Somber and Evocative: On Ricardo Wilson’s “An Apparent Horizon and Other Stories”

RICARDO WILSON’S new collection, An Apparent Horizon and Other Stories, opens with an eight-line, two-paragraph piece called “threshold,” an entry that has the untethered, evocative energy of a prose poem. The story communicates the moment that a family decides to abandon the South for the North, traveling with nothing but hope and some old familiar songs and games that allow them a vague continuity with their past. It’s a somber piece, appropriate for a collection that is soaked in suffering and the quiet moments families and individuals face when trying to locate themselves in a world that seems ambivalent about their very existence.

In “Saturday,” we follow a mother, Carol, as she collects the ashes of her son, who has committed suicide after accidentally killing someone in a car crash. Carol is accompanied by her teenage daughter, Aisha. The narrative unfolds from what feels like a great distance while at the same time possessing a claustrophobic quality. Wilson crafts an anxious, uncomfortable mood out of the execution of morbid yet mundane errands. Not even a trip to In-N-Out can alleviate the suffering tone of Carol and Aisha’s day. We hover above and around the pair, never getting too close, never settling into a clear perspective or definite point of view, and I thought to myself, Perhaps the point of view is that of the deceased son, and we are floating through this story alongside him, outside of life, beyond the physical. We experience the day at a cold remove, from what feels like the perspective of death. This is Wilson’s chosen tone, and, throughout the collection, he never strays from this detached melancholy.

“The Death of Sam Brown” is a first-person account of the eponymous West Indian man. At 58 pages, it is the longest story in the collection, and it possesses the quality of a slave narrative. The events of this curious story, while not presented in epistolary form, nevertheless feel like journal entries. A resident of Kingston, Jamaica, in 1917, Brown reminisces about his time working on and around the Isthmus of Panama in 1908. Perpetually drunk, or working toward that state, he earns money in a variety of ways — from boat repairs to stone and gem work to English-language tutoring. He describes himself as being “more desperate than well off,” and Wilson paints the character as someone living life from moment to moment without any clear direction. That this lack of direction characterizes both the protagonist and his narrative can be viewed as a smart organic choice by Wilson or a failure to create a strong narrative engine. It’s easy to lose oneself in the atmosphere, but just as easy to get lost in passages that at times feel undirected.

At the opening, Brown admits to suffering from horrible dreams in which he is subjected to visions of a man hanging but not yet dead. Over the course of the story, when he takes us back to his time in Panama, we learn about hangings he has witnessed and no shortage of other premature, horrifying deaths he either saw firsthand or heard about from friends, employers, and acquaintances. These moments of historical description are Wilson at his most captivating. For those familiar with slave narratives in which the lives of black laborers are closely detailed, the approximation of voice here may not come across as fully realized. But there’s no question the era has been researched thoroughly — the dangers faced during the construction of the Panama Canal are fascinatingly detailed, even when the information comes to us through extended passages that lack narrative drive. While he raises some questions concerning race and class, Wilson weaves the sociopolitical with the quotidian moments seamlessly. If the narrative meanders at times, it’s not because Wilson has included unnecessary material but because he is accurately adapting a style of adventure literature that was often serialized, full of episodic digressions, and focused on an exciting journey rather than a tight-knit plot.

“Elegy for the Sweet Tempered” is written in what seems to be an intentionally challenging style. The way the sentences are assembled and the story structured demands close attention. There are suggestions of a flashback, as well as the possibility of flash-forwards — and like several stories throughout the collection, “Elegy” embraces the style of a prose poem, suggesting that Wilson is more interested in evocative moods and atmospheres than clear character development. The narrative leaps from interior to exterior, between past and future, not clearly motivated by events on the page, and yet the rhythm and pacing carry the reader along with the same propulsive quality as a song.

Death may be the central theme of this collection, but the stories are not invariably macabre. Wilson plays with language throughout, delivering sentences like, “The day after the planes found the buildings the aliens on the southwest corner of La Cienega and Pico were selling flags with their hot dogs.” In “thresh-,hōld,” another prose poem, Wilson invokes the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center in a piece that ends with the anonymous protagonist being carried laughing into an emergency room. It’s a mysterious piece, dark and yet playful, mischievous.

The title story, “An Apparent Horizon,” is an effective culmination of the collection’s other entries, exploring themes of mortality, family, and intercultural relationships more deeply thanks to its near-novella length. The prose is no less formally challenging than the other stories, but the narrative is perhaps the most straightforward in the collection. In relating the tale of Marley Gillette, who goes by Mar, Wilson relies on atmospheric descriptions and elliptical plotting to keep the momentum going. When the story opens, Wilson presents Mar as a woman on a mission, albeit a mission intentionally vague in its details. We catch up with Mar several days into a hunger strike, living illegally on a plot of land that the Bureau of Land Management has ordered her to vacate. A journalist is detailing her journey, and we get a lot of details about her location and her daily routine. “She opens her laptop and pauses at her diary’s first entry: what is brown is green. She scrolls to the end of the near eight-hundred-page document and starts typing the notes chronologically.” What Mar does with these notes is a mystery. Soon, we witness her pass out due to malnutrition, only to wake up in a hospital bed. There is a leap forward in time, and Mar has returned to her home in Los Angeles, a residence in the hills above the city large enough to require hired help. With Mar’s return, the woman she had hired is dismissed, but the landscaper, Teddy, becomes something of an intimate, and the two develop an awkward, unbalanced friendship.

Throughout the collection, Wilson eschews clear motivations, leaving the actions of his characters open to broad interpretation. This ambiguous approach is another way Wilson infuses his work with a poetic sensibility. He has created a world that is unified by an aesthetic mood, as well as a few central themes, more than by shared geography or characters. The stories are rooted in the notion that the inevitability of death is the only thing we can be sure of, and that no matter how far we may go to outrun our mortality, there is no escaping the eventual end.

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A 2020 PEN America Emerging Voices Fellow, Damien Belliveau is a native of the San Francisco Bay Area and a veteran of the United States Army. He is currently a PhD student in USC’s Creative Writing program on the fiction track.