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Undecided

I did not care for the predominant sexual themes in the first few stories and I did not finish this book. Others can give a more thorough and literary review.

The one word that seems to be missing from all reviews of David Levinson's collection "Most of us are Here Against Our Will" is "genius." Perhaps it is the kind of omission made from the embarrassing chill of cognition of being confronted with something freshly real--like the eyes of an animal in the dark--previous reviewers were afraid to admit to have been startled by? Because as much as these stories are about "loss, family dysfunction, sex and survival," they are more largely comprised of the space between the fragility of human desire--its innocence and expectations--and the limitations of fulfillment with its disappointments and concessions.

The settings may be Austin, Texas, Manhattan, Los Angeles but the place is the frailty and fallibility of the human heart for which Levinson is poised with an adroit eye and keen ear to bring into relief. The narrator of the story titled "The Cheerleader's Kiss" walks into his unheated kitchen and says, "...[T]he air fidget, the floor spotted with ice. My breath left my body, tiny cottony bursts. A multitude of icicles hung off the table, thin as straws" is a superior example of rather than in a "tell", Levinson guides and elucidates the connections between the environments he creates and the people with which he populates them. Nothing is wasted, fractal or accidental.

Levinson's prose is warm and smart without the glibness and slick irony of many, or most of his contemporaries working through similar subject matter. It is Levinson's compassion for his characters rather than a cynicism about them that allows him to make some of the most lucid connections between the clutter of popular culture such as MTV, Chia Pets, Variety, Sean Connrary and Glamour Magazine and contemporary crises such as HIV infection, Hepatitis-B, and familial disenfranchisement. His people are flawed and troubled and as volatile, toxic and dangerous as they are innocents, scared and near breaking. But Levinson is never poking fun, sensationalizing, or putting them on display as a freak show. His characters drink too much, smoke too much, fret themselves sick over interpersonal relationships; they spend too much time on the phone, in bars, in conversation and meditation over coffee contemplating their own ennui, but not as an end that seems to be the subject of much of what we see portrayed as a "lifestyle" in "Independent" film and short fiction, but as a descriptor of the tidal pulling them along.

The collection takes its name from the seventh story, but more importantly earns its name through the overarching thematic of the book. Levinson is an observer of "will" of great acumen. In the stories "A Few Words About My Son" where a father is haunted by the loss of his son, and "Jaguar", which focuses on a woman's realization of dissatisfactions of romantic love, Levinson is the broker of dreams as they unravel. In the title story and "Quite Cold in Alaska" he is the exacting chronicler of the compressions made by contemporary notions of identity through popular culture that work to force out individuality or individual desire. And where each of these stories, individually, question distinctly American notions of sexuality, place, and time effectively, the impact of Levinson's collection, like a fist in the chest, is the question of will. He has made the philosophical, visceral, tangible, and frightening, as through example after stunning example, he seems to ask, "What place does will have in the worlds that we create for ourselves?"

If there is any complaint that can be made about Levinson at this point it would be that there isn't more out there. That we have yet to have been privy to all he sees, and the way that he sees it. Enjoy it now as a cult follower, this is an enormity waiting to happen.

A short story investigates the singular myths that nurture a soul and, if it is good, at the same time, exposes the myriad of little deaths a person is destined to die each day. Levninson's stories come very close to doing that each time. A must read for short story afficionados.