Book Review

Six Off 66
by David Daniel
Publishing Genius, 2008
http://www.publishinggenius.com.
ISBN: 978-0-9814685-0-1

The stories in David Daniel's Six Off 66 feel like television, early television, a bit old-fashioned and square. This isn't criticism, just observation. The characters, style of prose, plots, the pacing of these stories are distinctly tv. They follow the conventions and story-telling tropes of those episodic-anthology shows from the early 60s, like, well, Route 66.

Route 66 and the shows similar to it depicted a different self-contained melodrama each week. As the central, framing characters moved from town to town, they encountered new guest characters along the way, observing and interacting with these people's troubled lives. The shows were of lonely widows and uneasy teens, small town secrets and dark mysteries.

Daniel's stories are much in the same narrative vein—dramas of angry sons and wise Indians, beautiful women caught in the sulky light of aquariums and rocky seashores—with the feel of another age, a dawn-of-television age. Take the central story of the collection, "Off 66," a tale of a successful New York artist looking for the truth about his father in a tiny western town. Though flush with critical and financial success, the painter can't forget how his father abandoned him when he was still a small boy, an emotional roadblock between him and his worldly enjoyments.

This plot, as well as its complications and backstory, which involve a drunken but sagely Indian, is fairly standard tv material. So too do the setting—a sleepy New Mexico backwater, an abandoned adobe hut—and the cadence of the story, with its languid setup and rush to uncomplicated resolution, have a 60s television feel.

Again, this isn't criticism per se. We look back to programs like Route 66 with fondness. We accept that, given the medium, pioneer tv, given the period, early 60s, that some of the storytelling modes are quaint, a bit stiff for our contemporary taste, the dialogue and characters a touch mannered to our hip sensibility.

What makes Six Off 66 and most of the other stories in Daniel's collection interesting is that they so steadfastly refuse to be hip, to be contemporary at all. They take up a style that hasn't been in vogue for years. They exist quite happily in their old-fashioned dowdiness.

Another story, "The Thing in the Road," which opens the collection, is a tale reminiscent of The Twilight Zone, both in conception and theme. A trucker passing through another small town runs down some strange creature in the road. As the children poke it with sticks and the experts examine it, each person has a different conception of what the thing is, what it means, the truth or falsehood it represents. This thesis, and the way the narrative camera moves from one townsperson to the next, slow and steady, feels very much like those early television experiments with postmodernist questions, simple and measured, gravid with idea. What is true? the story ponders. Who is an authority? Is knowledge reliable? The story carefully turns these questions like Rod Serling in tweed.

If we take the stories from Six Off 66 as belonging to this tv-like format, accept their calm pokiness and earnest melodrama, they can be emotionally satisfying, rich in detail and human motivation. Their lack of irony is compelling. The question we might ask though is, can we, really? Can we discount the course of literary development? Is there an aesthetics of willful historic amnesia? Shall we put aside our millennial doubt, our stylish sophistication, and crash into the stormy waves with "The Girl at the Aquarium"?—Joseph Young