The Texture of Awareness: On Pete Duval’s “The Deposition”

By W. Scott OlsenMay 22, 2021

The Texture of Awareness: On Pete Duval’s “The Deposition”

The Deposition by Pete Duval

IMAGINE A SENTENCE as a trampoline. You step onto it, gingerly at first, testing its strength and your own sense of balance. It accommodates your weight, stretching a bit but, with luck, not ripping apart and sending you flailing. You walk, shuffle, slip to the middle, pause, and then flex your knees and push. The trampoline sends you up into the air, but only so far as to match the invitation and risk offered by your knees. You come down and survive. The trampoline offers another launch, and you bend your knees again. Higher, this time. Soon you are happily, gleefully soaring through the air.

Yes, this is a metaphor. But this is also what reading Pete Duval’s stories is like. The sentences are often gymnastic. They are often ballet — pirouette and jeté and sissonne. And, of course, the ideas follow along. Consider this bit from “The Physics of Large Objects,” the opening story in Duval’s new collection, The Deposition:

Yes. A tractor-trailer. An eighteen-wheeler. Its two-ply rear wheels rest in a bramble of lilacs at the edge of your yard. And reflected in the curve of the trailer’s chrome tank, everything — the brambles, the streetlamp, the Dog Star in its brittle opalescence, even you yourself, Norman, if you look closely enough: the entire visual field stretches like taffy, in keeping with the principles of reflection and the limitations of the perceiving eye’s — your eye’s — point of view.


The situation is mundane. In the middle of the night, a truck has come down a narrow road behind the narrator’s house and cannot turn around. But the situation is only an opening for deeper considerations. Norman, who is us (the story is told in the second person), cannot wake his wife, so he goes outside and assumes an unfamiliar confidence.

Look at you, Norman, impersonating a guy who knows what he’s talking about, pumped tight with a bravado born of intimate familiarity with the physics of large objects — the métier of tugboat captains, crane operators, men who labor at the nation’s ports of entry, durable goods and Pez dispensers by the millions in orange shipping containers stark against blue skies. The tonnage moving with the fluency of thought. You smile.


The Deposition, which won the Juniper Prize for Fiction sponsored by the University of Massachusetts Press (Duval’s first collection, Rear View from 2004, won Bread Loaf’s Bakeless Prize), is very much in the tradition of Flannery O’Connor: we encounter troubled Catholics from page one to page last. But this is post-Barthelme/Coover/Barth, post–Tim O’Brien storytelling: the narrators are not only enmeshed in their situations, they are enmeshed in an awareness of — and fascination with — their roles as narrators. As Norman says, “You’re aware of the texture of your awareness.”

The stories in The Deposition range widely. “I, Budgie,” which begins with an epigraph from the Psalms (“I watch, and am as a sparrow alone upon the house top”), is told from the point of view of an escaped household parrot lurking just outside the home, observing the family, explaining to us its sense of place in the universe. “Sometimes I want to deliver myself up to the maw that surrounds me, forget this fantasy of individuation. I’m an inconsequential instance of ‘budgie,’ nothing more. Anonymous despite what has been said of the sparrow’s fall.”

In the title story, an attorney known only by the initial V is driving late at night on Iowa backroads when he picks up a wounded, bleeding priest. The story, however, is not a rush to some emergency room. Instead, it occasions a less than sympathetic debate about theology and an invitation to violence. Attorney V is much like a lot of us — comfortably banal, on the outside of events but wondering. The priest, dismissive and in pain, offers revelation and a gun.

There is no resolution in Duval’s stories. There is no absolution, either. Yet, somehow, you feel both states are close — nearly there, if only one more step, one more turn of the road. Duval’s persistent subject is the distance between his characters and a state of grace. There is a visceral appreciation of anticipation, which is one of the reasons I love this book. As I read, I become aware, like Norman, of the texture of my awareness.

“Sinkhole” considers two plot lines. The first follows the owner of a Florida curio shop who happens to have a human fetus in a jar of formaldehyde; the second involves the pastor of a local church and one of his parishioners, who demand that something be done about the contents of the jar. “Meat” is an extended conversation between the narrator and a wild coyote named Norbert. Norbert provokes the wildness in the domesticated, vegetarian, librarian narrator while at the same time asking to be taken in, bathed, and protected.

In “Strange Mercies,” the final story in the collection (and the longest), a videographer for a second-rate Catholic television network becomes obsessed with tracking down a young woman suffering from stigmata in an unnamed Caribbean port city. At first his task is a simple professional challenge. But the shadows grow large as his own history surfaces and the quest becomes one for both evidence and enlightenment.

Having never put behind him his primary education at the hands of one last vestigial cartel of psychopathic nuns who drew their oxygen from the nineteenth century and warned against the act of chewing the host lest it flood his mouth with blood, never mind the unspeakable abomination of receiving while in a state of mortal sin, at the last moment, the wafer riding his tongue in the initial stages of salivary disintegration, he had resisted the urge to chew — or was it lockjaw? — and walked directly out, not into the usual blast furnace of tropical light but into a thunderstorm.


For the depth of the questions it asks, and the joyful somersaults it affords, The Deposition is a necessary book.

¤


W. Scott Olsen is a professor of English at Concordia College in Moorhead, Minnesota. He is the author of 12 books of narrative nonfiction, as well as being a photographer.

LARB Contributor

W. Scott Olsen is a professor of English at Concordia College in Moorhead, Minnesota. He is the author of 12 books of narrative nonfiction, as well as being a photographer.

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