Truth or Something Like It
By Curtis Smith

Review by Andrew Bowen

Casperian Books, 2010
ISBN: 978-1934081228
Paperback; 248 pp.; $15

Church steeples rose above the trees and roofs, white stalagmites aching toward their notions of God, while on the outskirts lurked the low, windowless porn shops, the roadhouses notorious for serving any girl with tits large enough to justify a halter top.

In one fell swoop, Curtis Smith displays the dichotomy and juxtaposition of his subject matter—“truth”—and the articulation he uses throughout to express it.

Truth or Something Like It is about Glen Tate, a young wrestling coach whose life is changed when the son of a charismatic firebrand—and presidential candidate—dies in a car accident involving them both. Succumbing to bribery, Glen’s once cavalier world of coaching, playing nanny for a class of high school miscreants, and a faltering love life is challenged as his guilt festers. Only when Glen finds the courage to summon the last traces of honor left over from his brother’s suicide does he put his own nondescript life aside to fight for his version of the truth.

Curtis Smith’s greatest asset lies in his ability to capture an emotion, a moment, and to siphon every verbal nutrient to the reader until the passage itself seems tactile. The reader is dipped into his world by passages that buzz with their own life and pulse.

Here was nakedness and maybe even a glimpse of TRUTH. And here, Glen thought, looking down through the watery, moist light, was a dick nowhere near hard, a dick overwhelmed by the cell-dividing presence in its playground area, a shell-shocked dick ducking for cover, and he returned again to the loser’s refrain he’d been unable to escape since stepping into her apartment.

This attention to detail, however comes at a price. Too often scenes and chapters open to a stage whose curtain takes longer than it should to unfurl. In such a rich landscape one becomes so involved in the environment that dramatic action is required to jar the reader from the siren’s song of Smith’s word craft. Fair warning is also needed regarding the narrative voice. Throughout the novel, the third person speaker has a clear bias toward Glen—even cheering him on:

“Onward, ghost man.” Or “Onward, Spartan.”

Sympathy:

“Good Lord, he was tired…”

And for good measure, chastisement:

“Along the way, he apologized to Charlie. Who was he to judge another man’s woman-rescuing schemes?”

As the reader becomes acclimated to the narrative, it becomes easy to drift into thinking one is no longer hearing an objective voice, but that of Glen’s. This becomes a minor distraction as one may have to remind themselves as to who is telling the story.

In this excerpt, we face the relative degrees in which truth expresses itself; the distance of which can mean the difference between a moderate and a fanatic:

“Less than four months remained to the election, and as Derek said, the country now had its choice between vanilla and French vanilla.”

Smith’s latest work makes an excellent portrait of man’s quest for truth and the lengths at which one might go to discover it. Through each character, Smith constructs a unique and vivid aspect of truth that stitches the fabric of the whole in a prism of detail. Truth indeed becomes subjective, and through his adventure, Glen becomes a reflection of sages long past who have surrendered themselves to the outcome of enlightenment, no matter the result or cost.

Visit Casperian Books on the web at http://www.casperianbooks.com/

Andrew Bowen’s fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in Prick of the Spindle, Metazen, decomP, Bartleby-Snopes, Wrong Tree Review, PicFic, Nanoism, Sex and Murder, The Legendary, MiCrow, and elimae. He is founder of Divine Dirt Quarterly and blogs at www.bowenandrew.blogspot.com

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