A Horse Is More and Less than Its Galloping

Review of What Burns by Dale Peck (USA: Soho Press, 2019)
by Jee Leong Koh

Content warning: child molestation and violent rape. This review contains spoilers.

Reading Dale Peck’s story collection What Burns, I do not find an irreverent provocateur, didactic narcissist, or campy satirist, as other readers have claimed to find. Instead, I think I see the outline of a moralist, of a higher sort. These seven stories, written or published over a span of 12 years, from 1999–2010, are remarkably consistent in probing contemporary beliefs in right and wrong, good and evil. They rub the price tags off our bottled possessions and packaged fantasies to see what the labels hide. Mark Athitakis’s review in the Post wastes too much space in rehearsing Peck’s notoriety (his hatchet jobs on other writers, his attack on Pete Buttigieg) but he fastens correctly on “a prevailing theme” in Peck’s writings, “the error of refusing to see betrayal and devastation clearly.” Athitakis elaborates, “A sense of security is often a lie,” and it is a lie that we keep telling ourselves in order to maintain our precarious well-being.

Two stories are most often adduced by readers as evidence for Peck’s desire to shock. They appear in the collection as the first and the last stories. In the first story “Not Even Camping Is Like Camping Anymore,” the 15-year-old Blaine is constantly pestered, more, hit on, by his mother’s babysitting charge, a five-year-old boy named Davis, who says such things to his make-believe husband as “All day I slave and do I hear one word of thanks?” while pushing around his pretend-Hoover, and “Hello baby … Can I offer you a cold one [drink]? Or would you prefer something … hot?” Blaine is put off not only because this behavior from a five-year-old is plain weird but also because his own sexual fantasies all revolve around girls. When Davis’ mother fails to pick him up one night, he is sent to sleep with Blaine in the teenager’s bed and the two boys share a sexual experience.

Is this sexual abuse? It is. Although both are under-aged in the eyes of the law, Blaine is 10 years older than Davis, with all that implies in terms of knowledge, status, and power.  And yet the situation is complicated by other factors. There is not only no coercion on the part of Blaine, there is not even initiation; both the harassment and the seduction come from Davis. Since both boys are young, there is suggested a dimension of play and experimentation in their interaction, usually lost in adulthood. In a twisted way Davis is trying out a trans identity. Since Blaine is apparently straight, he sees himself as giving, not taking away, something that Davis wants. In the last sentence of the story, Blaine, who is the narrator throughout, boasts, “Reader, I made him so happy it nearly killed us both.” I made him happy, not “he made me so happy,” or even “we made each other so happy.” Rightly or wrongly, Blaine sees himself as the giving, compassionate partner. Sure, the compassion is accompanied by bragging, but this mix of masculine pride (I made her happy) and pity (I made her happy) strikes me as what a fifteen-year-old boy may authentically say. The delicate balance is, in my view, a stroke of genius.

“It nearly killed us both.” To give the proper weight to that devastating last verb, we must remember why the boys are so unhappy that a spasm of bliss can snatch life and breath away.  The story is not just about the boys; it is, in fact, about families. Davis’ mother, a single mom, works as a waitress at a titty bar, where out of the six or seven cars parked outside on her day shift, one belongs to her, one to the stripper, and one to the bartender. Davis is, in fact, channeling her desperate wisdom when he gives unsolicited advice to the other kids in Blaine’s house:

There are three things you need to do to keep your man. One. Never say no. It don’t matter if your ankles are swollen from a double shift out to the Oh-Oh Inn and all your want is a tequila slammer and a Sominex. When the little soldier lifts his bayonet you lie down flat and take one for the team. Two. Dinner at six. Always. A full man is a sleepy man, and a sleepy man won’t be out chasing tail, let alone starting a half-breed family in the trailer park on the south side of town. He is also slower on his feet. And three. Always keep your waheena clean. There is nothing that makes a man bust your lip open faster than a stenchy waheena, and believe you me, thirteen stitches take a longer time to get over than the sting of a little douche.

Blaine’s mom knows the same wisdom too, and follows it to the T. She makes sure dinner is ready for her boyfriend Dan when he wants it, and even after he smacks her, she has sex with him to the accompaniment of his preferred tune, a war requiem called Adagio for Strings by Barber. Trapped in their class and gender, these women cannot help but pass their damage, their desperate need for love, on to their sons.

Where is the real trauma, Peck’s story asks. Does it lie in one night’s sexual happiness with a boy ten years older than you, or in the slow train-wreck of a miserable and violent home life? The heterosexual adults joke that they have sex for the sake of the next generation. Just before Blaine gives in to Davis, he too repeats, “what do we do it all for, if not for the next generation?” but he thinks it with less cynicism and more charity than the adults. Blaine’s words are also the words of the gay author, of course, who could be saying to the trans kid Davis the equivalent of “it gets better.”

The last story of the collection “Summer Beam,” almost a novella, has an even more disturbing ending but again a narrow focus on the violent conclusion would miss the integrity and artistry of the piece. I think it is unfortunate that the author decided to split the story into two parts as it really must be read as a seamless whole for its full effect to be appreciated. To summarize the plot, a woman gives her husband the divorce he wants and she retreats to her parents’ beach house, where she is sexually assaulted and killed by a group of young men. The manner of her death is horrifyingly graphic. A glass bottle is pushed into her mouth to silence her but is accidentally jammed too far until “it lodge[s] against her epiglottis.”

