frolics which threaten whatever schoolyard credibility he might have accrued. When he shows up dressed as Dolly Parton on Halloween the administration at CAC has to huddle to determine whether his cross-dressing is harmless costuming or a symptom of some perversion. (A harmless costume, they decide. They have to re-convene a few months later when Brockmeier impersonates a popular senior on another unfortunate wardrobe decision.) Later he coaxes some of his classmates to perform in a mystery play he has written (the lead gets cold feet, which requires Brockmeier, who had intended to simply narrate, to take over the role of “Kevin Brockmeier”).
His friends turn on him in a heartbreakingly plausible fashion and the book tilts sideways into an episode of magical realism in which, like Neo in the Matrix, Brockmeier is offered a choice. He doesn’t realize it, but he chooses bravely and the story wends on. As his earnest miscalculations pile up and anxieties multiply, he actually survives. He actually manages to become a different, wiser version of himself - one that incorporates his old self, one who will eventually be able to forgive the child he was.
What may be most remarkable about this slim book is that, though it is specific and precise - Brockmeier is the only real character, the other kids and even the sympathetic teacher, Miss Vincent, are really just strangers with unfathomable motives - it tells us a truth to which all of us can relate. There are plenty of memoirs that recount extraordinary circumstances and adventures, but I cannot think of one that so magically involves us in an exploration of the commonplace. A Few Seconds of Radiant Filmstrip is a look back - not in vengeance, anger or even gloating - but in wonder at the miraculous variety of experience, and the ways we come to be ourselves.
Email:[email protected]
blooddirtandangels.com
Style, Pages 47 on 04/06/2014