SEEING CLEARLY FROM FAR AWAY
Catherine Gammon sees Los Angeles best from Pittsburgh
Pittsburgh provided insight for itinerant fiction writer and Zen priest Catherine Gammon, a native of the expanding postwar Los Angeles, where the population soared with people looking to make a fresh start.
In an interview with Littsburgh, Gammon recalls that until transplanting to the Steel City in 1992 as a Pitt faculty member did she realize she hadn’t “actually known this depth of place-based, rooted family” that many with long ties to western PA take for granted.
Her latest story collection, “The Gunman and the Carnival” comes loaded with a bevy of characters hungry to connect with others in the sprawl of SoCal, making for a study of “an imagined city” where loneliness runs rampant among a population of millions.
In “Eudora Loved Her Life,” the 40year old titular character refines the boundaries of her now sober but undramatic life as a divorcee with a daughter in Stanford. Gammon allows Eudora to characterize herself and the socialization of women as a “lesson of summer … a young tomato plant… grown herself and fruited.”
When she goes to an isolated part of a beach to celebrate “her birth, her life,” she’s confronted by a young woman’s dead body: “The round bottom in tight black jeans, the narrow waist, the delicate wrists, the bare arms — covered in birds and flowers, red and green and blue — the splayed hair.”
The unnamed girl’s death from a probable overdose will send Eudora into a spiral of guilt she hopes will help her relate to others — a cop, her AA group, her young neighbor in a troubled relationship — until the story comes full circle.
Gammon leans on the beach as metaphor for her character’s transitions through age and relationships, well portrayed in “A Vampire Story?” Here, readers get introduced to Will and Ursula, a Hollywood “couple” known mostly for their taut onscreen sibling relationship in a minor Netflix series, less for their on-and-off romance offscreen.
As the roles dry up, they transition to the fallback position of many in the acting world — catering. At these gigs, they’re sometimes outed by fans unable to separate fact from fiction. After a steamy romp at the beach, they split, only to find it difficult to disentangle themselves professionally from being typecast until “comedy was the only solution. Just the two of them, alone, ordinary bodies, working a crowd, offering exotic finger foods and flutes of champagne.”
Built up characters
Gammon’s knack for building characters full of contrasts pays dividends as they arrive fully fleshed.
Her appetite for obliqueness also shows up at times in stories like “Dangerous” and “In Absence.” The experimental nature of these pieces makes for an interesting aside, though the opacity in these stories stands as contrast to her other, more fully realized stories with clear trajectories.
That objective gets better fulfilled in “Pack Rat, All Will Be Well.” Backdropped, as are others, during the pandemic with its concerns over personal distance, it in some ways feels strangely quaint four years later. It’s also the story of neighbors coming together, capturing the feeling of those early days when collective effort was in vogue.
Here, it’s getting Eddie’s grandkids together with his caregiver’s family to “make music and a parade” out of his hoarder’s stash of rubber bands, plastic bags, and takeout utensils.
That the kids’ project grows into a float variously imagined as “a blue Antarctic glacier and a sky of brilliant southern lights on a flatbed” as well as a “rainforest and they were throwing plastic butterflies,” represents the metamorphosis of Eddie and his neighbor, Deirdre, as they grow from strangers sharing a wall to people looking out for one another. The story remains a keeper.
Perhaps the takeaway from the eyeopening Gammon has her character’s endure throughout “The Gunman & the Carnival” gets embodied by one of the fractured point of view in the collection’s penultimate story.
In “In the future perhaps we will have another chance,” a driver focuses on the seductive nature of L.A. and considers “the beauty of lights at night spread out all over the city horizon to horizon, a human [expletive] galaxy that when you live here you come to realize you never see.”