When the Wreckage Is in the Writer: On Creating Death and Disaster

Although David Means is one of our best writers of sentences, one would be hard-pressed to commit any of those sentences to memory. His lines unfold and refold upon themselves like animate origami, offering lush visual imagery and word choice as pointed as an awl. Take this fragment of description from “The Tree Line, Kansas, 1934”: “The way the road spread out of the vanishing point, exposing its mouth to the farm while, at the same time, tapering back into the quivers of heat in a manner that made it hard, and at times impossible, to watch.” That’s not some lyrical outburst in the stream of his stories. It’s closer to the median. The complexity of his sentences makes them virtually unmemorizable. They flit around you like the mating dance of a bird whose movements you’ll never afterward be able to retrace.

But the one David Means sentence I’ve never: “I don’t want anyone to die in my stories anymore.” By the time it arrives, Means’s stories have given us a distraught widower beaten and left to die in a train tunnel, a brother who drowns in an capsized canoe, a toddler plunging through her back lawn into a creek concealed by a shady construction company. A high school misfit has suffocated in a sandslide. The collection is a register of deaths that are exotic and pedestrian at once, arising from small miscalculations and unseen hazards. And it’s a bit grisly.