“Coldwater Canyon” (forthcoming from Civil Coping Mechanisms, October 2018) is a novel that follows a Desert Storm veteran as he meanders through life,
spending a good deal of time at a gas station, drinking Miller beer or following around a young woman he thinks might be his daughter (but probably isn’t).
Protagonist Shep has a very unusual relationship to time. He experiences a Bergsonian kind of duration, where time doesn’t progress past to present to future but instead leaps around from present to past to future to present. His movements between these temporal settings are sometimes jagged or abrupt, but more often they feel smooth and natural. He flows from one moment to the next.
Shep also experiences a fragility of memory. He often has lapses, forgetting hours or even entire days. He has given himself over to this kind of temporality, evoking Billy Pilgrim of Vonnegut’s “Slaughterhouse Five.” Unlike Pilgrim, Shep approaches this new reality with a kind of grace. He understands that he cannot change it or bend it to his will and as a result, he has learned to exist in this passive state.
This isn’t to say that Shep is a passive character. He is active within these constraints, as he decides to follow this young woman or to watch over the gas station when the owner is away. The passivity of his character is merely temporal, not an obstacle to overcome but the criteria of his existence.
The prose of this work remains clean and robust while it balances detail, thought and action. It does so in a way that begins to resemble television. Descriptions might feel like inner monologues or voice over, actions become cinematic and visually oriented and the repetition of certain locations (like the car, the apartment and the gas station) root the narrative in its setting.
These locations within Coldwater Canyon are the set of the literary “filming” and the strong sense of familiarity and repetition gives the novel a beautiful flow. Every return to the gas station hits the reader with relief. No matter what has happened, we will not be taken away from this place. We will always be in Coldwater Canyon (or at least in LA), locked in one moment of time or another.
The physicality of this novel is rooted in this kind of familiarity, this way in which the various locations appear and reappear. The gas station becomes homily and welcoming, a personal territory. As readers we become attached to and feel protective of it.
Kinney’s work here is very impressive. Even though she isn’t experimenting with form or content, what she’s done here is honest and beautiful, full of smooth and flowing imagery, lush with interesting ideas and moral dilemmas.
Mike Corrao is a young writer and filmmaker working out of Minneapolis, where he earned his B.A. in film and English literature at the University of Minnesota. In 2016 he was an artist-in-residence for the Altered Esthetics Film Festival. His work has appeared in over 20 different publications, including Entropy, decomP, Cleaver, and the Portland Review. His first novel, Man, Oh Man will be released from Orson’s Publishing in the fall of 2018. Further information can be found at www.mikecorrao.com.