ALR Summer Book Club: Bret Anthony Johnston’s Corpus Christi

Misconceptions underlie many of the stories in Bret Anthony Johnston’s collection Corpus Christi. As Minnie herself tells us: “there was no one time when she missed Richard the most—a misconception of those who’d never lost a spouse…She wasn’t angry at him for dying—a misconception of therapists; she was angry she’d survived”(38). Characters often go through a change wherein they realize that their initial view of themselves, others, and the world around them is out of sync with the reality of their situations. In each of his masterful stories, Johnston gives us a sliding scale of perception and misperception, and seems to always know just when to hit us with the truth. As he says in an interview at the close of the collection: “one of the things I’ve tried to explore…might well be called the myth of memory…If our memories play a large part in defining us, what happens if those memories are wrong or are no longer accessible?”(264). He wrote the book, he says, to imagine what these situations might be like.

We see Johnston’s interest in exploring the way that the world and our interactions with it can define us from the very first story, “Waterwalkers,” where, as in many of these stories, a character struggles to put himself together after some manner of devastating loss: “those mundane encounters left him utterly unsure of his identity. No longer a father, no longer a husband”(12). As Sam hides himself away from the world that can no longer figure out how to define the new him—after the tragic death of a son and the subsequent loss of a wife—we can see the power that lies in the way that our past defines us not only for ourselves, but in the eyes of others as well.

As the Sam searches for meaning in all of what’s happened to him, he draws the predicted routes of hurricanes on a large map. Of course, as his ex-wife Nora points out, he’s wrong about the direction that that hurricane will take, but he’s correct in that hurricanes (or, acts of chance or fate) frame the deciding events of his life (meeting Nora, his son Max dying, finding Nora again). The parallel between the precise nature of hurricane in one aspect (produced by exact combinations of the forces of nature) and the random chaos and destruction that they cause is heartbreaking when applied to Sam’s life. We don’t fault him, or ourselves, for trying to map some meaning onto the forces of chance.

Many of Johnston’s stories contain this element of chance meeting: “Outside the Toy Store” and the mash-up at the end of “Corpus Christi” are other examples. Rarely do the characters get what they expect out of these chance encounters; what at first seems like a hopeful coincidence often serves to make the relationship worse off than it was in the first place (as “Outside the Toy Store” depicts a particularly brutal way).

Equally heartbreaking are the repeated mentions of luck in the first story of the three-story cycle of Minnie and her son, Lee, “I See Something You Don’t See.” Only a few pages in we learn that Minnie’s luck has once again run out, resulting in Lee thinking(incorrectly) that only he knows the truth about his mother’s condition. In keeping the truth from her, Lee sees himself as finally refuting the accusation that he is a man “unable to accept kindness”(48).

But as the story cycle as a whole demonstrates over and over again, there are often vital differences between the way that characters see themselves and the way that others see them. Far from being heavy-handed with this message, however, Johnston draws our attention to this fact lightly with the moment that spawns the title of the story itself, as Minnie recalls the rules of the game I see something you don’t see(52). The premise of this game, of course, is to get the other person to uncover what was always already there. The fresh perspective spurred by requesting, literally, that the other look at the world in a different way seems to be the only thing that can keep at bay the myriad number of misconceptions that keep piling up all around. The visual knowledge that we can gain by looking at the world differently comes to us through a verbal clue. Like the layers of meaning in the stories themselves, it is up to the listener to find their own path to the object in question.

The keystone moment, as Miro would say, for the “myth of memory” occurs in the third story, “Buy for Me the Rain,” when Moira says “‘everything happens to me twice,’” and Lee replies, “things rarely happen to me, even once’”(231). Lee’s description of himself, of course, is not true. We see Lee repeat the actions of his father over and over again, from soothing Minnie in that first emergency room visit, to duplicating the way Richard spoke to her, “she saw him gauging what would be best to say, what would be worst. Richard had done this”(58), to similarities in his appearance and motives “He resembled his father, his thin hair and sloped shoulders and even his reticence as he checked the cupboards” (160). Lee repeats his childhood actions as well “as in his youth, he still cut food with a fork rather than a knife”(142), and we never forget that the two are re-enacting, with a dark difference, their roles as mother and son. Minnie eventually forgets Lee’s name in her dementia, but never who he is: “through that long, excruciating fade, there always remained a silky, durable cord of memory that connected them, a child and his mother”(161).

The conclusion Moira come to in this moment, “‘so we’re a good fit’”(231), about the relationship between her and Lee is as untrue as it’s even been. Unlike his mother, Lee knows that “[Moira] would not grow to need him”(231). As a result, like Sam, everything feels “random and unmoored”(238) in the wake of Minnie’s death. The repeated experience of sneaking off with Moira “relived and vexed him”(242), because he expects that Moira will make his life different, more exciting, but also more uncomfortable, the repetition of an encounter whose meaning he has never understood in the first place. Unlike Minnie, Moira withholds the clues that Lee needs to see her clearer. This, of course, is what draws him to her. In contrast, we have some of Lee’s final actions as his mother has slipped into a coma “he took one of the crazy straws that she liked and returned to the den. He smiled in case she could see”(247). And then the Chekhovian realization, as he lies in bed with Moira, that the events of the funeral and that night are “only the beginning”(252). The worst of his troubles, left without someone from whom to withhold a comforting voice in the night, are yet to come.

There are many other themes worth exploring in this collection. “In the Tall Grass,” “Two Liars,” and “Birds of Paradise” (and, in a way, “Anything That Floats”) all depict coming-of-age stories wherein the young protagonists learn a little more about the adult world than they’d maybe like to. Johnston says “what I find inherently interesting about the parent-child relationship is its fragility and its durability”(265).

There’s also this tantalizing quote, from an interview at the close of the collection. Johnston says, answering a question about the violent weather in Corpus Christi, “…and of course there’s no controlling [the weather]. When these characters find themselves in violent or intimate situations, they’re often stripped down to their essences [….] Violence and intimacy, or love, require participants to leave themselves unprotected, to take chances, to gamble with the worst odds for the highest stakes”(264).

But, that’s for someone else to tackle, I’ve bloviated long enough. Looking forward to seeing what everyone has to say, I hope you all enjoyed this collection as much as I did!

-Hillary