All Back Full Read online

  PRAISE FOR ROBERT LOPEZ

  GOOD PEOPLE

  “Lopez’s methodical narrators will draw comparisons to Beckett, but they also share DNA with the Austrian writer Thomas Bernhard, showcasing out-of-touch anxiety cases in all their poetically elliptical glory…. Lopez has the ability to give the reader whiplash with his unconventional and bewitching stories.”

  —Los Angeles Times

  “Read [Good People] to stumble into the sunlight afterward…. Depressing, inventive, and marvelous—a thought-provoking path to feeling awful.”

  —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

  “Tightly knit…. Recommended for lovers of darkly humorous, strangely illuminating fiction.”

  —Booklist

  “Personalities ranging from the amusingly neurotic to the borderline psychotic shape the twenty quirky stories in this collection…. Lopez shows uncommon skill at evoking both laughs and shudders, sometimes in the same story.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “Lopez uses a close point of view to maximum effect, drawing the reader into each character’s mindset; despite the sense of complicity this imparts, the dark humor and discomfort of these stories provides just as much enlightenment.”

  —Late Night Library

  “A dizzying, disturbing tour of what might be going on in the minds of ‘good people’…. Those who enjoy dark humor with a dose of sadomasochistic sexual fantasy will take pleasure in [Lopez’s] spare prose and ability to spear a thought on first strike.”

  —Foreword Reviews

  “Robert Lopez’s strange, incantatory, visionary stories reveal the mysteries behind the ordinary world. You lift your head from this book and it’s as if a third eye has been opened.”

  —Dan Chaon, author of Await Your Reply and Stay Awake

  “Robert Lopez is such a master of saddening hilarities that his virtuoso turns in this crazily heartbreaking, dizzyingly original new collection will restore even the most jaded reader’s faith in the fresh possibilities of American fiction.”

  —Gary Lutz, author of Stories in the Worst Way

  “Robert Lopez is the master of deadpan dread, of the elliptical koan, of the sudden turn of language that reveals life to be so wonderfully absurd. Always with Lopez, the voice is all his—enchanting, surprising, at times devastating.”

  —Jess Walter, author of Beautiful Ruins

  “[Lopez’s] prose flows with such natural ease and liquid pronunciation that he makes the difficult seem very easy. Mixing in the wordplay of Samuel Beckett and the flat humor of writers like Stephen Dixon and Salinger, his work is a delight and a provocation.”

  —Blake Butler, author of 300,000,000 and There Is No Year

  “[Lopez’s world] is an affectless poetics planet caught in the black-hole gravity of a Stephen Dixon-esque free-falling narrative sink.”

  —Michael Martone, author of Four for a Quarter and The Blue Guide to Indiana

  “Gets under you skin and latches on.”

  —Brian Evenson, author of Immobility and Windeye

  “Lopez and his writing are original and pure, fearless and hypnotic. He is one of the brave protagonists of American literature.”

  —Michael Kimball, author of Big Ray and Us

  “Dark humor finds its way into these confessional stories and throughout the collection, the diverse voices ring true. Lopez has said music played a big part in his experience growing up, and it’s apparent in Good People that his writing has found its rhythm.”

  —Raleigh Review

  “These [stories are] trance-like rants, full of strange dark bitter, bitter comedy. Nobody else does whatever the hell it is [Lopez]’s doing better than he does.”

  —BOMB magazine

  “Whatever you believe about what separates good people from bad ones, forget it. Robert Lopez will challenge all of those assumptions in this arresting short story collection.”

  —Bookish

  “Remarkably intimate….Deliciously clever.”

  —Best New Fiction

  “Lopez does amazing things with prose, tone, and sparsity.”

  —Vol. 1 Brooklyn

  “One of Lopez’s many gifts is being able to make accessible, through humor and wit, what might otherwise frighten us. Good People makes us question our own ideas about morality and the weight of our thoughts and actions, all the while entertaining us with the plights of others.”

  —About.com

  ASUNDER

  “If Lopez’s earlier books didn’t prove to readers that he is a word-storm, a force of literary nature come unhinged, blowing shutters against readers’ houses, then Asunder surely will. This is a collection as proof, a collection as loveliness, a collection as rippage, and we are lucky to get it into our waiting hands, its words into our heads.”

  — The Rumpus

  “[Lopez] indulges in monologues, daydreams, and narrative meanderings, the sentences firing off and ending like flash messages between synapses…that’s why it was such a thrill and a pleasure to read.”

