The Week You Weren’t Here
by Charles Blackstone
Reviewed
by Summer Block
 The
Week You Weren’t Here, by Charles Blackstone,
is the rambling interior monologue of Hunter Flanagan, a young writer
living in Chicago and applying to MFA programs. Most of his mental
energy is spent obsessively analyzing a series of past romantic
entanglements and agonizing over present and future ones. Shockingly,
he is rather likable.
I read The Week You Weren’t Here while getting my
nails done. I read it on the taxi ride home, glancing down at the
page through patches of streetlight. I read it over dinner
until my boyfriend asked me whether the book was good and I had
no idea what to say. I read it twice, and then I didn’t know
what to do with it, so I left it on the counter. My editor checked
in to see if I planned on reviewing it. She said it was okay if
I wasn’t interested. I said I was very interested. I carried
the book around in my bag for a week. I left it on the sofa, and
when I got home, the bottom of the spine was marked by the imprint
of tiny dog teeth. Then I settled down to write about it.
First, I overturned a short note from the author tucked inside
the review copy, scrawled on the back of a Word-of-the-Day calendar
page. The word was redaction. I will never believe that
anyone could choose a page from a Word-of-the-Day calendar at random.
There was some significance to redaction, surely. But why
redaction? And why a Word-of-the-Day calendar? And who
still has a Hotmail address?
In this type of aimless analysis I am not alone.
Hunter Flanagan attends the University of Illinois and works in
the University of Chicago Writing Center. It so happens I attended
the University of Chicago and so took pleasure in the recitation
of familiar names and places: the Lab school, the Medici, Rockefeller
Chapel, Robie House, Botany Pond, Harper Library, Café Florian.
More than that, I winced to recognize the markers of our generation,
its cool regard, self-conscious poses, and restless loneliness.
That Hunter did not actually attend the University of Chicago but
rather worked as an outsider of sorts on its campus is one explanation
for his petty, arrogant discrimination, dismissing one potential
mate because she dips sweet potato fries in ketchup, holding another
up to the “Faulkner test.” He ponders a lovely blonde
and is pleased that she, too, is left-handed—“he always
thought that being with a left handed girl would be the answer to
everything that the girl would be smart and trenchant . . . that
she would understand irony” —and owns a Mac instead
of a PC. His regard would be calculating and cold if not so obviously
undermined by self-parody.
Hunter is indeed the poster-boy for twenty-something immaturity.
He harbors a junior high school student’s obsession with kissing
and with women’s underwear, those fledgling experiences on
the road to sexual maturity. He also wallows in accumulated rejections
and grievances, some dating from high school and even before. When
our hero wonders about dating, “Maybe they were completely
obvious—the signs—and he just never noticed it was too
thick or deluded by his own thought tempest to be able to see,”
you want to shake him. Meanwhile, his “thought tempest”
rages on. His constant, all-devouring interior narrative never turns
off. Not even during sex—perhaps especially not during sex,
when his mind spins over whether a lover’s bra is brown or
purple. Dating and even friendships are reduced to the same mental
monologue of critiques and comparisons.
Hunter suffers from extreme sensitivity, though only in the most
limited cases: he quails at watching a teenage girl embarrass herself
at a coffee house, but hardens his heart to the girlfriend who all
but begs for his attentions. His is the empathy that doesn’t
lead to action; he indulges in equal parts pity and self-pity with
no ambitions for either.
Like many of our generation, Hunter finds that irony has crippled
all his finer feelings, replacing great-heartedness with obsessive,
relentless self-scrutiny. The conditions and calculations are evidence
of this wounded cowardice. He is a terrible mixture of self-aggrandizing,
self-analyzing, self-dramatizing, self-effacing, self-serving—and
he’s lonely.
All this character analysis may lead you to believe Hunter is utterly
unredeemable. In fact, there is something about his character that
confounds contempt, a certain foolish sweetness. His misguided search
for love has its tender moments, as when he watches his date hold
his soda can:
“He said Could you hold this and she took the soda can he
was extending. He zipped his coat. He decided not to ask for it
back and liked the idea for two reasons. First the casual way he
said Could you hold this and the easy way she said Yes and did it
was like how people who were close behaved. Second she was holding
something that was his.”
Or waiting to meet a date at a café:
“She’d come in and he’d pretend to be startled
pretend to have been engrossed but really he would have been attuned
to every sound tremor motion within a 3 block radius.”
Hunter is so over the top—downloading “Nighthawks”
as his computer wallpaper, comparing himself to Kurt Cobain—that
you can’t help but feel sorry for him. This is a man who makes
romantic puns on “sufficient and necessary conditions”
and reads de Certeau at Starbucks. Even with Blackstone’s
stripped-down writing style, there is a real strength in Hunter’s
narrative voice, filling in the missing punctuation with pauses
and breaths and mumbles. His flights of fancy are lovely:
“He always imagined at some point stopping using the fake
Hotmail account losing interest in it and it would just continue
to amass messages until exploring or until Hotmail would shut it
off and then maybe emails would just bounce back and forth against
walls of nothing until he didn’t know what.”
His observations are remarkable for their everyday insight:
“When you did recognize somebody it always seemed to take
forever for both people to reach each other and before you did it
inevitably felt strange when the person walked toward you because
you couldn’t comfortably speak until there was a certain proximity
achieved—and it always took awhile to get there—so in
the meantime you just had to watch and maybe smile dumbly and he’d
always preferred just avoiding all of that.”
Hunter’s neediness is so raw and exposed, his feelings so
vulnerable and stunted, that you cheer for each glimmer of self-awareness,
as when he thinks of a departed girlfriend, “He had let go
of something that was his and for specious motives and he had to
live with that be reminded of that know that he had chosen something
and gotten what he had chosen and this was that thing this aberration
that resulting situation. This was that.”
The book jacket for The Week You Weren’t Here compares
Blackstone to Proust for the author’s exhaustive catalogue
of ordinary details. A more apt—if equally grandiose—comparison
might be to Dostoevsky, that unflinching chronicler of the depths
of humiliation and delusion, all the agony that hangs in an instant
of awkward silence, all the degradation in an off-hand remark or
casual rebuff. Who doesn’t cringe to hear Hunter on the phone
with his sometime-girlfriend:
“He asked Kate distractedly what time it was. Nine-forty-seven
right.
No it’s 10 she said.
No I mean 21:47. That’s 9 right.
Yeah she said I think so.
Okay just wondering.”
Or, on a date with another potential lover:
“Hunter said when they were on Dorcester and Fifty-sixth
I’m trying to think of—
She interrupted Things to talk about.
No he said quickly. Important landmarks to point out.”
But perhaps the most cringe-worthy moment of all is when Hunter
comes to see at last that, “It was one thing to still wear
Doc Martens and flannels it was one thing to reminisce and be envious
of teenagers of how he was at sixteen of how brave he had been compared
to now but another to keep pushing people away.”
Here’s hoping all the Hunters of the world can figure out
at last how to stop thinking and start living, how to embrace the
world without brackets or footnotes.
____
|
