110
2019
NORTH CAROLINA L I T E R A R Y RE V I E W
LOVE AND DEATH IN DEEP SPACE a review by Joseph Dewey Steve Mitchell. Cloud Diary: A Novel. Winston-Salem: C & R Press, 2018.
JOSEPH DEWEY, Professor of Literature at Broward College, is the author of numerous studies of postmodern and fin de millennium American literature and culture, most notably In a Dark Time: The Apocalyptic Temper in the American Novel of the Nuclear Age (Purdue University Press, 1990), Beyond Grief and Nothing: A Reading of Don DeLillo (University of South Carolina Press, 2006), and Understanding Michael Chabon (University of South Carolina Press, 2014). He has published articles on a wide range of Southern writers, including Cormac McCar thy, Reynolds Price, Allan Gurganus, Barbara Kingsolver, David Bajo, and Karen Russell. STEVE MITCHELL is an award-winning short story writer and poet living in Greensboro, where he is co-owner of Scuppernong Books. His stories and verse have appeared in The Southeast Review, storySouth, Red Fez, as well as NCLR. His story “Platform,” published in NCLR 2010, is part of his 2012 short story cycle The Naming of Ghosts (Press 53, 2012; reviewed in NCLR Online 2013). In addition, Mitchell has worked with mixed media projects involving both film and music, including an ambitious online project in which readers of Cloud Diary can suggest songs that capture and echo different moments in the narrative.
First-time novelist Steve Mitchell is clearly intrigued by deep space. Doug, Mitchell’s narrator, is a twenty-something isolate, a would-be writer of unfinishable short stories who exists along the fringes of the thriving arts community around Winston-Salem. When he first meets the free-spirited Sophie, a promising painter who in turn will jumpstart his heart, he is working nights as a security guard in a largely empty warehouse. “I guard space” (5), he deadpans. This is not the deep space of kitschy science fiction but rather, the formidable, terrifying space that envelops each of us, the deep space that seems impenetrable until the unexpected chance arises to share that cloaking loneliness with another, if only for a time. That deep space has engaged the American imagination since the melancholic whale hunter who wants to be called Ishmael first peered over the chipped bow of the Pequod to take in the sheer breadth and reach of the nothingness into which we are all born. And, although the story that Doug recounts of his experiences, first with the seismic shattering of love and then, too quickly, with the hammer-stroke intrusion of death bears no obvious debt to MobyDick, this shimmering story of a friendship that both lifts and buries explores the dark implications of Melville’s most paralyzing fear: if all the elaborate shadow-shows of Christianity are merely the fables we whisper to each other in the dark, stories about celestial zombies, slick magic tricks, and stardusted cannibals, then we are only random matter colliding in unfathomable emptiness. But, Mitchell reminds us, how powerful are those collisions. In heroic counterpoint to Melville, Mitchell affirms that, within a most forbidding deep
space, each other is all we have. And, when that love proves fleeting and inevitably fails, we find sustenance in the sparest fragments of memory images, gestures, bits of conversation that we shape into a fine and private mythology, stories at once imperfect and imprecise that become our cloud diary. At its great and generous heart, Cloud Diary, then, is a turn of the new millennium love story. Boy meets girl; boy and girl fall in love. What could be simpler? We share the transformative space Doug and Sophie come to shape, the emotional ecosystem created first by the inexplicable gravitation pull of their attraction and then by the wonderful, crazy logic of their yearning. We share Doug and Sophie’s meetcute over spaghetti squash in a Harris Teeter; their awkward first dates; their clumsy first kiss; their snappy repartee watching obscure foreign films over box wine, soda crackers, and strong coffee; their fierce lovemaking. Most important, perhaps, we share how their growing passion for each other fuels the passion for their art. Love inspires their creativity; art sustains their love. Mitchell takes a risk as he limits the narrative to exactly that shared space. We get no backstories of either lover, no recollections of their childhoods, their families, or their past lovers. Indeed, other characters appear only as secondary players; Mitchell offers no subplots to intrude into the complex space that Doug and Sophie share. The risk succeeds magnificently as Mitchell creates a love story at once engaging and unnervingly immediate. What stuns here is the unforced elegance of Mitchell’s anatomy of love, his willingness to use language unironically to cap-