ArtsBeat

In his 1987 essay "The New Sentence" poet-critic Ron Silliman argued for new kind of writing that would displace traditional narrative with a "dematerialized" prose based on the juxtaposition of sentences (or "parataxis") without a preordained hierarchy of meaning.
 
Outside of academia, this dematerialized writing style has found its expression in the development of "flash fiction" as a popular literary subgenre. While not all flash fiction has the non sequitur quality of surrealism and literary pastiche, the extreme compression of the form tends to favor broad gestures over subtle ones, and a predisposition toward hyperbole and incongruous juxtaposition.
   
In Buffalo-based fiction writer Greg Gerke's debut collection There's Something Wrong With Sven(BlazeVox Books), flash fiction illuminates some of the same eccentricites of small town, middle American experience that Sherwood Anderson explored in his classic early 20th century story collections Winesburg, Ohio (1919) and Triumph of the Egg (1921).   Like Anderson, Gerke reveals the core of strangeness underlying familiar societal conventions as grotesque, and depicts his 21st century "grotesques" as intimately familiar.

Packing 54 "flash" narratives into a scant 144 pages, Gerke--a Wisconsin native by way of the University of Oregon--takes readers on a picaresque gambol through many of the leading tropes of contemporary American storytelling from the manic to the gothic, absurdist romance to mock epic parody, Rashomon-effect reverie to tavern patron's tall tale.
 
"I invite you to live in my world, my life, my superconductor under my short brown hair.  Words scare me more than switchblades or machetes, " he writes in "Consider the Percocet," a monologue that elevates stream of consciousness to a kind of delirious over sharing.  Like many of the fictions in this collection, its imaginative limits are more closely constrained the rules of grammar and linguistic construction than the norms of human behavior or the laws of causality and the physical universe.
 
In an attempt at thematic organization, the collection is divided into three sections: "Bacchanalian," "Saturnine," and "Mercurial," but the fictions that comprise each section do not necessarily adhere to this neo-classical motif.  Instead, the "Bacchanalian" narratives have a droll, whimsical quality typified by the title story, a Paul Bunyanesque tall tale in which "Sven" is a 1,000 pound pet moth.
 
"Saturnine," the middle section, is less self consciously ironic, especially in "Did you Recognize Him?," a childhood reminiscence of such powerful clarity and heartfelt tenderness that it suggests Gerke has an untapped gift for memoir.  "Mercurial," the concluding section, contains the longest and arguably the most traditionally structured stories of the collection.
 
Gerke, who co-programs the Exhibit X Fiction and Prose Reading Series and leads Just Buffalo Literary Center's Short Story Discussion Group, is an ambitious young writer whose talent for Tristram Shandy like digression may not best be served by the limitations of the flash fiction form.  He is currently at work on a first novel set in Brooklyn.
 
--R.D. Pohl