In his short story “For Those of Us Who Need Such Things,” Brock Clarke describes a sight as being “somehow … both genuine and ironic.” This phrase sums up Clarke’s writing style and all of his stories, which are at once heartbreaking and hilarious, honest and cynical. The book is “Carrying the Torch,” a collection of short stories, and Clarke will be on the MSU campus Thursday at 8 p.m. in the McCool Hall auditorium to read from his works.
Clarke is an assistant professor of English and creative writing at the University of Cincinnati, and he has received much praise for his first collection of short stories, “What We Won’t Do,” which won the Mary McCarthy Prize in Short Fiction, and his novel “The Ordinary White Boy” received rave reviews. Clarke recently won the Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Fiction for “Carrying the Torch.” He is also fiction editor for The Cincinnati Review.
In “Carrying the Torch,” set mostly in suburban areas of the South, the characters in his stories are trying to come to terms with or run away from their pasts, trying to start anew. And they all succeed, whether by some sort of closure, resignation or sometimes through lying to themselves. They are stories about honesty and the truths people deny, the bittersweet truths of love lost, lies and life.
In the desperate “For Those of Us Who Need Such Things,” a husband tries to win back his estranged wife by buying and reviving a small South Carolina town. In “Carrying the Torch,” a woman fed up with her husband’s blatant cheating carves a wooden model of his penis while fantasizing about ripping off the real thing and jogging through the neighborhood streets, holding it above her head like a torch. In the tragic “The Ghosts We Love,” a man dresses up like his dead father in an attempt to expose to his family the lies they hide behind and the false lives they lead.
Not often can a writer form an emotional bond between reader and character in 20 short pages. But Clarke, carefully balancing cynical irony and heartfelt honesty, succeeds.
Clarke’s works contain deeply human, most times tongue-in-cheek, observations about life. Whether in an offhand observation-“… there’s something very distasteful about caterers, something temporary and nomadic about them”-or an intense realization-“One moment it was Lily’s birthday … and I made her a cake … and she kissed me on the cheek for the effort, right on the cheek, which you wouldn’t think would be something more and better than a kiss on the mouth but was.”-Clarke always finds a unique way to say what he means.
His stories are not only characterized by the characters themselves, but by the descriptive details he adds. Clarke manages to fuse a cynical, brash and straightforward writing style with the delicate, bittersweet beauty of loss and love, and readers can surely expect much more from this brilliant observer and writer.