Order MOONDOG OVER THE MEKONG here
They came for Taem in the middle of the night. Kicked him in the balls and drug him out of the two-level apartment in boxers, Samnien screaming. They didn't say anything. They knew who he was. They knew just what he'd done.
Minimalist writers are a dime a dozen, nowadays. Most of them are crap. No, it's true, most contemporary minimalists borrow the aesthetic to cover the fact that they can't write. It's bad enough I came to believe one can only be minimalistic spontaneously, like Raymond Carver. I don't think he was trying to fit any kind of mold. He was just writing the best fiction he could come up with. I don't think Court Merrigan is self-consciously minimalist either. The stories in MOONDOG OVER THE MEKONG are just quiet and observative in their nature, despite their unflinching stances on the human condition. The world according to Merrigan is a place you never quite seen before. An original and compassionate vision from broken places.
My favorite story was OUR MUTUFAL FRIEND, where two lead narrators clash about two abandonned children who recently fell from the face of the Earth. I kept expecting it to ram into one of the hundreds of clichés of the genre, but Merrigan kept slaloming between them, challenging its reader, to finally offer such a refreshing ending. THE SCABROUS EXPLOITS OF CYRUS AND GALINA VAN also stood out to me, not only because it's the only Western, but because it's successfully conveying the stark nature of life in the Old West through dialogue alone. I love a good Western, but God knows I'm bored of descriptions of tumbleweeds, cactuses and scorching hot sun. Merrigan's Cyrus Van satisfied this perverse pleasure of mine to be served an almost blindfolded Western story.
Court Merrigan's style is telegraphic and understated indeed, but it's also oddly Shakespearean. His universe is broken promises, ragged desires and people who dream way higher than their pay check. Most of his stories are downright tragedies, but filtered through this self-contained, disciplined and empathic prose, Merrigan highlights the helpless self-destructive instincts of human beings. The best example would be A GOOD GIRL, where a Yakuza and his girl are cornered by the police and wounded. They are sticking together and yet they are the two loneliest characters in the entire collection. They keep together because they are scared of being alone more than they are scared to see the other one disappear. It was another fascinating story.
''So Omaha. Then what?''
''West.''
''Why?''
''I was born out west. Pa died in the Harrows when I was still a squirt and we hoofed it back east like everyone else. Now I'm headed west to get back what's mine.''
I loved Court Merrigan's downplayed, almost avoidant writing style. He is writing hardboiled fiction in the leanest, meanest possible way, yet he cannot fully hide the beating heart under his sentences. Merrigan has a profound understanding of what makes the flawed beauty of human beings. He also understands how the proper distance to your subject can heighten a story, make it larger than it should be. MOONDOG OVER THE MEKONG is a fine example of what minimalism should really be about : the tangible footprint of human character. A story becomes much more powerful if the reader has to coat the action with underlying emotion. It's more demanding as a reader, maybe but it's not throwaway fiction. MOONDOG OVER THE MEKONG stays with you quite a while after you're done.