Kirkus Reviews; 5/1/2005
Guista, Michael BRAIN WORK: Stories Mariner/Houghton Mifflin
(208 pp.) $12.00 paperback original Jul. 11, 2005 ISBN: 0-618-54672-3
A California writer with a degree in psychology won the
Bread Loaf Bakeless Prize with this beguilingly cerebral collection
of 14 stories.
Oliver Sacks comes especially to mind when a reader delves
into Guista's digressive first story, "Filling the Spaces Between
Us," about a psychiatrist searching for "soul" in his
patients who finally comes around to what is ailing his wife: she can
no longer discern emotions after an accident with her horse. Guista's
first-person narrators suffer psychically, whether from Catholic guilt,
or pain, or the disorientation of medication. In "A Walk Outside,"
another doctor offers extracts from the diary of an intriguing patient,
prosaically named Norman P. Bowls, whose affliction of chronic inactivity--the
state of being "frozen"--spelled 30 years of "sinking
yet never quite drowning." "Step Four" traces the obsessive-compulsive
behavior of a husband and father who has a phobia for batteries; fed
up with the "unwavering blandness" of his controlling medication
and four-step therapy, he decides to become a free character for the
day, experiencing emotions extremely, and with tragic consequences.
The Catholic catechism forms the textual structure in "The Interviewer"
as the narrator offers a probing Q&A about his own conscience (and
others') before he attains a sense of peace. Some of the stories achieve
a surreal, thrillingly dark twist, like "The Front Yard,"
about a husband on a beer bender who returns home to find that his wife
has moved all the furniture to the front lawn after having had a vision
that Catholics are going to blow up their house. More traditional stories
treat childhood guilt and divorcing parents, like "California,"
about the breakup of a migraine-suffering husband and his adventurous
wife in Florida: his inability to grow ("You grow outward, not
up," she says) prompts her to move out to California for its alluring
"verticality."
A fresh, distinctly unorthodox, intellectually satisfying
collection of finely tuned fiction.
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The paranoia that eats at a college professor who ran over a child, the debauched rampage of an obsessive-compulsive trying to obliterate his fears, the helplessness of a father who, through the haze of a migraine, watches his wife sell all their belongings -- these stories bring something better than a theory: the creepy reminder that ''the thin curtains between 'them' and 'us' '' don't really exist at all.
--Priya Jain - The New York Times
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January Magazine names Brain Work a "Best of 2005" book:
Brain Work is a perfect title; it anticipates exactly what the reader will receive. Cerebral and thoughtful,the author has a way of making the mundane profound: "I believe in death, and now have little reason to have faith in immortality, so time is incredibly awesome to me, in both the wonderful and the terrifying sense of the word. I kill time only when I'm wedged in by it on all sides." Superficially many of the stories seem to be about psychological treatment for abnormal behavior, both neurosis and psychosis, but time and time again the characters and readers find themselves up against the intangible, the inexplicable, as the story slips from solid ground: The psychiatrist who finally gives up his search for the soul, two elderly patients who find the courage to step outside their institution and redefine love, the interviewer who is driven to desperately seek proof of angels. Charles Baxter, in his foreword, astutely writes: "The evidence of things unseen is where psychology and religion meet. Psychology has one explanation for visions, religion another. Psychology was once thought to have demystified religious thought or to have displaced it entirely. But what these stories do is to hold these two explanations in a kind of suspension." He goes on to say that it is very rare for a modern writer to deal with the spiritualization of psychic disorders and he's right. This is what gives these tales their edge and will make them stand out for the persevering reader. These 14 stories, some of them as short as six pages, are full of suffering people, all of whom Guista views with compassion and amazement. It's not so much the plots that will grip you, but rather the pain of each of these characters. It feels as if a new noun needs to be invented to describe their situation and the themes of the book, a noun with as much weight as existentialism to define this 21st Century struggle, to balance the psychological condition with a shifting spiritual anxiety. Guista's stories have appeared in many reviews and journals but Brain Work is his first published book. Original and provoking, combining angst and awe, theology and therapy, these stories will mess with your mind. -- Cherie Thiessen
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Cincinnati City
Beat: MICHAEL GUISTA -- BRAIN WORK: STORIES (MARINER)
Literary types who say the short story format in books is dead don't know what they're talking about. Three of the best books I've read this year have been collections of short stories, including Brain Work by newcomer Michael Guista. The author explores the mysteries of the human mind and soul, all with a somewhat dark approach. The first story, "Filling the Spaces Between Us," is a disturbing tale of a disillusioned psychiatrist's professional obsession. "The Whole World's Guilt" is about a man who accidentally runs over a small girl in his car and the emotions he experiences while trying to keep it a secret. "Down to the Roots" concerns itself with a dysfunctional mother and father trying to raise two children who know all too well their lives need to be better. The story's finale puts the brakes on fast. You won't know what hit you. "Step Four" is about a good-natured family man who's obsessive about batteries -- any kind of battery. It's wickedly funny with another ending you won't see coming. Throughout Brain Work's 14 stories, Guista gives us well defined but strange people. This is by no means a light read on the bus. Sit back at home and get your teeth into this one. It's a damn good first effort by an author to keep an eye on. (Larry Gross) Grade: A
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San Francisco Station:
Brain Work by Michael Guista
The Nature of the Mind
By Mario Bruzzone
Originally, Michael Guista's Brain Work was to be titled Brain Work: Stories in Search of a Soul. While I don't know the actual reason why the subtitle was dropped, I suspect that someone saw its deceptiveness: The stories themselves aren't looking for their own souls; rather, Guista is trying to uncover the essence of the soul that inhabits us all.
