Drawing together the best of his short fiction published over the last four decades, Burn Man: Selected Stories showcases Mark Anthony Jarman’s sharply observed characters and acrobatic, voice-driven prose in stories that walk the tightrope between the commonplace and the mystical.
Many writers are content to light one or two well-placed lyrical firecrackers in a short story. Others, like Mark Anthony Jarman, set off entire fireworks displays on every page. 'Propane slept in the tank and propane leaked while I slept, blew the camper door off and split the tin walls where they met like shy strangers kissing,' opens the visceral 'Burn Man on a Texas Porch, the first entry in Burn Man, an anthology of 21 stories culled from Jarman’s four-decade career. The rest of the story is, like many of Jarman’s tales, a hallucinatory rummaging through the mind of a broken man. After receiving skin grafts that 'didn’t quite fit,' the narrator fumes: 'Hate is everything they said it would be, and it waits for you like an airbag.' In Jarman’s stories and sentences, things seem always ready to explode ... The archetypical Jarman narrator is a bedraggled man dragging around a big aching heart. He might be a petty thief, a hockey scout, an addict or a bloodstained soldier ... When I read these stories, I scribbled down two names: Barry Hannah and Denis Johnson. Then I turned to the book’s introduction, by John Metcalf, which speaks at length about the influence of both on Jarman’s prose. But let me be clear: Jarman is no mere imitator. He may have the crackling syntax of Hannah, Johnson’s gift for shocking yet poetic images, and the penchant for loners and misfits of both, but Jarman’s voice rings unique.
'Burn Man on a Texas Porch,' from Jarman’s outstanding 2000 collection 19 Knives, is a canny choice to open the current volume; it is not only one of the finest Canadian short stories ever written, exemplifying what the short form is capable of on a stylistic, technical level, it represents in microcosm the elements that persist throughout Jarman’s very particular oeuvre. These include a rough-hewn male protagonist nevertheless possessed of an almost romantic sensibility; a fragmented structure; and compressed, allusive language that lands just this side of poetry ... The 21 stories in Burn Man, selected by the author himself, are not ordered chronologically but rather the way a musician might sequence tracks on an album, paying careful attention to modulations in tempo and rhythm and how individual pieces play against one another. This offers readers who might have encountered these stories previously in the context of individual collections a new experience ... The mordant humour in situations such as these helps leaven what might otherwise be a series of brutal, downbeat stories. Though Jarman is rarely without hope, even if that hope is tinged with a recognition of existential pain.
Jarman renders the chaos and disaster of his characters’ lives through an aesthetics of bombardment. Fragments of thoughts and images fly at the reader, without respect for linearity. The success of the stories is determined by the effectiveness of these imagistic, pellet-like sentences.
