LYING AND MAKING A LIVING

A volume of provocative short stories tackles a wide range of topics.

Provocative is the key word here. Dunlap’s cheeky little fictions are meant to startle, tickle, shock, and, yes, provoke. These tales do not shy away from risqué subject matter. There are the tamer ones, the commentaries on sex and gender. Then there are the stories that up the ante, focusing on incest, suicide, big game hunting, bestiality, and the Lindbergh baby kidnapping (in that tale, the author cleverly asks his readers to think about what happened to the luminary’s other kids). Matching the rhythm of Dunlap’s prose, his stories are often in succinct setup and swift punchline mode. In the slight “Vocabulary Words,” characters try to find a word to convey different experiences of feeling betrayed, finally coming up with stupid. In the following tale, “The Manly Art of Recycling,” a man reminisces about his far-flung experiences before chucking all his recyclable waste into the trash, destined straight for a landfill. At their best, these stories are winking and quippy. But at times, the volume can be a bit pretentious. The author pays a showy homage to Faulkner, for example, by quoting him twice in this collection, once in the epigraph and once at the very end. Dunlap also occasionally writes voices that invoke clichés of Southern poverty. His attempt at Southern Black dialect is even more problematic (The line “I know fo’ sho’ white folks ain’t” feels a little off-putting coming from a White writer). In another tale, two characters come out as transgender but their transitions are done in the service of a joke that they will eventually sleep together. The last piece, the novella Rufus and Sally by the Light of the Moon, also wrestles with gender, with Sally donning men’s clothes for safety in the American West. But she is always an erotic object in the story, which fixates on the “telltale bulge of her hips.”

An often witty but sometimes uneven collection of tales.