The second thought I had was that the style was very much similar to Raymond Carver or other highly stripped-down, bare-prose-style writers, the kinds that introduction to fiction writing books or many graduate writing programs of the 2000s favored. Most of the language is describing only what Kevin sees, what he says, what he does, and what others say and do to him. There are only a small number of trips into Kevin's head, and even those are short-lived, although they do get a lot done in terms of filling in gaps.
Surprises everywhere
While the second impression held throughout my reading of "The Spit of Him," the first one didn't. It turned out that Kevin's decision to head to the next town over to sell Christmas sticker in spite of warnings from his old man wasn't about the journey, it was about the destination. This is true even though Kevin was unaware of what the Madsens meant to his family, and seemingly remained unaware even after his meeting with them.
The whole story gets turned on its head when Kevin shows up at the Madsens. In most short stories that appear in an anthology like O.Henry or Best American Short Stories, there are plenty of surprises, but not really what you'd call a "twist." Twists--the girl in the boat was the escaped convict, the apparent victim was actually the thief, the main character was dead the whole time--are for movies or plays, not literary short stories. Meg Wolitzer's introduction to Best American Short Stories in 2017 warned against the use of "unearned surprise for a surprise's sake" in short stories, and it seems most literary stories heed this warning.
But the twist in "Spit" is completely natural, possibly because the story itself feels more like reading the script of a play than a short story. There are actually two surprises revealed during Kevin's interaction with the Madsens, at least for me. I was thinking Kevin was in his twenties, perhaps, and possibly a person with special needs who had been tasked by an organization responsible for helping him with going out and selling the stickers. I did not realize this was a nine-year-old kid, and I was surprised when that fact came out. The second surprise, of course, is that Kevin's father used to live in the town he warned his son to stay away from but left when he hit and killed the child of the town's candle-making big employers, the Madsens, in an automobile accident. Henrik Madsen, the father, seems pretty convinced that Kevin's father was drunk when the accident happened, although if that's true, one wonders how Kevin's father has seemingly been present for Kevin's whole life instead of in prison.
So it turns out the story isn't an existentialist tale of wandering, but instead about this interaction between the child of the guy who killed a young man and the parents of the dead child. In addition to being the kind of pared-down prose fiction primers like, it also uses dialogue in the way that those same introductory texts call for. The mother and father don't agree with one another about how to deal with Kevin, and every word they say contradicts each other. They are also talking past Kevin the whole time.
So it turns out the story isn't an existentialist tale of wandering, but instead about this interaction between the child of the guy who killed a young man and the parents of the dead child. In addition to being the kind of pared-down prose fiction primers like, it also uses dialogue in the way that those same introductory texts call for. The mother and father don't agree with one another about how to deal with Kevin, and every word they say contradicts each other. They are also talking past Kevin the whole time.
Symbols and theme
Just because the prose and the settings are plain doesn't mean there isn't a lot going on to think about. All of the three houses Kevin visits have changes of lighting. The first one has lights on until he knocks, at which point the lights go off. The second house's lights are off, until the owner approaches Kevin from behind and, seemingly knowing who he is, gets angry and goes in the house, turning the lights on as he does.
The Madsen house ought to be the very symbol of light. They make candles, a business that they say employs half of the town. And, in fact, when he rings the doorbell a second time, the lights come on, and mother Birgitte answers. She's a little stand-offish, but seeing a child out in the cold rain badly dressed for it, she takes pity on him and decides to buy his stickers. It seems that his journey to find a sympathetic soul is over after only three houses. But when Henrik arrives at the door, he recognizes the boy because he's "the very spit of" his father, and that leads to a longer interaction.
Right after Kevin mentions Thailand, where his father's girlfriend's son lives, and adds that he has never been there, one of the candles on the chest of drawers in the Madsen's hall goes out. Birgitte re-lights it.
One of the few entries we have into Kevin's head gives us the line about there being more people in the world you don't know than you don't. The mention of Thailand as a place Kevin has never gone, and likely will never go to, adds to this original line. There are also more places in the world you'll never see than there are places you will. Because of this unavoidable lack of experience, none of us really receives much light or knowledge in our lifetimes. We're all kind of provincial, tied only the the small number of experiences even the most cosmopolitan of us can ever have. Kevin is an extreme example of that kind of insularity, because he's never even been as far before as this one little town not far from his own. His father isn't exactly going to open up the world to him, either. One house he's been to turns its lights off when he approaches, literally refusing to share its knowledge with him. The second turns its lights on only after it has told him to leave. The third turns its lights on, and the mother, at least, makes an effort to keep them on when they threaten to go out. But it's only the sputtering light of a candle, and even Birgitte's care can't make it much more light than that.
At one point, Kevin literally attempts to allow in more light. When Henrik says that Kevin looks like his father, Kevin points out that he has his mother's eyes, and he "widens them so that both Henrik and Birgitte could see." But Henrik ignores this and points out Kevin's nose, which is exactly like his father's. Kevin has traveled in search of bettering himself, but the world seems not to want to answer when he knocks. The scant light from a candle that the one sympathetic person he finds lights for him is scarcely enough to help him to see with.
In addition to light that is unavailable to him to see with, there are also signs he cannot decipher. He sees a sign at the first home offering appointments to shop in the store attached to the home, but no phone number. The Madsen home offers a candle showroom, but Kevin, although he knows about the candles, is not brought in to see them. Finally, there is graffiti-scratch on the bus stop he is waiting at near the end of the story when he is ready to go home. The graffiti sort of offers several versions on it of microfiction, tiny stories told only by the smallest of hints. "torkild lund is a joke" is one. A "for a good time call" phone number and subsequent commentary on the number is another. These microfictional stories further emphasize the theme of how many people there are in the world, each with their own story, and yet we will never be able to enter in to those stories.
Even the few openings we have into Kevin's interiority are kind of like microfictions themselves. We get a paragraph about his father, spitting his phlegm into the sink. We get the heartbreaking look at his party box under his bed and his hope that he'll be able to add the Madsens to his list of invitees. Last, we get him remembering his father's commentary on the moon in Thailand, and how by comparison, the moon in Denmark where Kevin lives is small and pale. Again, this last little peak into Kevin's mind emphasizes how small his world is and how little chance he has for enlightenment living in it.
Nod to the translator, Martin Aitken
I don't speak Danish, but I've been a translator for most of my adult life. I know how hard it can be to get certain phrases translated well, especially when there's a play on words in the original. I don't know what the Danish original was for "Cow-hoof trimmer? Age's no beginner!" but I'm impressed by how it came out in English.