It took me a long time to get around to reading the first of Joseph Torra’s novels, Gas Station, precisely, I think, because of the title & the premise behind it. The idea of coming of age working the pumps as a topic for a novel is a hard sell for someone who didn’t bother to learn to drive until he was over 40. On the other hand, the back cover pitch for My Ground, Torra’s third novel, refers to that book as “the final volume of the My Ground series,” making me think that I should approach his fiction volumes – I’ve been a happy reader of the poetry for some time – in chronological order.

Three sentences into Gas Station & I was sold completely:

I’m burning trash piece by piece tossing take-out coffee cups, crumpled sandwich paper, paper bags, pizza boxes, donut boxes, this morning’s Record American into the rusty fifty-gallon drum holes punched through sides for ventilation. Cigarette butts I glean and smoke stirring the black-smoke paper fire. It smells back here where Countess is chained up all day her shits sit various stages of decay.

What sold me on it was three things. First the level of detail – specifically the inclusion in the first sentence of “crumpled sandwich paper,” the first time I can recall ever seeing that omnipresent contemporary object discussed in literature. Right off the bat, you know that Torra has a real eye, not simply a literary one. The second thing that sold me on it was his sense of the relation of narrative – literally here the unfolding of meaning across time – to syntax. The inversion of the second sentence is exactly right, even if (as I think it does) it echoes the first sentence of Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury.¹ Okay, so referencing Faulkner is a good way to seduce me as a reader as well – tho finally it’s not what this book is about. Third, the run-on syntax of the third sentence places the narrative on the side of language as speech, rather than the “proper” erudition of expository prose. The text is signaling an allegiance to an entire prose tradition that includes everyone from Kerouac to Creeley & reaches back to the best of Melville. Not bad, in sum, for three sentences about burning trash.

Yesterday, I characterized Renee Gladman’s The Activist as “a powerful narrative engine roaring down the track with no particular place to go,” contrasting with works “where you may or may not be going anywhere, but it hardly matters since what you’re paying heed to are the details along the way.” Torra represents this latter tradition in almost its purest form. About two or three sections into the book, the prose relaxes just slightly, enough so that the Faulknerian echoes fade, but allowing Torra to elaborate an endlessly pleasurable text that operates almost entirely at the point of detail. Indeed, even past the 100-page mark in this 134 page I felt that it was possible that Torra was going to resist giving us the predictable sign-posts of plot closure (there are several possibilities, involving the narrator’s father’s relation to his mother, the gas station’s future, the narrator’s virginity, some of the other characters that inhabit this small, even claustrophobic universe). Torra pushes us almost to the end before he gives us a few & not necessarily the ones the we anticipate either. A part of me wishes he hadn’t, but another part recognizes this as an element in the novelist’s contract with reader expectations – Torra’s not interested in the quick, slick gee whiz books that the likes of James Patterson or Stuart Woods mass produce, but he’s not Kathy Acker, either. That is to say, he doesn’t think of the reader of the novel as a chump. He doesn’t take the risks that a Renee Gladman does with the form itself, but in part that seems to be because Torra is much more interested in the pleasure the text itself can provide. Of Gladman, I wrote that she had written “eighty percent of a great book.” Torra doesn’t aim quite as high, but he brings home something closer to 95 percent of what he aims for. For a lot of readers of both – I think everyone who reads this blog should be reading both – it may just come down to a matter of taste. Both have a lot to contribute.

One thing I would note, tho, especially for the reader who comes down on the side of Gladman, Gas Station offers an extraordinary document, almost an anthropological study of social range possible within a certain kind of institution. The narrator’s father, after all, is the pettiest of the petite bourgeois, one for whom the alternative might not be the working class, but a more lumpen mode of existence. For the most part, it’s a male world, but from a perspective that is seldom articulated except in terms stained with heroic struggle. Torra avoids all that: it’s sexist & racist, but it’s also daily & friendly, a refuge from realms (including, for the narrator, school & home) that are obviously not nearly as safe a haven. The difference between these two books is not that one is political and the other not, nor that one is left and the other is not, but that one is committed to the particular. And that’s a difference worth contemplating.

¹ Which reads “Through the fence, between the curling flower spaces, I could see them hitting.”