The opening story of Broken Record Nostalgia by Caleb Michael Sarvis reads like something out of Raymond Carver — or something Carver might have written if he’d been a twenty-something writer applying his craft in the twenty-somethingth century. It’s called “Click Click Harvey,” and it follows the adventures (or lack thereof) of three roommates who track down the man who sideswiped the car that belongs to one of them. Some mayhem ensues but, as is frequently the case in Carver’s no-frills fiction, what’s really front and center is the broken world in which the characters live: cars drive by, televisions churn out hours and hours of meaningless drivel, women and men struggle halfheartedly to understand each other, and lot of drinking takes place. It’s an atmosphere that persists throughout the collection, but with each successive story, Broken Record Nostalgia grows increasingly surreal — and increasingly poignant.
Many of the stories in the collection center on a character named Marcus, whose brother Noah’s suicide has left a hole in the center of his life. Early in the collection, in a story titled “Thoreau in a Phone Booth,” Marcus contemplates committing suicide himself, much to the dismay of Noah’s one-time girlfriend, Arella, who spends a phantasmagorical night trying to keep the seemingly inevitable from happening. Later in the collection, we learn that Noah used to dress in a bear costume and wander through the woods in a vain attempt at escaping the madness of life among humans. In the same story, “Bewildered Idea of Resurrection,” Marcus is engaged in a misguided attempt at rewriting the past a la something akin to Donnie Darko.
Through it all, characters come and go, drifting beyond the boundaries of their own stories to appear in the margins of others, always searching for meaning, always coming up short. Indeed, if there is any meaning to be found in the chaos of life, Sarvis insists throughout Broken Record Nostalgia, it’s meaning we create from the scattered pieces of our lives.
Small Press Reviews 