Bruce Green

Arc

Green's timeline is built around a single mechanism: compression. The narration says his childhood — a mother killed by a novelty snake-can he lovingly wrapped for her himself, a father who answered her death by mass-murdering strangers with exploding cigars and dying by Lethal Injection with his son at the deathwatch (2, 3) — has been "compressed to the igneous point" where nothing remains legible but tics: avoid anything with 'N in its name, check a palm before a handshake, detour around fezzes in little cars, go rigid at anything Polynesian (4). The body carries what the mind buried: the face slightly smunched from the veiled aunt's daily grief-clutch (3, 11), the asphalt-spreader's boots that repeat his ruined father's 90%-sole orthopedic boot (1), the years of mutism that hardened into an adult who has "about one fully developed thought every sixty seconds" and keeps his map shut (11). Calvin T. calls it shut down, disassociated; Gately, more charitably, calls it sense. All Green himself will say is his own most economical self-portrait: "he's been broken by life... and he's regrouping" (12).

The one feeling that survived compression intact is Mildred Bonk. The eighth-grade love the puberty-angel didn't reciprocate (5) becomes a will ("He developed a will," 6), a trailer household, a daughter (7), and finally a tattooed name Ewell files under Stoic Regret — "MILDRED BONK on his jilted right triceps forever" (10). The February beach-party catastrophe sits at the hinge of that story and the buried one: the Hawaiian music keys the phobia, the phobia keys the drinking, and Green ends up riding the T home in a grass skirt — costumed, precisely, as the Polynesia that killed his mother — then three days of "paralyzing depression of unknown etiology," etiology being the one thing the reader has and he hasn't (8). When Mildred finally leaves with Harriet for a hat with a ranch in it, the Bottom that delivers him to Ennet House is narrated in his own flat idiom: "Who wouldn't have to get high just to stand it?" (9).

What makes Green structural rather than decorative is that the plot's Ennet House climax runs through his psychology. His quiet makes him Lenz's chosen cover (12); his buried phobia — Hawaiian strains drifting from a Québecer beach-theme party — is exactly what draws him away and back at the wrong moment, making him the rapt, unwitting witness of the dog-kill that summons the A.F.R.-milieu Nucks (13); and his plain decency puts him in the streetlet at midnight, where the almost wordless kid delivers the novel's most consequential half-nelson — nose broken, "but he doesn't let go" — deflecting the shot that would have killed Don Gately (14). The record then closes on two quietly open doors. Asleep in the living room two nights later, nose taped, the man who says he doesn't dream cries out "For God's sake no Mr. Ho don't light it!" — the compressed material speaking, once, in its sleep (15). And in the legal aftermath he is the last person to depose to seeing the vanished .44 that now imperils Gately's defense (16). Sobriety, the Item, and everything after are left as the book leaves Green himself: shut down, intact, open.