Tunneling to the Center of the Earth: Stories
Kevin Wilson
Harper Perennial, 2009
U.S. trade paper, first edition
ISBN 978-0-06-157902-8
240 pages; $13.99

Franz Kafka, Michael Chabon, and the literature of the fantastic seem to be major influences on Kevin Wilson, whose collection of short stories, Tunneling to the Center of the Earth, will delight anyone who enjoys off-balance and well-told tales. Kafka’s influence is evident in the surreal situations Wilson creates: in one story, three young people who have just graduated from college but don’t have jobs decide to live underground for a time, and begin digging in their parents’ suburban yard; in another, a man has a job finding the Q’s in a Scrabble tile factory that rains letters down on him several times a day; in yet another, a museum is dedicated to the detritus of people’s lives. Chabon’s influence shows up in the fact that these stories are not the “contemporary, quotidian, plotless, moment-of-truth revelatory” stories, he said he was tired of in his introduction to McSweeney's Mammoth Treasury of Thrilling Tales, but, as Chabon requested, tales with plots. Wilson demonstrates that he can write artistically and thoughtfully and yet really tell a story instead of simply playing post-modernist games. And the fantastic comes into play in many of these stories, from the one about the parents who spontaneously combust to the tale in which families hire “grandparents” to enrich their childrens’ lives.

This first collection is memorable. Take “Grand Stand-In,” the story about the fake grandmother, hired by a number of families to be available for hugs, kisses and chocolate chip cookies for children whose grandparents have died. Wilson carefully explains the sociological reason behind this need: people wait longer and longer to start a family, and by the time they finally get around to it, the people who would normally have offered grandmotherly and grandfatherly love are all dead. But who wants her kid to grow up without knowing the completely uncritical love of a grandparent? So these families, generally wealthy and able to offer their children anything, take the extra step of offering them grandparents. All is going well for the protagonist, who grandmothers five families and makes a tidy profit at it. She has never had a family of her own, so she gets a lot of enjoyment out of keeping track of what’s going on in her various families. But then the day comes when a family wants her to slip into the shoes of a grandmother who is still living but forced by her health to enter a nursing home – a situation that requires the protagonist to take a hard look at what she’s doing. When the twist comes toward the end of the story, it’s perfectly logical and terribly sad.

Wilson seems especially good at inventing odd occupations for his characters. There’s the fellow who works in the Scrabble tile factory in “Blowing Up on the Spot,” mentioned above; he longs to be assigned the letter “E” instead of his terribly scarce “Q,” because he’s paid by the tile. Sometimes his fingers think he’s found a “Q” when it’s really only an “O.” Tough work! (Although the purpose of all this tile-finding isn’t explained, it appears that tiles are simply made in bulk and then sorted, so that by finding Q’s, the protagonist is ensuring there’s one in each game, no more and no less.) But that’s not the whole of the story, because this is the same story in which the protagonist’s parents have spontaneously combusted. No one knows why. It happened while they were on a subway. Simultaneous spontaneous combustion is almost unheard of, our protagonist tell us, and he keeps imagining what caused it and what his parents might have been thinking and feeling immediately before it happened.

Another character, this one in “The Shooting Man,” works in a noise factory, the place where they put the “moo” into that container painted with cows that moos when you turn it upside down, and the voices into Chatty Cathy dolls, among other things. If you worked in such a place all day, every day, wouldn’t you be sort of fascinated at the freak show that comes into town? Especially when that show features a man who shoots himself in the face, right in front of the audience, every night. How does he blow out his brains one night and still perform again the next night? It’s not too difficult to figure out for anyone except the protagonist, though he finally gets it – when it’s too late.

“The Museum of Whatnot” is one of my favorites. In this story, a young woman is employed in the title museum, charged with curating the detritus of people’s lives. She has to figure out how to display one man’s collection of spoons from different silverware sets, for instance, or the collection of letters from a teenage suicide. Not written letters, from one person to another, mind you, but letters of the alphabet this boy cut out of magazines and newspapers and saved in special notebooks. The woman’s real challenge comes when she gets a collection in from the estate of William Saroyan: rocks, paper clips, rubber bands, tin foil. It has to be displayed, because Saroyan’s will stated that no institution would get his papers if his other collections were not given equal standing. It’s not junk, and it certainly isn’t garbage; it’s “whatnot.” I’d honestly go to a museum like that just because it was so weird, wouldn’t you?

Even stories that seem fairly straightforward, without a touch of the weird, tend to nonetheless be off-base somehow. There’s “Go, Fight, Win,” in which a 16-year-old cheerleader becomes fascinated by a 12-year-old boy. Is it love, hormones, or what? Why do these two click in what seems like an obviously inappropriate relationship? And why, exactly, is it so obviously inappropriate? It’s not like they’re stripping each other naked. It all feels so odd that you find yourself squirming a bit with discomfort while you read the story.

Juvenile sex and love also make their appearance in “Mortal Kombat,” with two boys who are complete nerds, trivia champions on their school’s Quiz Bowl team. Neither of them thinks he’s gay, so why do they wind up kissing? It seems as much a mystery to them as to the reader, and that seems to be the point.

Wilson’s stories were all previously published in literary magazines, some of which I’ve never seen or heard of before, so I’m glad this collection is available. The book also has an “about the author” section in the back of the book that had me laughing out loud, along with an interview with Wilson about specific stories and a section called “The Stories Behind the Stories” that talks about Wilson’s influences. I’m sure the idea of this section is to give book groups guidance if they should wish to read this book together, but it’s fun even for the individual reader. Wilson is on the threshold of a great career.