Nonplussed: the dazed protagonist in "I Am Here To Make Friends" by Robert Long Foreman

All the books on the craft of fiction warn writers not to have passive protagonists. Your hero can't just face a world that either she doesn't understand or which doesn't understand her, spend the length of the story immersed in that lack of understanding, and then end the story still dumbstruck by how strange and unfamiliar the world is. This is a hard lesson for writers to learn, and many a promising MFA candidate never gets past it. Maybe that's because the sorts of people who seek to tell stories in the first place really do spend a lot of their lives feeling alienated, misunderstood, and generally like the world is too much for them. But most eventually learn to make their characters want something, have that want be frustrated, and then cobble together enough of a conflict out of the quest to fulfill that desire that editors will publish the story.

We're so used to the cycle of want, followed by inability to achieve the wanted thing, followed then by some kind of epiphany that allows the character to achieve what he wants--the "tyranny of the epiphany" as Jim Shepard calls it--that it's entirely arresting to read Robert Long Foreman's short story collection I Am Here To Make Friends (Sundress Publications, 2020, 215 pages). Arresting, because most of the stories involve a protagonist who breaks the rules by not being sure what they really want, mostly being passive and misunderstood, and yet every one of the stories is a joy with more than enough forward momentum to keep the reader happily flipping pages to the end. Stories without clear stakes aren't supposed to work that well, but these do, and the reader is left shaking his head as one story or another works when it doesn't seem like it should, like walking through a hall of optical illusions.

No story exemplifies this dazed protagonist as much as "The Vinyl Canal," which is mostly about the narrator's annoying acquaintance who becomes obsessed with scratching grooves in the songs he doesn't like on his records so the record player will skip over them. There is some movement in the story to take the subject matter outside the interior musings of a pompous college kid more in love with his thoughts than his thoughts merit: police brutality and American love of the easy way out enter the narrative, but they never quite form a conflict. The kid disappears, it might have been the police who did it, and then the story ends. The narrator is observing a world that doesn't give up its secrets, and ultimately, it's too much for her to keep plumbing the depths.

This cycle is repeated in: "Appraisals," about a man who accidentally is mistaken for an appraiser at a convention who decides he will just tell everyone what they want to hear; in "Turkey of the Woods," in which an addict of some sort finds a brain in the woods he mistakes for a mushroom; and "Lost Origins," in which a slacker becomes obsessed with finding a code in a strange video he bought in a bargain bin at a thrift store. These characters crack jokes other characters don't find funny, and make discoveries nobody is interested in hearing about. Being misunderstood, though, doesn't make these characters crave understanding enough to do something about it. There is no overcoming of anything to achieve a goal. Instead, there is a direct refusal to confront challenges. When the main character in "Lost Origins" finds out his girlfriend wants to break up with him, he simply says, "Fine, I thought. I saw this coming." When he then starts a new relationship, his new girlfriend says something he disagrees with, but "I wasn't about to start an argument. I was in love."

So why does all this passivity work, contrary to all the rules writers have been taught? One reason is that the jokes really are funny. The people who hear the protagonists cracking wise may not get them, but the reader does, and it creates a sort of bond. We feel that we want to reach through the story and form a secret society with the main characters.

Much more than this, though, is the way these stories remind us how appropriate it is to feel disoriented. Maybe it doesn't always make for compelling fiction to be so uncertain what the point of life is that we don't even know what to wish for, but that is a totally normal reaction to realizing we've all been dropped off on this planet with no guide book. It's appropriate to feel nonplussed, a word Foreman uses a couple of times, and which means to be so confused by a situation, one doesn't even know what course of action to take. The etymology of "nonplussed"--and many of Foreman's characters are deeply interested in the etymologies of words--is simply "no more." It means there is really nothing else left to do, because something has left you so dazed, there's no action that makes sense.

No story exemplifies this more than "Awe," the opening story. (I am putting to the side two stories in the collection, both of which have to do with guns, and both of which are sort of oddballs compared to the others.) The narrator hears his friend talk about what a life-changing experience it was watching his child be born, so the narrator goes on a wild Internet adventure to find a couple or a mother who will let him watch their child be born. He tries to explain what he needs:

"So, you want to see me give birth out of--what--curiosity?"
"I heard about it from Gary--my friend. About what a mindfuck it is." I was paraphrasing. "I mean, how much it changes you to be in the room when someone's being born. Gary's a different guy now, in a good way."
"And you need that."
"Sure."

Of course he needs that. We all do. We all need "awe," which is the only thing any character in any of the non-gun stories in this book wants clearly enough his quest to achieve it can be called a conflict. When he achieves his goal of feeling awe, there is nothing else he needs to feel alive and to also have some sense of communion with other living beings. To be alive is to feel disoriented, to feel awe, to be so nonplussed that there is nothing left to add to the experience. These stories, which resist everything they will tell you in MFA programs, feel like they have exactly the right amount of what's in them, and I wouldn't want to add anything more.