Wilson Forgets "What's Important"

When immersed in a certain brand of modern writing, it is easy to forget that other groups of people exist besides dead-end suburban teen druggies and slightly less dead-end artsy Brooklynite 20-somethings (who may or may not be druggies). Adam Wilson’s new short story collection, “What’s Important Is Feeling,” is a prime example of this particular style. The older, more put-together characters resemble those of HBO’s “Girls”—they are constantly culturally referential, well-educated, likely on the road to relative financial security despite occasional discomfort with the idea, and alternately dramatically emotive and apathetic. Class does not characterize his younger set; some are wealthy, but others are lower middle class. They are all between 15 and 18, midway through discovering sex, dependent on drugs and alcohol, and dissatisfied with their parents and school. Yet the primary issue with the collection is not Wilson’s lack of diversity in his protagonists or even that he uses two groups that are rapidly becoming cultural stereotypes. “What’s Important is Feeling” stumbles as a result of Wilson’s failure to put his protagonists in compelling physical and philosophical settings.

In “Sluts At Heart,” the most effective story in the collection, Wilson breaks out of his 21st-century aesthetic and sets the tale’s brief rumination on the death of a friend in 1992. A Brooklyn 20-something (surprise!) preoccupied, like many of the time, with whether Fat or Hot Elvis would grace the National Stamp, travels back home to Boston to visit a high school friend who has been diagnosed with cancer. The Elvis motif, which figures prominently in Wilson’s deconstruction of his protagonist’s existential angst, is powerful and avoids heavy-handedness. Wilson’s ability to capture the language  (“Yo,” for one) and mood (extreme unease in the wake of the Rodney King riots and the Gulf War) of the moment with efficiency and subtlety suggests a far larger cultural range than that on display in most of the book.

Wilson’s other deviations from his favorite aesthetics make up the most illuminating sections of his work. In “Things I Had, for S.R.,” Wilson shifts his setting to South Florida and focuses on an awkward Jewish teen, Andrew. The piece describes his first time smoking weed, rampant sexual frustration, and garbled relationship with his Alzheimer’s-afflicted grandfather, who believes his grandson to be his dead partner. Wilson provides commentary on the cultural divide between the largely Latino high school population and Andrew, who is sent to the “different counselor for Jewish kids, a social worker named Javier whose office was lined with science-fiction books and posters from ‘Star Trek’ conventions.” Wilson, who doesn’t talk about race or class much outside of “Things I Had,” does so with humor and tact, which makes it all the more frustrating that he doesn’t cast a wider net of experience throughout the collection.

Those stories set in a chain store-riddled East Coast suburban hell or in apartments in Greenpoint or Back Bay are repetitive and often self-indulgent. The number of paragraphs Wilson spends describing hours of lazy pizza microwaving, TV watching, smoking, parental alienation, and general lack of direction is astounding.The suburban teen stories are at least given a jolt out of the living room by the repeated presence of life-threatening disease. While Wilson writes about grief extremely well—his stoned protagonists showcase varied emotional responses and dissonances after their wrenching losses—the juxtaposition wears thin quickly. With stories as short as Wilson’s, constantly devastating events evoke numbness more than legitimate emotion. The characters are simply too anonymous (particularly those who are dead or dying) to buoy such big feelings.

The stories that focus on the older characters don’t have as much of a death obsession. Instead, they are almost always revolve around sex. Wilson isn’t especially graphic in his descriptions; he imbues the stories with a provocative conversational frankness about casual sex and the blasé “millennial” attitude towards deeper connection. Once again, however, the repetition and brevity of the various relationships and stunted bedroom interactions lead to boredom. Wilson tries to mix it up, writing unconvincingly as a young career woman in one story and bizarrely incorporating a lobster fetish into a semi-afloat addict’s love life in another. In the latter story, “Milligrams,” he even plays with form and writes the piece as a numbered list. Most of the shifts, however, come off as attempts to cover up the similarities between the pieces.

“What’s Important Is Feeling” is Wilson’s first short story collection and second published book. He is funny, good with dialogue, and astonishingly efficient with prose. Although his ideas here are overused, his flirtations with racial, geographical, and historical diversity are absorbing. If Wilson manages in his next work either to bring new ideas to his two go-to settings or to embrace new and wackier ones fully, he may create something thoroughly beautiful.