This "soul" is loosely defined. It is soul taken to mean the essence of one's being, the combination of personality, intellect, and memory that make us who we are. When we medicate ourselves into a stupor, as one character does, are we the same person even if critical aspects of our personality -- creativity, mental acuity, kindness -- are altered by medication? What if the change is permanent? Most importantly, are we any different than the chemical processes that occur constantly in our brains?
These types of questions are unavoidable in Brain Work, and are part of the reason why it's such a good book. The other part is because Guista, a graduate of the UC Irvine writing program, is an excellent craftsman.
The first story, "Filling the Spaces Between Us", is simultaneously a psychiatrist's exploration of psychiatric illness and of the death of the soul. It is the most brutal and affecting story in the collection, and also exquisite, in a way only the emotionally horrific can be. Like a folk tale, the power of the story is not in the events, though they are inherently interesting, but in the telling of them. The first time I read the story, I could sense the progression, the events that have to follow. Yet even in only rereading certain targeted scenes I find them compelling for, in a beautifully human voice, it shows error and melancholy and regret.
Guista doesn't only question the dogma of the soul, however; he also questions psychiatry. In "The Year of Release", a college professor teaches a student prone to seizures. "When a seizure hits a person," the student explains, "Well, when one hits me, the world just changes. It's as though I can smell my thoughts. I'm watching myself, and my body's going its own way, despite me." For the student, the seizures are evidence of a spiritual being, a soul, and a means of seeing the world outside of his corporeal existence. When they are medicated away, the professor comes to understand, something irreplaceable is lost.
Other highlights include "The Whole World's Guilt", about the driver in a car accident and his attempt to come to terms with himself, and "California", about a yard sale occurring as a couple separates. "California" is initially confusing, but its subtlety in describing the world through the eyes of a man suffering a migraine, and the lack of cohesion that the pain effects, is impressive.
Brain Work's unifying theme -- its "gimmick", if you will -- is that the all the stories revolve around the psychologically abnormal and the psychologically ill. Parkinson's, Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder, and Tourette's all make appearances, and at times the stories seem pressed into the theme. If the book has a weakness, this is it.
That said, let me offer this as well: There are no bad stories in Brain Worki and quite a few that are excellent. If Guista does not answer the grand questions that his stories put forth, then it is because no one can. Our understanding of the working of the brain is still lacking; so too is our understanding of the soul.
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San Francisco Chronicle: Brain Work
Stories
By Michael Guista
MARINER/HOUGHTON MIFFLIN; 180 Pages; $12 PAPERBACK
What might seem like a bizarre bar joke (what do you get when you cross a catatonic with an amnesiac?) turns out to be a formula for creating haunting stories in Michael Guista's first work of fiction, "Brain Work."
Set in farms, valleys and orange groves around California (Guista teaches at Santa Maria's Allan Hancock College in Santa Barbara County), "Brain Work" is reminiscent of such neuro-lit classics as Oliver Sacks' "Awakenings" and "The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat."
