Book Review

Down to a Sunless Sea
by Mathias B. Freese
Wheatmark, 2007, $13.95
http://www.wheatmark.com

When you read a book with a title like Down to a Sunless Sea (no relation to David Graham's novel by the same name), you pretty much know that you're getting a healthy dose of thinking from the glass half-empty camp of humanity. And, to this end, Mathias B. Freese does not disappoint. His stories, written and published over a span of thirty years, chronicle the dark spaces in which the soul plunges and, often, does not return. Yet, Freese has a way of drawing the reader into his dark corners that, as long as one doesn't stay too long, will find a sort of perverse satisfaction. In "I'll Make It, I Think," the reader meets a Holden Caulfield-esque character with a deformed hand ("Ralph") and foot ("Lon") who complains of his trouble with activities such as shaving and walking. As a cripple, he also doesn't have much luck with the girls. He is reduced to spying on his naked sister and being a peeping Tom, despite being blessed with a different kind of abnormality—a large endowment he calls "David." In fact, he wonders whether he "should sacrifice David as an offering, leave him on the window ledge like a piece of bric-a-brac, wax fruit, a banana." Although you can't help but feel sorry for him, his self-deprecation in one sentence followed by the revelation that he won't date crippled girls because he "ain't no snob; I just know I can do better for me" is digusting yet humorous in its highlighting of the hypocrisy of youth.

Other characters don't receive such wry treatment. The enterprising young Herbie in "Herbie" decides to go into the shoe-shining business after shining his father's shoes. Expectations of his father's approval are quickly dashed by Herbie's offended father—"What am I, dead or something? What's a matter, I don't make enough around here to clothe your ass?"—reminding the reader that the Horatio Alger optimism was rarer among working-class families than one would think, a pride in honest poverty that is also explored in "Billy's Mirrored Wall."

In fact, it is in the disappointments of young Jewish men growing up after World War II in which Freese excels. In "Alabaster," a young boy reluctantly keeps an elderly woman, a Holocaust survivor, company on a bench while her daughter is away for a moment. Instead of fretting and cooing, the expertise of most older women, the survivor prefers the tact of harsh reality rather than visions of sugar plums: "Rolling up the arm sleeves of her cloth coat, she showed me her once-beautiful arms, upturned, maligned. I saw nothing until she pointed me to a pulse area above her hand. Seven digits faded into her skin." Freese is less successful when venturing away from this formula. "Arnold Schwartzenegger's Father Was a Nazi" is a heavy-handed character attack on a minority who, like him or not, happens to be a Horatio Alger story. However, on the whole, Down to a Sunless Sea is a engaging, dark collection of stories, and their grit and bitter taste is manageable in small bites, so long as they're not swallowed whole.