Ahhh-Choooo! Overspiced Stories in Amanda Davis’ Circling the Drain

I was on my lunch break, trolling leisurely through the McSweeney’s website, when I unearthed Amanda Davis’ short story “The Fat Ladies Floated in the Sky Like Balloons.” I spent the rest of the afternoon trying to unwrap my mind from those fat ladies. I couldn’t stop thinking about the story. I had to print a physical copy, fold it in half, and tuck it under my seat. I had to physically separate myself from the story so I could at least attempt to finish the day’s work.

Never had I encountered magical realism that left such an impression on me. I was awe-struck by the juxtaposition of imaginative qualities and harsh emotional realities. I craved more of the same intensity and ingenuity when I eagerly ordered Davis’ first (and only) collection of stories, Circling the Drain. What I found was a daring exploration of the conflict between logos and pathos. For the most part. Many of the 15 stories are short—between 1 and 6 pages. Some experiment with fable while others sparsely depict ordinary realities. Only three of the stories combine the supernatural with the natural, creating the immediacy and contrast that I initially found so appealing.

In Fat Ladies, Davis uses fantastic elements to exaggerate the positives and negatives of a failed relationship. The floating fat ladies, exploding flowerpots, and impaled pets represent logical and emotional reasons for ignoring Fred’s reappearance. Yet in the final scene, Eloise cannot bring herself to swing the hatchet a second time: “This probably isn’t such a great idea, I began in my head, but what I said was, Nice day.” The character’s self-awareness and vulnerability give the story a meaty backbone that anchors the fantastic elements and gives them their own weight.

The only other story that comes close to achieving this wonderful paradox of character is “Testimony.” We watch as a family unravels, as a brother cuts out his own tongue and a sister searches for the words that he can no longer speak. We see the brother prying out his own teeth; we see the sister combing the isles of a bookstore. The structure grounds the mystical elements, and in the end, Davis leaves us with a question about the nature of humanity, as she did with Fat Ladies, thrusting the story into its larger context.

While I believe the collection is meant to stand on three legs: “Testimony,” “Circling the Drain,” and “Faith or Tips for the Successful Young Lady,” only “Testimony” achieves the emotional resonance that the others attempt. Davis sometimes relies on shock value (arson, murder, attempted suicide) to propel her stories, and as the result, the characters come off as impulsive and incapable of adapting to the circumstances they have created. All three stories contain spirits, angels, or ghosts that illustrate the characters’ battles with the internal landscape. Each story is divided into numbered sections that skip around in time and space. Yet, rather than anchor the collection, they stand alone in a clump, while the others wriggle and streak in every possible direction.

As the collection’s legs straddle the line between fiction and reality, other stories cut the strings and go spiraling skyward. There’s the entertaining, five-page story about Billy Foo – a local chef who is fed his own ego, “Spice.” There’s “Chase,” the story of a woman who poisons her boyfriend’s magical blue horse. Wonderfully imaginative, simple, and fun, stories like these lift me out of the collection, which largely depicts gritty urban realities. They’re clowns at a funeral – they deserve their own confetti-filled backdrop.

Similarly, hyper-realistic flash-fiction pieces like “Fairy Tale” and “The Very Moment They’re About” refract the collection’s core. They send the reader spinning in a different direction – toward compressed moments in reality. The jarring contrast between these stories and the fantasy-based stories leaves the reader without a clear sense of Davis’ style and muddies the purpose of the collection as a whole.

Davis takes a bold approach. She mixes styles, genres, and themes. Her tales flop from fantasy to magical realism to just plain realism. We understand that her scope is far-reaching – that she’s capable of writing in a variety of genres. Unfortunately, we don’t come away from the collection with an understanding of the stories themselves. We’re pushed and pulled in so many directions that the characters and their stories get lost in the shuffle.

Typically, after an author’s first collection of short stories, we can say that she is a writer to watch. But for Davis, Circling the Drain and her first novel, Wonder When You’ll Miss Me, are all we’ll ever have. Amanda Davis died tragically in a plane crash in 2003, just prior to her book tour. I highly recommend reading her stories. They’ll set your imagination aglow, just as “Fat Ladies Floated in the Sky Like Balloons” did for me. But choose one at a time, and savor the flavor. As Billy Foo knows, if you combine all the spices at once, you may end up over-complicating what would otherwise be a breathtaking dish.