Michael Paul Hogan's "Street Light Bolero" (Review)
Toti O’Brien
Michael Paul Hogan’s newly released short story collection leads the reader on a mesmerizing joyride, offering a variegated gamut of settings, characters, point of views, narrative styles and registers, among which the author seamlessly shifts, like a skilled racing driver or a consummate ballroom dancer.
Hogan’s stories span from early 1900s Montmartre to the Florida Keys, from Soho to Sumatra, from the beaches of Saint Tropez to a small island (or boat) lost amidst the South China Sea. Such huge latitude mirrors the author’s displacements (his flesh-and-blood knowledge of diverse countries, languages, cultures) as well as his passions (the towns, eras, and heroes that have inspired him the most).
Whether zooming on “common” people seized in defining moments of grace, or boldly reimagining famous lives from the past, the human landscape is as vast as the territory. Still, Hogan’s navigation from land to land, tongue to tongue, world to world, couldn’t be smoother. The narrative voice has such confidence and crystalline clarity that it prompts readers to sit back and relax. No matter how high the leaps, how daring the arabesques, the voice always rings true.
Hogan’s prose — now jazzy, sudden, staccato, now exquisitely legato, neatly rounded and keenly detailed — bursts with visual splendor. He has the hand of a painter, and his eye sees the world through a movie camera, with swift changes of lens, angle, background, aperture.
An art lover, a critic, and an artist himself, Hogan is fond of collage, a genre most in vogue among Surrealists and Dadaists in early 20th century Paris (where and when some of his stories take place). Doubtlessly, his prose borrows elements from his favored technique, blending seemingly incongruous elements in a cognizant, mindful, deeply felt fashion, weaving tight connections (so fine, they might be invisible) among the distant and disparate. Even sparse, small cameos — edges all-ripped, apparently floating on surface — are, in fact, neatly sewn to a supporting mesh that couldn’t be lighter, more flexible. Hence, the whole is highly cohesive, both within each story and across. As the book unravels, a puzzle gradually comes together (as when, stepping away from a collaged artwork, the perspective adjusts, and details assume different roles in the larger design). Several of the stories link up. Strong leitmotifs emerge. We realize that more ties are there between facts, things said, thoughts, venues, than meets the eye. So much resonates as we go deeper.
Despite its dazzling variety, Hogan’s book is neither a savvy miscellanea nor a fancy extravaganza. There’s a method to the madness, but it is so organic, so fluid, and runs so deep that — like glue in a collage — it never obtrudes, letting the reader drift with joyful abandon. Half of the stories have East Asian settings — though I include among them the “Key Blanco” trilogy, set in Florida (as noted, borders are porous). They are brushed, imbued, and embraced by water (coastlines, islands, high sea) — though one simply goes from a bedroom to a garment store. Leaving ample room to exception, contradiction, variation, a line reels in these tales, threading them like beads of a necklace. A same tone unifies them — narrative, though not necessarily linear (laced point of views, inserts and detours, wavering timelines always animate the plot) and realistic (meaning finely observed and meticulously described, though dreams, myths, legends, memories and ghosts freely inhabit the page, granting imagination its dues). The characters are so-called common people, living relatively common lives, marked by gestures and feelings we all know: working, parting, leaving, longing and displacement, love and loss, bliss and its impermanence, death and mourning, solidarity and solitude. To all, something happens that is worthy of awe, sometimes unbeknownst to themselves. Sometimes, only for our sake, the sake of the observer.
All the stories set in East Asia (or with East Asian characters) are enhanced by the use of full sentences in Bahasa. Sometimes, their meaning is translated, sometimes just implied by the context. It is striking to see how the “foreign/local” tongue settles in, then expands in concentric waves, lending to the story the added weight that gives it gravity, the extra-texture that makes it palpable, the unique sonority that makes it unforgettable. Those words we don’t truly understand allow us to comprehend what otherwise would escape.
The other half of the stories, equally enchanting, have Western (European or U.S.) settings. They might take place at the turn of the 20th century, or in earlier or later time periods, not always defined. They might shift through time, as they often travel from place to place. Here imagination reigns freely, though it plays with history, literature and cinema. Known past artists and authors (Freud and Poe, Kafka and Baudelaire, Ernst and Cocteau, the Fitzgerald, Faulkner, Bukowski, etc.), as well as characters from movies and books are either referred to (setting the tone of a particular era, style, taste...) or they directly intrude, sometimes through the voice of a fantasy doppelganger. A few stories don’t include celebrities and don’t have historical ties. They portray “common” people, though not truly akin to the folks we met on the fishing boats, on the road, or sat in a tiny Florida joint. These belong to a VIP kind of jet set — working, struggling, losing, longing, apparently don’t pertain to their narratives. They are anonymous. However, they relate to the pantheon of Western myths Hogan merrily discombobulates and humorously redesigns in this half of the book, with results that are both brilliantly iconoclastic, and extremely lyrical — as the world of the imagination, at its best, is certainly a haven for the different and the lonely, such as the orphaned semi-paralyzed boy in Varii Graffiti, whose salvation lies in his old uncle’s library, the expanse of Parisian roofs he sees from his window, and the polychrome universe of graffiti artists his mind spawns, then nurtures with infinite love.
As you have guessed, the two strands of the book intertwine. As they mix and mingle, they inevitably reveal what they share. They both pay tribute to the singular solitudes that we are, to the miracle crossings that break our monads wide open, to the hidden connections that bind our islands together, to the healing power of our imagination.
The story that strikes me the most is brief, less than two pages (like a metaphorical haiku focusing the book’s rainbow palette into a single shade). It describes a beach at sunset — a couple, just disembarked — a group of five fishermen — later, another couple. Here, the narrator’s feelings aren’t mentioned once. They are only and strictly defined as negative space, perfectly contoured by the neat, minute, earnest depiction of what he observes of others. Does his brisk awareness of an instant of sheer, simple bliss — taking place beside, yet outside him — isolate him, excavating his longing? Or does it spill on him, reflected by the shimmering light, by a morgana, a mirage between land and sea? The story doesn’t tell. No need. As per the Bahasa dialogue, what we can’t quite decipher is what really comes through.
