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Local author Michael Knight says Goodnight

by Jeanne McDonald

Maybe you can't tell a book by its cover, but you can actually read some writers by their appearances. Stephen King looks slightly diabolic; Norman Mailer's body language is argumentative; Jackie Collins's style is glamorous and sexy; and their books pretty much reflect their physical images. But Michael Knight is the paradox. He's open, amiable, and has possibly the widest smile in Knoxville, but his stories are portraits of people who are displaced, dissatisfied, disenfranchised, and sometimes just plain dissed.

With the publication of Goodnight, Nobody (Atlantic Monthly Press, $23), where dozens of such characters stumble through the pages, Knight has proved himself to be one of the best young writers in America. Assistant Professor of English at the University of Tennessee, Knight has the ability to slide his fist gently around a character's heart and squeeze out its very essence. He has a fresh, slightly canted way of looking at people, but once we get into his character's minds, we suddenly realize that, no matter how weird or sad or kinky they are, we know them. We might even be them. At the very least, they, or people like them, wander in and out of our lives every day.

For example, "The Blonde" in "Birdland," a story that originally appeared in The New Yorker, is one of those mysterious women you'd never expect to find in a little town like Elbow, Alabama, where the main entertainment is watching the Crimson Tide play out its season on the television set at the Dillard Country Store. As Raymond, the narrator, describes her, "The Blonde has platinum hair and round hips and a pair of ornithology degrees from a university up in New Hampshire." She wears a safari hat and sunglasses, and, when she's not sleeping with Raymond, spends her time researching a flock of African parrots. Her plan is to follow the birds when they return north in March, but somehow she never quite makes it. Isn't there a girl like The Blonde in every backwater town, a girl whose blondeness eventually fades and whose safari hat becomes a hallmark of her eccentricity, and isn't there always a sweet, hapless guy like Raymond, who loves her beyond imagining?

But in the heat of their romance, Raymond and The Blonde concoct their various fantasies. "My life," says Raymond, "purls out behind me like water...The Blonde spins stories about our unborn child. Her daughter, she says, will discover a lost tribe of parrots in the wilds of Borneo and invent a vaccine for broken hearts...And, maybe, if the stars are all in line, our daughter will grow up to be the hardest-hitting free safety who ever lived."

Knight begins "The End of Everything" with the line, "And then there's the one about the woman who comes home from work and discovers her dog—sometimes a Doberman, sometimes a Lab—gasping and gagging and giving her wall-eyed looks from the phony oriental rug in the foyer." She races the dog to the vet, who promises to call the minute he finds the cause of the dog's distress, which turns out to be a human finger lodged in its throat. Knight turns this old urban myth into a tale of the abandoned wife who finally discovers a way to get even with her philandering ex-husband, by loving him "half to death." In all these stories there is pathos and darkness and sometimes hopelessness, but the interwoven thread of love pulls things together, at least temporarily, even when the future seems impossibly bleak.

In a brief but powerful story called "The Mesmerist," a man named Moody hypnotizes a girl on a plane and kidnaps her, using his special gift to ensure that she will "no longer be acquainted with unhappiness." Soon, though, he learns that his prized possession is not free from outside intervention, and to keep her, he must be constantly watchful.

"Mitchell's Girls" is a sad but funny story about stay-at-home fathers, blended families, and teen-aged attitude. When Mitchell's back goes out while he is vacuuming, Cassie, his toddler, and Tabitha, his step-daughter, whom he describes as "too gloomy for extracurricular activities," both ignore his searing pain, Cassie out of ignorance and Tabitha out of malice. Lying on the floor for hours while the girls step around him, Mitchell is "still beyond himself somehow, dissolved and hovering...and he saw the light fixture looming through his tears like an enormous, hospitable star, felt himself rising toward it, believed that if he uttered even a single word he would be sucked backward and down again into a world in which everything was born to die."

In some stories, like "Ellen's Book," love and determination pay off, while others leave it up to the reader to imagine a resolution. After all, the best narratives are the ones that go on playing themselves out in our minds after the actual end of the story. Because that's the way life is, isn't it, and every one of these stories is bursting with life.