Suss: another literary journal

All twenty-eight sto­ries in Andrew McNabb’s debut col­lec­tion, The Body of This, are set in Maine. McNabb’s Maine is not the famil­iar car­i­ca­ture of ter­ri­ble accents, back­woods remove, and lack­adaisi­cal Down Easters. It is, instead, filled with curi­ous char­ac­ters teas­ing out mean­ing from their lives’ details.

McNabb’s char­ac­ters are mostly Catholic, but they all—white, black, African refugees, Mexican aliens, white col­lar retirees, mis­fits, big­ots, art stu­dents, newlyweds—share a fas­ci­na­tion with the body. Following an acci­dent, a cou­ple in their eight­ies finds new joy in star­ing at one another’s naked bod­ies. A teenager finds courage in the sight of his crush’s acne. A man yearns to put his tongue in a home­less stranger’s mouth “and clean her teeth of their fer­ment.” These sto­ries are in turn las­civ­i­ous, funny, and moving—often all three. “Service” begins,

So here it is: It was Terry Mulvaney’s life­long desire to live the Christian ideal of absolute sub­or­di­na­tion and obe­di­ence, and so he got a job at The Home Depot in South Portland.

A char­ac­ter in “To Jesus’s Shoulder,” in find­ing St. Bernard’s ques­tion to Christ about “His great­est unrecorded suf­fer­ing,” asks his friend, “Can you imag­ine all that? Unusual. Unusual. A prayer to a wound.”

Ultimately, this is the collection’s argu­ment: as these char­ac­ters are fas­ci­nated by the minute details of the bod­ies around them, so too can we find allure in the minu­tiae of our own lives. The pieces of Andrew McNabb’s debut col­lec­tion, for a start, pro­vide us some­thing to cheer.