The National Virginity Pledge by Barry Graham

Reviewed by Kadzi Mutizwa

ISBN: 0977605183
Another Sky Press, 2009

None of the characters who (dis)grace the pages of Barry Graham’s The NationalVirginity Pledge have taken anything resembling a virginity pledge, but I found myself wishing that at least a few of them had. Maybe that pro-abstinence crowd is onto something.

Graham throws the reader into a world of lost souls behaving badly. All of his tales are dark and most of them are pretty dirty. They’re about the kinds of people we hope our children never devolve into. People who “shoot Bacardi 151 and do lots of nasty things with more than one person at a time,” and try to suffocate runaway household hamsters, and burglarize their parents’ houses (walking off with everything from DVD players to two-liter bottles of Mountain Dew) for drug money. Many of these people are hard to root for. For example, I initially felt sorry for the couple whose baby was diagnosed with Tay-Sachs Disease. But then the baby’s putative father holds up a diner to pay for a televangelist-endorsed salvation treatment, and my sympathy began to taper off.

This is a collection of short stories. Some really short stories, several of which only tally up to a single paragraph, as though a revisionist take on the poem. Yet it’s these shorter pieces that often seem the deepest, delivering more of a meaningful and memorable punch, such as the one about a girl who romanticizes what her discarded piece of bread might mean to a stranger; or the one in which a presumably young boy stands locked outside of his father’s house, gazing through the window at his parents reliving the only day they ever loved each other.”

Graham’s stories tend to be more dialogue-heavy than description-driven which is disappointing, since there are tantalizing glimmers of his potential for sharp descriptive flair—like when he describes the way the colors of the sky at sunrise fuse with the flashing blue and red lights of a police car; or when he likens a headache to the explosion of hijacked planes.

Two of Graham’s recurring (and related) themes are compulsive gambling exploits and car accidents. Gamblers are hopeful sorts who believe in the transformative power of luck. The people in these stories gamble on much more than just poker games—they gamble on their ability to trust and rely on their partners and family members, and they gamble on their ability to abate their suffering with drugs, liquor, and casual sex. But gambling and holding out for luck can be a desperate brand of hope and desperation is the unmistakable undercurrent of these broken people’s lives, with f atal car accidents serving as reminders that luck will all too often, and unceremoniously, run out. 

Fiction writing itself can be a gamble. This collection is subtitled: Short Stories and Other Lies. The lie is that (unlike what you’ll find in the non-fiction realm) these are just stories, imaginatively manufactured yarns. But, more frequently than not, fiction functions as a self- and zeitgeist-revelatory mask and any writing of it is just as brave as memoir writing or poetry. The people in these stories are eminently real in their rawness. They surround us, and they are us, and Graham gambles on our ability and willingness to respect the discomfiting legitimacy of their struggles and experiences.   

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