Book Review: Talking to Ghosts at Parties
- Mar 26, 2023
- 3 min read
Talking to Ghosts at Parties by Rick White, Storgy, 2022
Reviewed by Scott Neuffer
I’m trying to quit smoking while writing this book review. I want words to be enough, spiritual entities that, like ghosts, animate the moment. But how I crave the smoldering wreck of a well-smoked cigarette, the way one crushes the butt into concrete, leaving a black smear. Words are not enough: images on the verge of flight pulled back to the shore of embodied reality, the grit, the dregs, inconsolably compromised and mortal.
I’m thinking about this interplay reading Rick White’s debut story collection, Talking to Ghosts at Parties. He’s a masterful fabulist, working at the boundary where our fantastical minds meet the real, don’t-give-a-shit world. These thirty stories are wildly imagined, rich with recurring characters, often intensely funny, but never mean or heavy-handed. They plumb something delicate, a human need for connection that beats beneath the words like a skittish heart.
“Esther lived in corners” is the first line of the collection, from “Uncle Charlie’s Bicycle,” and it sets the themes of alienation, secrecy and the ways characters try to break free from society and themselves. In “You’ll Never Be a Cat,” a traumatized girl assumes a feline identity in front of a doctor, playing out a fantasy life that invokes the moon and the rock band the Cure. In “Dog Face Malone, Meet Linda,” a father stricken with cancer names his tumor “Linda” and leaves a suicidal message for his ex-wife. When the ex-wife shows up, the man realizes how much he needs her: “She’s the only way I can relate to the real world. She’s my anchor, my fulcrum, always has been.” White writes his characters at their most desperate and fanciful, as they become ghosts to themselves, but not without tethers to flesh and blood.
In one of the best stories of the collection, “Lycanthropy (Werewolf Kitchen),” a restaurateur is convinced he is a werewolf and denies himself love because he believes he is a dangerous monster. “Jimmy had once heard the term solipsism and vaguely understood what it meant — that only one’s mind is sure to exist. He didn’t know that it came from the Latin solus, meaning alone.” Whether the character is a werewolf is irrelevant. What’s real is the ache of his loneliness, his feeling of unworthiness.
Sometimes the solipsism in the collection ends in tragedy as the cruel world is splayed open in a thousand different ways. In “Cafeteria,” a story about bullying, there is a moment “where Abdul splits in two. One half is the Abdul lying on the piss-soaked floor, cowering in his shame. The other is the future Abdul, inextricably tied forever to the ghost of this moment.” So many misfits struggle to survive in school or work, and White isn’t beyond scathing send-ups of corporate culture and violent, empty men.
Perhaps even more striking is when White achieves the level of myth and transcendence. He reaches poetic heights when his characters completely give themselves to fantasy. Such is the case of “Eric the Astronomer” who lives alone in a “tower made of memories.” “Ands so it goes on for Eric, night after night — this dance, this worship. And every night, Eric’s tower grows a little taller, heaven gets a little nearer.” It is love that fuels the fantasy, and it is love — its hope, its failure, its grandeur — that imbues these stories with magic.
Talking to Ghosts at Parties is simultaneously shrewd and big-hearted in navigating the spectral planes of human existence. White is a visionary full of wit and sympathy, and this debut collection will haunt readers in the best way.