In "A Walk Outside," one of the 14 stories in the collection, Norman has missed most of his life since the stock market crash of 1929. When L-dopa is prescribed for his sleepy sickness, he awakens in 1971 to life in a convalescent home, and falls for silver-haired Louise, whose Alzheimer-induced hazes are broken by rays of clarity.
Their affair is recounted, via journal entries and patient files, by one of Norman's doctors, who rarely notices in his patients anything more than the science of their hard wiring (so you know you can trust him when the narrative goes where it goes). In his third journal entry, Norman has documented his first date with Louise. After taking her to dinner, he arranges for the two to be alone, hoping to have sex with her (his roommate has recently died, so this is his chance to have a woman in his room). Louise is hyper-clear. She tells him they don't need sex at their age and lures him out of the home, into the neighborhood beyond.
Not having been out in eons, they are amused by the most simple events -- blowing the fuzz off dandelions, finding roses in a field -- and apprehend it all beyond the shell of routine. But as they slip back into the home, Louise's Alzheimer's returns, and a blissful Norman tells her what is only true: that she is his, that they love each other very much, and that she is very happy.
It is the most cinematic of the stories, with its element of carpe diem, but it also shows off the main ingredients of a Guista narrative -- brain malfunction as a challenge to our notions of self, and a smart, usually subtle tug-of-war between concepts of science (parts) and of the soul (a whole).
In "Step Four," an obsessive-compulsive father struggles to cope with his phobia to batteries. Medicated on prescription drugs that make him feel hollowed out, he is stuck between the second and third steps of his four-step therapy regimen. Step 1: I am diseased. Step 2: This is a function of my disease. ... He gets this far, then instantly starts obsessing over all the permutations of his possible contamination by battery acid (which might be a proxy for sin).
Derailed in this way, the man can never make it to the third step -- self-distraction with crossword puzzles -- or the heavenly fourth, which is no longer caring. He finally achieves, in the form of a brawl with a stranger on the road, a flawed compromise between his old, pre-meds wholeness and, yes, Step 4. The fight is handled as a self-purging, quasi-breakthrough, even if the narrator will be right back at Step 2, and possibly in jail, the next day.
Guista's characters are traumatized by the postmodern world, broken into shards of what we call self. But trauma is often what helps them feel whole again, even if how they achieve wholeness is fleeting, flawed or anti-social. Here, the panaceas prescribed at the pharmacy or talked out on the couch parallel and piggyback older ancestral panaceas of faith, mercy, redemption and grace. But if Guista's characters take comfort in the idea of faith, it is also highly problematic for them. Likewise is their faith in science.
The 20th and 21st century disorders, as handled in these stories, prove that free will isn't what it used to be. For however our ancestors tried to deal with it, Guista seems to be asking if contemporary men and women can handle free will any better. For example, in "The Interview," a character terrified of hell obsesses over the apparent happiness, the glow of his religious peers, finally holding his breath until he feels "peaceful" and drifts toward a taking-in of "the dust specks swirling in a shaft of stained- glass light, the face of the Madonna and her angels, this whole beautiful world."
It is our old notions -- of beauty, hope and love -- that we fall back on, for better or worse. Even if they are, as the father in "Down to the Roots" tells his son about all concepts, just words. The narrator of the opening story, "Filling the Spaces Between Us," finally realizes that "neurons are neurons, and tracing the actions of the synapse, as mysterious as it seems, takes away the mystery it aims for. ... [A]ll I ever needed out of life was another person, and she is what I need now, she who can give and no longer receive love."
Graceful, poised, careful, Guista has a unique, gripping voice, even if at times the prose seems a little wooden. "Brain Work" plumbs the anxieties of a troubled theologian while simultaneously CAT-scanning the theologian's thoughts on thinking itself.
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Psychiatric Services:Brain Work: Stories
by Michael Guista; Boston, Mariner/Houghton Mifflin Company, 2005, 208 pages, $12 softcover
Richard E. Kellogg
Brain Work: Stories, a collection of 14 short stories, is Michael Guista's first fictional work. Guista was the winner of the 2004 Katharine Bakeless Nason Prize for Fiction awarded by Middlebury College and the Bread Loaf Writer's Conference. In this book he explores the regions of ambiguity and perception that permeate the mental and physical lives of the many characters introduced in these stories.
Guista looks at many types of relationships: between a psychiatrist and a patient, a husband and wife, parents and children, and a teacher and his students. His subject matter is human relations—self to others and self to self. The "brain work" of the characters is visible to the reader through a narrative sharing of the characters' inner lives. The author's writing style is somewhat dispassionate; his language simply and effectively supports the complexity of his subject matter.
