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Brick and Mortar
by Alison Gresik
Oberon Press, 2000, 182 pages
Reviewed by David Wright
Like its solid title, Alison Gresik’s Brick and Mortar is a substantial collection of short fiction. Comprised of nine interwoven stories, Gresik’s first book looks closely at a range of characters from the congregation of Calvin Park Presbyterian Church. Gresik’s writing is marked by a careful stylistic touch and a deep respect for her characters--everyone from the church’s matriarch to its janitor to a little boy, bored enough to crawl beneath the pews during Sunday service. Equally important, her stories demonstrate a rich faith, both in a God who lives (somehow and inexplicably) in the lives of a church’s ordinary congregants, and in the power of stories to communicate the intricacies of such real belief.
The best of the stories here -- “Drink,” “Oil,” “Grain,” “Fuel,” and “Plaster Cracks”-- interrupt their protagonists in media res, using the present tense as a means of showing how characters confront a complicated situation connected to the church (and then judiciously using flashbacks to both unravel and further complicate their lives). What’s so striking in each case is Gresik’s restraint. She manufactures connection and insight from the smallest crises and details, knowing that these tiny matters are indeed what hold a small church together.
In “Drink,” for instance, she writes from the surprising perspective of Ryan, a small boy who sees the church and the world from a peculiarly privileged point of view. “Only Ryan knows about the wood underneath the pew,” writes Gresik. “Up where his mother sits the pew is shiny brown like toffee, but underneath the boards are pale and fuzzy.” Through the eyes of this youngest of congregants, Gresik suggests her metaphoric understanding of the very tangible nature of faith, and to the strange sense it must make for a young boy. At one point, Ryan lays his head on his mother’s chest to hear “her voice from the inside. Her singing sounds darker because it is dark inside a person. Inside a person is hollow, with just your stomach, which is where Jesus lives.”
For Gresik’s congregants, Jesus also lives quite matter of factly in their daily interactions. It is a refreshing depiction of these troubled, faithful folk. Too often when religious characters appear at all in contemporary storytelling, whether in fiction or in film, their religious commitments appear as the writer’s answer to a problem, as a ground the writer can turn to for easy explanations about why a character acts as she does. Or (and this happens more frequently) writers pit characters against their own faith traditions. I think, for instance, of Barbara Kingsolver’s recent bestseller, The Poisonwood Bible. For all its compelling questions about culture, faith, and parenthood, Kingsolver’s novel can be summed up in a sentence from the publisher’s reading guide as it describes the father’s tyrannical faith and his four daughters’ reliance on their mother, Orleanna, who works “to protect them all from whatever perils may come -- from jungle, river, or father and his terrible God.”
Faith in Gresik’s work does not appear as an easy answer, either for the reader as a way to pin down the characters nor for the characters to puncture their very real problems with simple solutions. Faith here is close to a given, though not entirely taken for granted. What bridges the two extremes is the rich presence of a community outside of which the faith these characters inhabit would make no sense. Even those on the edges of their beliefs must reckon with the presence of Calvin Park.
When the new pastor who is the hero of the collection’s final tale feels like jumping out of the window instead of preaching her sermon, she chooses instead to step back into the study and into her vestments. The choice is real but inevitable. She returns to face her own bloody fears in the presence of others. How much more difficult than retreating into the self or into the anonymity of the streets.
Some of the stories do, at times, seem prescribed toward their endings, especially those with an obvious biblical pattern. And at times the voices of creative writing workshop participants, suggesting more dialogue, or “show don’t tell,” hover over the stories (the collection was, initially, a master’s project). What saves the stories, however, is the way Gresik grounds her characters in so many intricate, tactile processes: caulking windows, building model trains, conducting a church choir, lighting a cigarette, baking loaves of barley bread. One of her characters, Peter, recalls his mother’s advice on making bread: “You must not disagree with the dough. . . . You must let it follow its own mind.”
In Brick and Mortar, Alison Gresik allows her fiction to follow the collective and disparate minds of a single faith community into both expected and unexpected corners of the church (and of her characters’ interior worlds). As a result, she kneads a nourishing mix of well-crafted, character driven fiction. Readers of faith will be challenged. Those seeking will be intrigued.
David Wright's poetry, essays, and reviews have appeared online and in print in such places as The Christian Century, The Avatar Review, and here on Nimble Spirit. His second collection of poetry, A Liturgy for Stones, will be published this fall by Pandora Press U.S. David lives and teaches in the Chicago area and will be a featured poet at this October's Mennonite/s Writing: An International Conference at Goshen College in Goshen, Indiana.
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