  — The Literary Review

  “Lopez confronts the world of page-long descriptions and destroys the notion that a good story needs to be overly saturated…. The opposite could be said of the stories in Asunder. In a world of noise, Lopez offers quiet. There is a tremendous restraint to the language in the collection. The prose is simple and powerful; it reminds the reader that sometimes more is conveyed in silences.”

  —Ampersand Books

  “Admirers of the short-short form will appreciate this collection. With perfection in phrasing and attention to the minutiae of prose, Asunder presents a model for how new the English language can seem. There is nothing tried or tired here.” —NewPages

  KAMBY BOLONGO MEAN RIVER

  “Brutally funny and bleak, yet invested with an intense, sweet sadness, Kamby Bolongo Mean River crackles with the energy of a writer performing brilliantly. In a small miracle, the pleasures of that performance never obstruct the narrative. Lopez’s story about broken language is finally most powerful for a character we cannot confidently name, who has lived a life we cannot outline, in places we do not understand.”

  —Review of Contemporary Fiction

  “Kamby Bolongo Mean River is an original and fearless fiction. It bears genetic traces of Beckett and Stein, but Robert Lopez’s powerful cadences and bleak, joyful wit are all his own.”

  —Sam Lipsyte, author of Homeland and The Ask

  “Reading Kamby Bolongo Mean River is like reading The Catcher in the Rye for the first time; you just know something momentous is happening as you read, as you become drawn in to Lopez’s bizarre, fractured narrative.”

  —New York Journal of Books

  “Kamby Bolongo Mean River is fluid and funny and moving on a first read, but its exploration of existence and isolation gets smarter, funnier, and deeper every time I read it…. First, the prose is as clear as can be, with a lot of air in it, a lightness, and the rhythm and variation in the repetition make for a kind of beautiful song. The other reason Kamby’s not oppressive is because it’s so funny on the page, maybe the funniest book I’ve ever read.”

  — The Lit Pub

  “The tenderness with which Lopez treats these fragile characters, the honesty in their rendering, the lullaby of loneliness that coos through this world, whispering along the banks of the Kamby Bolongo and above the rooftops of Injury, Alaska; Johnny’s longing, his fear, his isolation—all of these are pure Lopez.”

  — The Brooklyn Rail

  “In his second novel, Robert Lopez once again taps a deeply comedic voice….A narrative within the narrative takes shape, a prelinguistic one reminiscent of prehistoric cave paintings. He is tracing back toward the origin of his voice. He has a plan, and as the brilliant pacin
g and rhythm of the narrative drive toward its conclusion, this excellent novel forces a reconsideration of the very concept of a native language.”

  — The Quarterly Conversation

  “In examining confinement the novel certainly telegraphs the stark spirit of Samuel Beckett’s later writings, yet Lopez’s innovative meditation on isolation is singular in its grim humor and emotional influence. Framed by the obsessively bizarre yet sincere outlook of a young man held under observation in unknown environs, Kamby Bolongo is a mesmeric interpretation of words: ‘what is between the words and behind them.’” —Bookslut

  “Form reflects subject here: this is a story at full steam, one that cannot be bogged down by traditional conventions…. Kamby Bolongo Mean River begs to be read in one sitting, and the syntax—the hypnotic looping, the relentless unpacking of sentences—reverberates long after the novel is put down.”

  —360 Main Street

  “Robert Lopez’s carefully crafted, insistent prose is matched by his bold exploration of madness, abuse, emotional and psychological trauma, isolation, but also of one man’s self-motivated, if still ill-directed, plan for rehabilitation. Kamby Bolongo Mean River may just tie both your brain and stomach into knots.”

  —Word Riot

  “Kamby Bolongo Mean River constantly haunts my desk, no matter how many times I try to return it to the shelves….A character in possession of one of the most uniquely rendered and affecting modes of speech in recent memory. By the end of the novel, the narrator is still in the same place he was in the same place as the beginning, but I’m willing to bet that no reader—no listener, for this novel is as much spoken as it is written—will be able to say the same.”

  —Post Road

  “Through astonishingly organic and layered language, Robert Lopez has created an inner world so remarkable you might fall over with fright, and then stay on the floor to laugh a while.”

  —Southeast Review

  PART OF THE WORLD

  “Robert Lopez has written a darkly hilarious exploration of the trickery of memory, the unreliability of personal history, and the strangeness, even uncanniness, of our daily transactions. As we follow Lopez’s hapless narrator about the business of trying to navigate his homely part of the world, we are made to reconsider our own well-mapped relations, the unhygienic corners of our homes.”

  —Dawn Raffel, author of The Secret Life of Objects

  “Reading Part of the World by Robert Lopez felt to me like standing in front of one of those marvelous, mind-bending exhibits at the Museum of Jurassic Technology that seem at first glance to be doing exactly nothing and at second glance to be dissolving and reconstituting reality as we thought we knew it. Literary pleasures like this are all too uncommon.”

