Can you imagine living in a world where no one ever says to anyone else, "I was wrong to treat you that way. I'm truly sorry. Please forgive me."
I can. In fact, as much as I may not like to admit it, that world comes uncomfortably close to describing the one in which we currently live, where obvious bad actors invariably plead, "Not Guilty, Your Honor!" and never bother to comprehend the depth of suffering they might have caused others even when they're clearly guilty as sin.
In Lucian Childs' Dreaming Home, we're presented with a series of linked short stories that play out in this all-too familiar world. Although bad actors are rarely made to take responsibility for the suffering they inflict on others, we, as readers of Childs' smart, talented and evocative stories, come to love his characters' noble, sensitive, and beautiful traits. No, we don't get to escape the hatred, violence and sadness they endure; but, by reading Childs' fiction we learn that these Dreaming Home characters are made of far nobler stuff than we might have at first thought.
In the opening story a twelve-year-old girl by the name of Tiana exposes her older brother, Kyle, the principal protagonist, to their father's fury by showing him Kyle's notebook filled with sketches he's copied from a male pornography magazine.
In the second story, the father, a Vietnam Vet with PTSD—also a confirmed fundamentalist homophobe—has enrolled Kyle in a program supposedly designed to "cure" him of his homosexuality through a rigorous program of scripture study. Yet, some of the religious leaders in the program are practicing homosexuals who have been known to rape members.
This sounds brutal, right? It's not; it's anything but brutal because in the case of the first story Childs chooses to tell it not from Tiana's or Kyle's point of view, but from the P-O-V of Tiana's friend Rachel who's a typical twelve year old, therefore allowing the first story, which is entitled "Rachel" to open on this note: "We were having a Natalie Cole spring that April, my best friend Tiana and me. Practically wore the grooves off "Unpredictable." And we were in junior high. Finally. I was in Math Club, AP Algebra. I turned twelve on the sixteenth and had my first kiss. Everything was totally groovy."
In the second story, "The Boys in the Ministry," the horror of Kyle being held captive in an ultimately corrupt and abusive religious program is artfully transformed into extremely droll and entertaining fare when the story is told entirely in first-person-plural, a narrative "we" which takes in all the "boys" in this institution, which makes for a fun read.
Here's a description of the welcoming committee greeting newly arrived "boys:" "We thread our fingers into our belt loops. Hips cocked, glaring straight ahead, we plant ourselves on the sidewalk like our brothers and fathers would, feeling tough and perfectly righteous…"A muscle twitches in Brother Stalwart's manly face. He straight-arms his Bible out in front of him, creating a mighty heterosexual force field. "Stand strong in your truth, brothers. For we are one with them now."
Each story follows the development of Kyle as he goes from his twenties in one story to this thirties in the next. In each story, I can attest Lucian Childs pulls off an impressive feat of imagining, not only making each story intensely readable, but, in the process, delivering a life story with every bit of the emotional power one would usually expect to only find between the covers of a novel.
