For Out of the Heart Proceed
by Jensen Beach
Dark Sky Books, 2012
120 pages / $12.00  Buy from Dark Sky Books or SPD

The twenty-two stories in Jensen Beach’s debut collection, For Out of the Heart Proceed, center on family and in particular father and son relationships. The collection is peopled with troubled characters struggling to make sense of their circumstances, choices, and connection to others. What is perhaps most compelling about these stories are the interesting and memorable ways the characters grapple with issues of faith: Faith in themselves, others, the world, and the divine. There is great efficiency to Beach’s prose and a precise order to this collection that juxtaposes the disturbances and sometimes chaos of these characters’ lives, conflicted characters often controlled by fear.

For Out of the Heart Proceed contains three Parts linked by how its men do, and sometimes don’t, transcend their fears and difficult situations. In the first story, “Training Exercise,” a father and young son must brave the dark and what appears to be a menacing, male stranger in their back garden:

This opening story contains a mix of light and dark that’s both literal and figurative and sets the tone for the entire collection.

In “Peafowl,” the male protagonist undergoes several changes of heart involving exotic birds, his wife, the natural world, and himself:

Themes around our relationship to the wild and unknowable appear often in the collection.

“Orion,” the last story in Part I and one of the longest stories in the book, tells the tale of two estranged friends forced to consider the power and the magic of the human imagination and experience:

The two men are also forced to confront the opposites of that power and magic:

“Orion,” a story where the bizarre, profound, and arbitrary are expertly handled, ends Part I on a dark, nuanced note with the protagonist’s fear heightened and his faith tested. The reader is right there inside this wonderful awful closing scene and image, as squeezed as the cockatiel in the protagonist’s arms and left to wonder what will happen next? While Beach portrays his characters’ struggles with compassion, there’s also an insistence on honesty in these stories and a refusal to skirt characters’ flaws or to offer readers easy resolutions.

The theme of place also appears often in the collection, both geographic place and place as an ideal that characters yearn to reach. In Part II’s first story, “Africa,” tension mounts in an uneasy triangle of father, potential girlfriend, and daughter:

As the story unfolds, through telling details and dialogue, we feel the protagonist’s sense of loss at his inability to connect with this woman.

“Priest Lake, Idaho” and the final story in Part II, “To the World I’ll be Buried,” are especially moving and strong. Beach inserts himself into “Priest Lake, Idaho,” exploring on the page different authorial choices he can make for the story’s protagonist and alluding to God, omniscience, and the often-cruel and sometimes fortuitous randomness (or is it fate?) of life:

A dog plays a bigger and bleaker role in “To the World I’ll be Buried,” another story that centers on tense relationship triangles and betrayals both real and imagined:

The success of “To the World I’ll be Buried” and the collection as a whole lies in how real and relatable these often quirky characters and their strange dilemmas become in our imaginations. Through keen details and the characters’ well-drawn thoughts, actions, and dialogue, Beach brings the stories’ setting and cast alive and the latter’s hopes and fears are as individual as they are universal.

In Part III, the work becomes ever more imaginative and surreal as the male protagonists continue to overcome hurdles both within and outside of themselves in order to thrive and/or survive. “Their Future Looks Brighter the Closer It Gets to the Sun” tells the story of a father and son who together make an enormous kite and attempt to escape the “dusty, yellowed earth” by flying on the kite’s tails.

“Spaceport America” introduces us to another father and son duo searching beyond their everyday existence and the earth itself for meaning and significance:

The collection’s final, title story, “For Out of the Heart Proceed,” brings us perhaps the most humorous and yet crushing tale in this collection. Jim and his son, Gene, are a man and a boy both rootless and searching. Like so many other characters in this book, Jim and Gene feel forced to look beyond the real and the ordinary to find a sense of connection and belonging:

Jim, again like the rest of the protagonists in this collection, is both flawed and striving hard to do the right thing and the story’s close is as poignant as it is open-ended.

The story endings in For Out of the Heart Proceed are often unexpected and open-ended. There’s the urge at each story’s finish to turn the page, searching for more, not with disappointment or with dissatisfaction, but with that hunger to know ‘the end.’ However, Jensen is too successful at nuance, subtext, and omission to give readers any less than the only close to each story. At the book’s finish, we are reminded that little, if anything, ends where we expect. We can never fully know another’s story or the full depths of a character, least of all our own. We are forever striving, looking within and beyond our existence for the best place, the best way, sometimes with fear, sometimes with faith, and sometimes with both.

***

Ethel Rohan is the author of Hard to Say (PANK) and Cut Through the Bone (Dark Sky Books), the latter longlisted for The Story Prize. Her work has or will appear in World Literature Today, Tin House Online, The Irish Times, The Rumpus, Post Road Magazine, The Los Angeles Review, and elsewhere. She earned her MFA in fiction from Mills College, California. Raised in Ireland, Ethel Rohan now lives in San Francisco. Visit her at ethelrohan.com.