Why this cruelty to one’s character? Ellen is portrayed in a sympathetic light throughout the story. She loves her family dearly, returning to the beach house every summer with her husband even after her marriage. Whereas her husband Nathan is seen to be arrogant, combative, cynical, and insecure, someone who always whines on the annual drive to the beach house, Ellen tries to be calm, optimistic, and supportive to keep the peace but also ready to defend herself, when necessary. Nathan is a literary critic, who is always critical, whereas Ellen is a fiction writer, who creates stories. Finally, it is Nathan who has been unfaithful to Ellen and who demands a divorce to marry his lover.

Even as Ellen and her family are depicted sympathetically, the reader gradually realizes that they lead a privileged life; herein lies the artistry of the story. Ellen’s father, a history professor, can afford to write a book on the technology used in Native American pottery that no one reads. Ellen’s mother used to work for a big Boston publisher until she quit over the demand to edit a hagiography of a tobacco manufacturer. Native American culture and anti-smoking protest, these are two of the favored causes of a white liberal class. Ellen is not a very good writer, but she teaches writing at Swarthmore. She is not published often, except in one journal, where her story appears in the back third, what Nathan calls in his usual acidic manner the “friends and family” pages, underlining the influence of social networks.

Beyond their occupations and preoccupations, the social mores of this class are also slowly subjected to keener scrutiny. The family find Nathan, who is Jewish, too striving and abrasive, but they are of course too polite to tell him or Ellen. Instead, we see Nathan through Ellen’s white liberal eyes, as the story is written from her point of view until right at the end, a privileging of her perspective to match the privileges of her class. Unless a reader has cottoned on to the inner workings of the story, they would be brought up short by the response of Ellen’s mother at the end of Part 1. When Ellen confides in her mother that she and Nathan are having problems, Mrs. Baldwin says, without looking up from the dishes that she is washing, “Well, frankly dear, I’m not surprised … Your father and I always thought you had no business marrying a Jew.”

At the beach house, at least once a summer, the family perform “one of their most beloved passion plays.” On a patch of grass, a little beyond the deck, lies a bottle—no one can tell if it is a soda or beer bottle—which the men would threaten to remove by some ingenious means and the women would protest to keep there. This is the bottle that will kill Ellen. She is in a symbolic sense the lamb sent to slaughter.

Alone in the house, feeling abandoned by her husband, she sees a group of young men in wetsuits, carrying surfboards, pass before the deck. She correctly identifies them as townies, not summer people. Just before, she had looked at her rumpled clothes in the mirror and did not like her “townie” look. The detail, conveying a subtle class condescension, is masterly. One of the townies is, however, very good-looking and she mistakenly compares him to an angel. The next day, she buys a couple of six packs of beer, although she drinks wine and not beer, and invites the men, all high-school seniors, to have a drink on her deck.

Here is the crux of the story. Why would a woman, all alone in an isolated house, invite a group of strange men in? Ellen thinks that she is just doing a friendly, perhaps flirty but certainly harmless, thing. But in her assurance lies her downfall. And what gives her that powerful sense of assurance is her privileged position as an educated, white woman from the professorial class. To be clear, I am not saying that the story punishes her for her race and class. The story is not at all self-righteous nor vengeful in spirit. Instead, step by quiet step, stroke by delicate stroke, it confronts the reader with what Mark Athitakis says: “A sense of security is often a lie.” Or, as Peck’s story concludes, “If it’s peace you want, prepare for war.” We forget to prepare for war at our own peril.

We have all kinds of way of “refusing to see betrayal and devastation clearly,” as Athitakis puts it. The other stories in Peck’s collection illustrate with dazzling variety and vividness our self-delusions. In “Bliss,” a man befriends his mother’s murderer and only realizes at the very end why he is doing this extraordinary thing. In “Sky Writing,” it is revealed at the end why the obnoxious plane passenger is flying from city to city around the world, never touching the ground except in airports. In both “The Law of Diminishing Returns” and “Dues,” the repetition of events forces the protagonists to confront their losses. The former, about a young American gay writer in London, is at least semi-autobiographical. The story “St. Anthony of the Vine” is a perfect parable of how we defeat ourselves handily, in love and politics.

The long epigraph to the book comes from the philosopher Bertrand Russell. After centuries of looking for “some permanent substratum amid the changing phenomenon,” Science has replaced matter with energy, according to Russell. However, energy is not a thing. It is “the burning, not what burns.” By naming his book “What Burns,” Peck has aligned himself with the noun and not the verb. In one of the poetic preludes to the stories, a writer-figure argues that nouns are naming words, and names are power. The idea harks back to Adam’s naming of the animals. Adam named the horse “horse,” and not “the one that gallops.” A horse is both more and less than its galloping. And so the writer creates his own fictional paradise-cum-expulsion by naming names too: Davis, Blaine, Ellen, Nathan. Another way to put this is that the writer sees the bodies first, with their prior entanglements with class, race, and sexuality, especially class, and also with time and space, before any action even starts.  We are bodies before we are agents. The higher morality begins with this truth.


Jee Leong Koh is the author of Steep Tea (Carcanet), named a Best Book of the Year by UK’s Financial Times and a Finalist by Lambda Literary in the US. He has published five other books of poems, a volume of essays, and a collection of zuihitsu. His most recent book is Connor & Seal: A Harlem Story in 47 Poems (Sibling Rivalry).