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Anticipated Results (2011)
Lost Boomers
Drinking and sinking, Dennis Bolen's generation have left the Age of Aquarius for the Age of Estrangement
by Jeremy Twigg
The unnamed narrator in Dennis E. Bolen's short story collection Anticipated Results (Arsenal $18.95) is the Everyman of the lost Baby Boomer generation. He has a decent job and works hard at maintaining a relationship with his daughter, who we don't meet until halfway through the book, and he gets on well with women.
His culinary abilities and vocabulary ("perspicacious";) are above-average. But he's unsatisfied. His friends come across as deadbeats, many of them struggling with addiction. He looks for meaning in ill-fated dinner parties with guests that are under-appreciative, emotionally unavailable or just plain rude.
Boomers are typically thought of as being an entitled generation, but the people we meet in Bolen's stories are the ones that fell through the cracks, the ones that didn't take over academic institutions or rise to the top of the corporate world. They're smart, but not successful. They haven't made it to the upper class, so they try to console themselves with the aforementioned parties and their impressive command of the English language.
The narrator's description of military generals in charge of the Vietnam War is a case in point: "They create this awful Moloch-literally a young-man-eating machine-that became such an uber-monster, such a mental-physical-emotional-social object of utter hatred and polarization, that it caused a political schism in the collective world consciousness such that our hair and our music and our attitudes became picayune concerns in the overall miasma.";
Clearly, someone is trying too hard to impress the guests.
I've always found Bolen's past as a parole officer interesting-something that set him apart from other authors. This detail is missing from the publisher's bio for Anticipated Results, his seventh work of fiction since 1992. Perhaps Bolen is tired of the association. Regardless, his writing has a toughness that comes across as having been gleaned from first-hand experience.
The opening story entitled "Paul's Car"; is a good example. One of the book's secondary characters, Paul, has suffered a car accident (he's a cab driver) that leaves him unable to move inside his vehicle, which is slowly sinking into the chilly Fraser River. "A shiver seized him from anus to scalp and nearly blackened his vision."; You can't mess with a sentence like that.
Coming near the end of the collection, there's a 1950s-era story about the narrator's childhood in a small Vancouver Island town. He's burdened with a boozing father who can't hold down a steady job and a mother who becomes collateral damage. When the nine-year-old narrator proudly displays his new wiener stick-a device he's made from a customized coat-hanger-at the dinner table, his Dad wraps it around the kid's neck.
That scene leads to an epiphany. "As Dad was wrapping that wire around my neck, he was a jealous man. For years, we'd been competing for Mom's attention."; The boy runs away into the woods and, although his status as outcast is temporary, his psyche is forever shaped by the wiener stick incident. Adding insult to injury, the boy is prejudged by a cottage owner who catches him stealing peanut butter and jam sandwiches. "The injustice of it became the start of my darkness, the portal to a black will inside my soul."; Despite the narrator being declared emotionally scarred, Dennis Bolen's Everyman Boomer consistently comes across as well-intentioned, as someone who cares about others.
We get to know Bolen's narrator in bits and pieces, culminating in a degree of intimacy that is simultaneously disturbing and welcome. But it's ultimately Paul, the most hopeless drunk, who bookends the collection. Paul symbolizes lost members of the Boomer generation: Left for dead in a ditch, abandoned, hanging sideways in a sunken car.
978-1-155152-400-9
A graduate of UBC Creative Writing, Jeremy Twigg works in public relations in Vancouver.
[BCBW 2011]
Drinking and sinking, Dennis Bolen's generation have left the Age of Aquarius for the Age of Estrangement
by Jeremy Twigg
The unnamed narrator in Dennis E. Bolen's short story collection Anticipated Results (Arsenal $18.95) is the Everyman of the lost Baby Boomer generation. He has a decent job and works hard at maintaining a relationship with his daughter, who we don't meet until halfway through the book, and he gets on well with women.
His culinary abilities and vocabulary ("perspicacious";) are above-average. But he's unsatisfied. His friends come across as deadbeats, many of them struggling with addiction. He looks for meaning in ill-fated dinner parties with guests that are under-appreciative, emotionally unavailable or just plain rude.
Boomers are typically thought of as being an entitled generation, but the people we meet in Bolen's stories are the ones that fell through the cracks, the ones that didn't take over academic institutions or rise to the top of the corporate world. They're smart, but not successful. They haven't made it to the upper class, so they try to console themselves with the aforementioned parties and their impressive command of the English language.
The narrator's description of military generals in charge of the Vietnam War is a case in point: "They create this awful Moloch-literally a young-man-eating machine-that became such an uber-monster, such a mental-physical-emotional-social object of utter hatred and polarization, that it caused a political schism in the collective world consciousness such that our hair and our music and our attitudes became picayune concerns in the overall miasma.";
Clearly, someone is trying too hard to impress the guests.
I've always found Bolen's past as a parole officer interesting-something that set him apart from other authors. This detail is missing from the publisher's bio for Anticipated Results, his seventh work of fiction since 1992. Perhaps Bolen is tired of the association. Regardless, his writing has a toughness that comes across as having been gleaned from first-hand experience.
The opening story entitled "Paul's Car"; is a good example. One of the book's secondary characters, Paul, has suffered a car accident (he's a cab driver) that leaves him unable to move inside his vehicle, which is slowly sinking into the chilly Fraser River. "A shiver seized him from anus to scalp and nearly blackened his vision."; You can't mess with a sentence like that.
Coming near the end of the collection, there's a 1950s-era story about the narrator's childhood in a small Vancouver Island town. He's burdened with a boozing father who can't hold down a steady job and a mother who becomes collateral damage. When the nine-year-old narrator proudly displays his new wiener stick-a device he's made from a customized coat-hanger-at the dinner table, his Dad wraps it around the kid's neck.
That scene leads to an epiphany. "As Dad was wrapping that wire around my neck, he was a jealous man. For years, we'd been competing for Mom's attention."; The boy runs away into the woods and, although his status as outcast is temporary, his psyche is forever shaped by the wiener stick incident. Adding insult to injury, the boy is prejudged by a cottage owner who catches him stealing peanut butter and jam sandwiches. "The injustice of it became the start of my darkness, the portal to a black will inside my soul."; Despite the narrator being declared emotionally scarred, Dennis Bolen's Everyman Boomer consistently comes across as well-intentioned, as someone who cares about others.
We get to know Bolen's narrator in bits and pieces, culminating in a degree of intimacy that is simultaneously disturbing and welcome. But it's ultimately Paul, the most hopeless drunk, who bookends the collection. Paul symbolizes lost members of the Boomer generation: Left for dead in a ditch, abandoned, hanging sideways in a sunken car.
978-1-155152-400-9
A graduate of UBC Creative Writing, Jeremy Twigg works in public relations in Vancouver.
[BCBW 2011]
Submitted on March 29, 2011 in By David.