The first story is "Filling the Spaces Between Us." On the surface, it concerns the relationship between a psychiatrist and his wife. The psychiatrist is the narrator. His wife, a horse lover, suffers a brain injury while caring for their horses. As the story progresses the reader may find a subtle shift in what the story is about—or not about. The meaning of love and the experience of despair may be at the heart of this story, yet a question of one's relationship with one's self lingers. The soul of the psychiatrist appears to be up for grabs.
"Down to the Roots" is about a mother, a father, and their two young sons. The family is struggling, and the father is an alcoholic. There is a rhythm to this story like a classic blues song: you have a feeling you know what the resolution or turnaround is going to be, yet there is an element of revelation when you get there. The story includes an act of violence that resolves in an ambiguous manner, leaving the reader to reflect on the meaning of the transpired act and the possible reason for it.
The final story, "The Year of Release," involves an English professor with Tourette's syndrome. It is about the relationship between the professor and a standout student who experiences increasingly debilitating epileptic seizures. Both characters engage in a give-and-take dialogue about contradictions, with the class serving as a stage and the other students as an audience of sorts. Eventually the student undergoes treatment that extracts the richness of thought and assertion that attracted the attention of the professor in the first place. The question of the value and quality of life is raised, and who is to judge?
I would recommend Brain Work: Stories to readers of Psychiatric Services on the basis of its subject matter and professional bent as well as the quality of the writing. The book is especially recommended to those who work with large numbers of long-term patients with treatment-refractory illness.
Footnotes
Mr. Kellogg is director of community-based care services and state facilities and interim director of the New Hampshire Office of Medicaid Business and Policy.
Literature, Arts, and Medicine Database: Short Story (20 pp.)
Keywords Epilepsy, Obsession, Power Relations, Psychotherapy, Religion, Science, Spirituality,
Summary A college professor who suffers from Tourette's disorder deals with two challenging students in his English 101 class. Having spent years in therapy, Professor Jorge is now fairly content with his life in spite of the frequent vocal and motor tics that he labors to suppress. Allen Ramsey is the freshman prodigy who induces Jorge to reassess the implications of his existence. Anna is an undergraduate who is preoccupied with death. She has a crush on Jorge and leaves a suicide note in his office box.
One day Allen is late for class because he has a seizure. His seizures increase in frequency, but Allen doesn't mind them. He relishes them. Allen acknowledges that "It's as though I can smell my thoughts" during a seizure and "the world just changes" (170). Jorge finds Allen on the campus ground in a postictal state. He summons an ambulance, and Allen is admitted to the hospital.
When Allen returns to class weeks later, he is no longer the same person. With the use of medication and possibly surgery, doctors have abolished his seizures along with his former personality. Allen receives an "Incomplete" grade for the class. The semester's experience has Jorge lamenting Allen's shocking transformation, attempting to convince Anna of life's worth, and mulling the magnitude of his words.
Commentary Doctors don't seem to get it. Allen is convinced that physicians are unable to comprehend the truth about seizures. For him, seizures provide a glimpse of eternity and rare moments where space, time, and body temporarily vanish. He wonders why anyone would strive to control, let alone eradicate, such spiritual experiences. Science and spirituality do appear to be at odds in a story where illness and religion are equally life-changing forces. Jorge and Allen are intriguing characters. Jorge fears displaying his malady (Tourette's), but Allen extols the rapture of submitting to his disease (epilepsy).
Illness certainly impacts identity and personality. Disease is capable of transfiguring individuals and at times even elevating them. Allen's description of the ecstasy and supernormal state of mind associated with seizures has been echoed by other characters in literature (for example, Prince Myshkin in Dostoevsky's The Idiot-see this database).
Religion, faith, sickness, and science are essential to this story but so too are the danger and importance of our choices, perceptions, and deceits. What if there are no "right" answers? Are there problems associated with thinking all the time and analyzing every situation? What possible hazards come with control--of disease, life, and other people? At the conclusion of the story, Jorge has come much closer to comprehending the true nature of life and language. He perceives how words are unpredictable, reverberating, transforming, and possess a history of their own.
Source Brain Work
Publisher Mariner Books (Boston & New York)
Edition 2005
Annotated by Miksanek, Tony
Date of Entry 9/13/05
