NONFICTION
‘My Father’s Guitar and Other Imaginary Things’
By Joseph Skibell
Algonquin
$16.95, 224 pages
“Memory,” observes Mary Karr, “is a pinball in a machine — it messily ricochets around between image, idea, fragments of scenes, stories you’ve heard. Then the machine goes tilt and snaps off.”
This spot-on metaphor from Karr’s recent “The Art of Memoir” speaks to the dizzying sensation of being “waylaid” by unexpected recollections. Atlanta author Joseph Skibell rolls out a similar analogy in “My Father’s Guitar and Other Imaginary Things,” his first nonfiction collection. The narrator of “Everybody’s Lot” stammers for three pages trying to place a world-famous actor. Eventually, the name falls “onto my tongue like a gum ball dropping out of a gum-ball machine.”
Skibell’s enjoyable, if disjointed, jumble of personal writing bounces pinball-like between droll anecdotes and intricate family histories. The “tilt,” so to speak, comes in its forceful reflections on the fleeting nature of consciousness.
Though the 16 short pieces in “My Father’s Guitar” are called essays on the jacket, Skibell refers to them as stories. Neither label fits perfectly. Taken as a whole, the anthology reads as a fragmentary memoir, providing random snapshots of the author’s awkward Jewish childhood in Lubbock, Texas, long flirtation with making music and difficulties launching a writing career.
The title piece sets the stage for what appears to be a recognizable premise: middle-aged adult struggles to reconnect with (or at least understand) a distant parent. It begins with a geeky reverie about buying a Martin guitar, but the mood darkens when Skibell is summoned home to tend to his bedridden dad. During the convalescence, father and son pass the days with long chats about music. A curvaceous “dreadnought” of a guitar spotted at his dad’s house weighs on the narrator’s brain — but a later visit reveals a completely different, far less desirable instrument.
“This was all very problematic for me,” Skibell admits. His sisters insisted “that for me memory and imagination are like two converging rivers, that I tend to misremember things or, more probably, make them up.” The bogus memory (a “laughably Freudian” mental hiccup, it turns out) introduces a pressing question: “If I could dream a guitar up out of thin air, what else, over the years, had I imagined?”
Skibell, who has taught English and creative writing at Emory University since 1999, maintains a workmanlike style for most of these confessional tales, shying away from the lyrical zing of his novels “A Blessing on the Moon” or “A Curable Romantic.” The tactic allows key incidents and personalities to stand on their own. “Don’t Mess With Mister In Between” needs no ornamentation in detailing an uncle’s “hobby,” his code word for crack addiction. Ditto for “Snip, Snip, Snip,” involving a house haunted by a dressmaker’s ghost that makes phantom scissor noises late at night.
The spare voice is less effective when “Guitar” riffs into Andy Rooney rants, whining about credit card fraud or parking attendants. In “If You Were Smiths,” Skibell grows irate at a cousin for posting unsolicited online reviews of his novels. Thankfully, the brief fable of hubris squeezes self-effacing laughs out of a first-world problem.
Skibell’s comedic skills come in handy when he discusses personal eccentricities and embarrassments, such as getting fired from playing cowboy songs at a Texas steak house or the fiasco of pitching scripts to Hollywood agents searching for the next “Educating Rita.” When his wife pokes fun of his fascination with dead languages, he notes their usefulness in dealing with “dreamers and ghosts.”
The curious sway that dreams hold over waking life plays a big role in “Irvin in Wonderland,” the anthology’s liveliest entry and one of its most thought-provoking. At last, Skibell returns to the tense father-son dilemma introduced at the opening. The previously described “chasm of incomprehension” between the two takes on a new meaning during a transformative hospital episode.
His father dumbfounds everyone by waking up Lazarus-like from his supposed deathbed. Confusion compounds as he starts reporting visions and quoting the Torah. Skeptical at first, the narrator looks to Jewish mysticism for guidance.
“It took days for Dad to come down off his high, days and nights during which we continued our Irvin in Wonderland explorations of consciousness and meaning.” Grinning like the Cheshire cat, the once-cranky patriarch jumps from pranking the nurses to speaking fluent German. The author wonders, “How much of ourselves do we really know? How much of ourselves do we hide, even from ourselves, behind the masks we wear?”
The chapter ends with both men returning to their old positions, “distant and correct with each other once again.”
That’s the downside to such powerful and emotive storytelling: It leaves you wanting more. Skibell lets the daddy issues simmer as he trots out a parade of other enigmatic men in his family. His recollections of a hearse-driving flim-flam man or a D-list character actor never lack affection or texture. The familial connection add a sense of implication, something that’s too often missing in the book’s many encounters with offbeat strangers.
As frustrating as it can sometimes be, the presumably random shuffle of ideas and personalities in “My Father’s Guitar” speaks to its central argument about coping with impermanence. Skibell reminds us that memories, both the real and fake ones, eventually fade. The same goes for objects — and people. “We rarely get the kind of love we want,” says one essay, “and though it’s easy to grow bitter over the imperfect love we’re given, there’s nothing to do but accept it.”
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