Book Review : Ben Tanzer - After the Flood (2015)

Order AFTER THE FLOOD here

(also reviewed)
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"I've missed you," Mark suddenly says.

He's not talking to me.

The pleasure you can only get to know by growing older are bittersweet. My parents made a living telling me I didn't get it yet, that I needed to mature into things and guess what? They were right. I would've never "got" the swag of Tom Jones or the melancholy of a Johnny Cash song at 18. All I ever wanted back then was to destroy everything in sight to a Slayer song. You know what would've also eluded me at 18? The writing of Ben Tanzer. The Chicago-based author's quiet brand of domestic tragedy, often best portrayed in his collections of short stories, treats you like fine wine: it gets better as you both get older, and AFTER THE FLOOD might be his finest yet. 

Ben Tanzer gets a little more ambitious with every release. AFTER THE FLOOD is his first conceptual short story collection, featuring the lives of several people during a very symbolic storm. The first story of the collection HOW IT WORKS might be the most symbolic (and one of the most enjoyable) of them all, featuring a crumbling relationship in crumbling house amidst the storm of the century. I'd say the rust of a long-term relationship is something difficult to describe because it comes from a wordless, anxiety-ridden place, but Tanzer nails it confidently with a story filled with the memories and regrets that build middle aged people.

"Go ahead," I said, grabbing her shoulders and staring into her dead eyes.

"What?" she said.

"Everything is fucked," I said.

"That's the storm talking," she said. "End of the world shit. Let it go."

So I do. I let it go, and then I let her go. But she never quite came back.

Although Ben Tanzer has his own stylistic identity, it's easy to trace the lineage back to Raymond Carver's America, devastated by the alcoholism and loneliness usually found at the other end of the rainbow. Another standout story in the collection was THE RUNNER, which turn the myths of the self-made man and the American saviour upon their heads. A thousand stories like this have been written before and every single one of them is corny, but THE RUNNER isn't. The clash between competitive spirit and human drama it offers isn't binary. It's not a jerkoff-becomes-saviour, it goes way deeper into the spirit of competition and human achievement than that. Not only it's one of the best stories in AFTER THE FLOOD, but it's also one of Tanzer's all-time best.

There are some things you can't quite get until you cross that very bridge in your life, and Ben Tanzer's fiction is one of these things that colours your own wounds and memories with a unique perspective. It feels like the author cares about YOUR wounds, somehow. Tanzer's vulnerability and accessibility aren't just self-sacrifice to the Gods of Writing, they are breaking the boundaries between the reader and him. The storm setting of AFTER THE FLOOD and its short size give it a vivid sense of urgency that his other works didn't have. If you're looking for a literary diamond in the rough, short fiction Ben Tanzer is shining brighter and brighter with every release. AFTER THE FLOOD is beautiful, melancholic and eerily quiet every time the thunder finishes rolling.