Anthropology — Dan Rhodes

If brevity is, as Polonius says in Hamlet, indeed the soul of wit, then Dan Rhodes, with his turn of the millennium collection of short short stories, is a writer possessed of extraordinarily sharp perception. His stories in this collection, titled Anthropology and a Hundred Other Stories, represent the best that short comic and literary fiction can offer.

Anthropology is a slim anthology of a hundred and one stories, each a hundred and one words strong and each narrated by an unnamed man romantically involved either currently or in the past with a woman who may also be conveniently without a name or otherwise may bear a quaint one. One such woman of the latter category is Badr-al-Budur. She is, undeniably, named after a major character (Aladdin’s love interest, no less, who was Disneyfied into Princess Jasmine) in Arabian Nights, a k a One Thousand and One Nights, which was a probable inspiration for Rhodes’s book. A thousand and one is too big a number, and it runs counter to the idea of infusing one’s work with “the soul of wit,” so perhaps after wrapping his clever head around that observation Rhodes decided to slash off a zero and settled for the resultant magic number of a hundred and one. But the similarity between the two collections goes well beyond the binary persuasion of their respective story counts, for much like the fantastical tales of thieves, sailors, princes, and genies in Scheherazade’s medieval stories, Rhodes’s contemporary stories populated for the most part by men who are in love and their girlfriends who are out of it take on a magical quality, often of the peculiar, twisted sort, even as they are typically grounded in reality.

Take for example the title story, which is first to appear since the stories are arranged alphabetically by title as though in an attempt to create a semblance of order amid the madness of the characters that inhabit them. “I loved an anthropologist,” Anthropology begins. It’s a sentence so uncommon that before the publication of Rhodes’s book a Google search for the sentence exactly as it appears would have yielded a zero-result page. Besides the narrator of Anthropology, did no-one ever love an anthropologist and live to blog the tale? Or does the d in loved make all the difference? Yes, perhaps that’s it. Perhaps someone — at least someone with an Internet connection and a (micro)blogging site that can be indexed by Google — still loves you, Borisa Yeltsin, PhD in Anthropology. As it turns out, no. But Google or no Google, anthropologists are just hard to come by, which makes the narrator’s confession about his loss already — all the more, even — heartbreaking. The d in loved does make all the difference after all. “She went to Mongolia to study the gays,” the lovelorn narrator, only the first of many, continues. “At first she kept their culture at arm’s length, but eventually she decided that her fieldwork would benefit from assimilation.” Now we must quickly decide whether to be amused or saddened by this development. It’s a dilemma we shall encounter a hundred times more as the collection progresses, and often the easiest thing to do is what we humans (the subjects of anthropology, no less) usually unconsciously do following our own misfortunes: to be a mixture of both. And so we are further amused and saddened further when our once anthropologist-lover reports, “She worked hard to become as much like them as possible, and gradually she was accepted. After a while she ended our romance by letter. It breaks my heart to think of her herding those yaks in the freezing hills, the peak of her leather cap shielding her eyes from the driving wind, her wrist dangling away, and nothing but a handlebar moustache to keep her top lip warm.” If that final imagery isn’t magical, then what is?

Rhodes is a master paraprosdokianist, if only such a word exists. Fortunately, the root word paraprosdokian does. It is, Wikipedia would have us informed like no other knowledge-driven non-profit organization would, “a figure of speech in which the latter part of a sentence or phrase is surprising or unexpected in a way that causes the reader or listener to reframe or reinterpret the first part.” In Rhodes’s book, it’s not merely a sentence or phrase whose latter part is so unexpected as to give new meaning to the first, but an entire story, albeit a bite-sized — or in the Kindle edition, 2 KB-sized — one. In Shipwreck, the narrator loses his girlfriend to a shipwreck, gets over her death, and finds “someone as pretty and nice as her, and eventually I invited her on a beach holiday.” Right around the middle of this story Rhodes introduces a twist: They see his poor old girlfriend “washed up on the shore.” And get this: “She’d been clinging to a plank for fourteen months, living on raw fish, rainwater, and her love for me.” Just as we are yet again faced with our previously mentioned dilemma, the narrator “was faced with a choice.” With only 21 words left to this particularly tragic story, he frankly declares, “My new girl won because the old one was skinny and bedraggled, and besides, the water had made her all crinkly.” Sometimes, though, it’s not the first part that requires a second look but the title itself, as is the case with Laughing, which starts and deadpans, “My girlfriend died laughing at one of my funny faces.”

Anthropology and a Hundred Other Stories presents tricks as often as it does stories. (Incidentally, Trick is the title of another story in this collection, but as another reminder of Rhodes’s vulpine way with words, the trick here is unlikely to be what you imagine it is.) Rhodes’s true sleight of hand, however, lies not in his expertise in conjuring a hundred and one Burtonesque love stories, each made up of the same number of words, but in his ability to capture in a hundred and one nutshells such complex concepts dealing with love as dependence, illusion, impermanence, melancholy, memory, sanity, and sexuality. Rhodes recalls this ability in his sophomore collection of short stories, called Don’t Tell Me The Truth About Love. Fair and brief warning: In Anthropology and a Hundred Other Stories, Rhodes already did.