Book Review: Time as a Sort of Enemy

Dom Fou

Time as a Sort of Enemy by Tyler Dempsey, Gob Pile Press, 2022

Reviewed by Scott Neuffer

Tyler Dempsey’s new story collection snaps with dark energy, leaving the texture of dried blood on the mind’s fingers. The eight stories in the collection range from a scrappy, elliptical prose style to more sprawling stream-of-consciousness constructions, and they plumb settings from the Midwest to Mexico City to the advent of Internet life. What could be called satirical in these stories quickly becomes social realist grounded in a dark, working-class ethos.

The first story plays Apollo and Aphrodite off each other in jest, imagining a couples therapy session. It’s a fun opener that still manages thought-provoking lines like, “We never capture what we’re worth.” The second story originally appeared in trampset and compiles eight subjective passages with similar themes. The fifth passage explores emotions associated with poverty. The final passage takes this forlornness to a hallucinatory state: “Out my head. Around the rafters. Is a man. It’s me. Cept, I don’t know. Up there bawling. Everybody else, the whole street’s looking up. I don’t know a damned thing.” It’s a breathtaking passage to end the story. Dempsey can produce moments that feel both epiphanic and desultory, of “mind craving answers just out of reach to questions unidentifiable.” In the way he probes philosophic quandaries of desolate men, Dempsey recalls some of the best work of Cormac McCarthy and Denis Johnson. The narrator of a later story sums it up best: “It’s building — debt, chores, guilt — loaded like a trap. If you’re dumb, like me, you sense it. When, how, and why, you’ll never unpack. But, you spend your life trying to get ahead.”

Hope is not a luxury the characters in Time as a Sort of Enemy have. Still, a sense of humanity emerges: weathered, heartbroken, deranged, articulate. In being able to touch upon the obscene and profound, in being able to navigate harsh worlds with scraps of emotion, Dempsey proves himself a skilled chronicler of modern masculinity, an immensely talented and thoughtful writer. Here loneliness becomes sublime. Thought itself becomes a means of perseverance.