Sean Ennis

Chase Us, the new collection of short stories by Sean Ennis, reads like a dream.

That is to say, many of the 11 stories individually – and the collection as a whole – present so many unexpected twists and are so free of telegraphing and build up, are so immediate in their presentation of drama, and are so full of surprises, that the effect is what you might imagine it would be like if you could jump into someone’s dreaming mind. It is an impressive, fearless collection.

This is a series of stories in which the same characters appear, age from childhood to adulthood, and move, primarily, through the same part of suburban Philadelphia. But beyond that, the characters are unpinned from the constraints of reality. The characters reappear, but are sometimes recurrent in name only – their behaviors, their histories -- don’t carry consistently from one store to another. There is, in many of the stories, a logic that defies the logic of our real world: A mother takes up residence in a greenhouse erected in a living room; boys form gangs and grow feral around an endless wall ball competition (it’s Lord of the Flies with tennis balls); mothers and sons go to war with each other (the sons wielding kickballs, tennis balls and bows and arrows, the mothers charging forward with cell phones held high); kids kidnap one another in local parks with no consequence besides eventual boredom. Yet, in the world of the stories, that skewed logic is never questioned, it makes perfect sense – just like a dream.

This is an amusing, entertaining set of stories. Yet the overall effect is not light and the abundant humor is a dark humor. Ennis employs his skill as a scene builder and his unique style as a storyteller to deliver a distinctive world view oscillating between real and surreal without explanation, leading us through a dystopian present into a slow motion apocalyptic future with tee ball and recounted with fatalistic frankness by a narrator who remains wryly perplexed by it all. It is a world view running deeply with a sense of disconnectedness and loneliness. The world of Chase Us is really two worlds existing in parallel: the world of children and the world of adults. The children are bored and lonely and scared. The adults are angry, defeated, largely unaware of, and seemingly uninterested in, the experiences of their children. Reading Chase Us, I had to pause and look at my own children as they ran with their friends, appearing to have fun, and wonder just what world they are living in. What fears, what ambitions, what risks, challenges, desires and failures rule their minds? Can I know and would they tell me if I asked?

So often children form connections with each other first by happenstance, not by choice. Childhood friendships begin as the by-product of proximity. And what American child really has the choice to leave even when things are bad? “Run,” the narrator’s father tells him at the end of the opening story. It’s his opportunity for escape, but he doesn’t take it. By the final story in the collection the narrator has grown into an adult himself; a father striving to do a better job for his child than his adults did for him. “It should be clear by now,” he says to us, “that I spend a lot of time trying to make everyone else happy. It’s not clear to me what would make me feel that way.” It’s a question we all could ask ourselves – we former children who are now adults: are we here by choice or are we captives; do we know how to make the others in our lives happy; do we know how to build happiness for ourselves? Are we connected to one another as it sometimes appears or are we more alone than we think?

Chase Us resonates. I finished reading the book months ago. I’m still thinking about it, still feeling it.… (mais)