  —Laird Hunt, author of Neverhome and Kind One

  “In his first novel, Robert Lopez leads the reader into a peculiar part of the world on his own terms. The novel itself deals with the everyday actions…. However, these tasks become yard sticks by which one must measure the narrator himself and his sense of reality.”

  —Verse

  ALL BACK FULL

  ALSO BY ROBERT LOPEZ

  Part of the World

  Kamby Bolongo Mean River

  Asunder

  Good People

  ALL BACK FULL

  A NOVEL IN THREE ACTS

  ROBERT LOPEZ

  5220 Dexter Ann Arbor Rd.

  Ann Arbor, MI 48103

  www.dzancbooks.org

  ALL BACK FULL. Copyright © 2017, text by Robert Lopez. All rights reserved, except for brief quotations in critical articles or reviews. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher: Dzanc Books, 5220 Dexter Ann Arbor Rd., Ann Arbor, MI 48103.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Lopez, Robert, 1971- author.

  Title: All back full : a novel in three acts / Robert Lopez.

  Description: First edition. | Ann Arbor, MI : Dzanc Books, 2017.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2016017549 | ISBN 9780982797556

  Subjects: LCSH: Nonverbal communication--Fiction. | Interpersonal relations--Fiction. | Oral communication--Fiction.

  Classification: LCC PS3612.O65 A79 2017 | DDC 813/.6--dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016017549

  First US edition: February 2017

  Book design by Michelle Dotter

  This is a work of fiction. Characters and names appearing in this work are a product of the author’s imagination, and any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

  Printed in the United States of America

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  ALL BACK FULL

  ACT I

  The setting is an ordinary setting. A kitchen. One table and four chairs. A counter with a sink. Cabinets across the room from the table and chairs. A door that opens into the kitchen.

  The principals are at the table. They are married to each other.

  The man is middle-aged. He can be tall or short, but is probably not thin. He is portly, but not rotund. He can be bald or have a full head of hair. If he has hair, some of it is gray, but not all of it. He is not the sort for all of his hair to be gray. It is certainly not silver.

  He can be any ethnicity. Say, for now, he is a white man. Another time he might be black or brown or some other color.

  The woman is anywhere from thirty to fifty years of age. She is taller than her husband and probably younger, but not much younger. They are contemporaries, sharing similar histories and backgrounds. She can rest her chin on the top of his head. Years ago they’d perform this trick at parties. They called it a trick even though it is not a trick.

  Past that she is not at all distinctive.

  The man is reading a newspaper. This is a time when people still read newspapers. It might be Sunday. In fact, it probably is Sunday. It is Sunday morning.

  The woman is also reading a newspaper. It is the same newspaper. They are trading sections back and forth. She enjoys the magazine, the week in review.

  They do not read a daily newspaper. They do not sit down at the table to read the newspaper together every morning, trading sections back and forth. The subscription is for the Sunday edition, though sometimes it takes them all week to read it.

  He will sometimes bring a section to the park with him. He will sit on a bench and try to read. Most often he is unable to concentrate.

  The other people distract him, as he is easily distractible.

  She tries to find time at work to read certain stories she couldn’t finish on Sunday. She does this during lunch or on breaks but never during actual work-time.

  The table has on it two coffee mugs and a plate of breakfast pastries. We can presume that one or the other woke early this morning and drove to the bakery.

  It is not important which principal drove to the bakery.

  For the sake of fair play, let’s presume they take turns doing this, alternating Sundays. Let’s say that today it was the husband’s turn to drive to the bakery.

  They read like this for a time.

  It is quiet. There is no sound, save the occasional sip of coffee, the placing of a mug back down on the table or the turning of a page.

  This quiet goes on for what might seem like a long time. It might feel like five minutes or months or years.

  How the time feels depends upon if you are the man or the woman or someone observing the man and woman.

  Finally, the man says, without looking up, Was that your friend?

  The woman says, It was, also without looking up.

  The man says, How is she?

  The woman says, The same.

  It is quiet again. They look up and at each other, maybe past each other or through.

  The man says, The same as always?

  The woman says, The same as ever.

  They go back to reading.

  The man is asking a
fter the woman’s friend. He is curious about this friend as she is something of a new friend for the woman. The woman has any number of friends but this is a new one. He has only met this friend once or twice and isn’t sure how he feels about her.

  The man doesn’t have any new friends. He’ll make new acquaintances as people do in the course of living a daily life, mixing with people at work and in public, but these never turn into friends. No one he can make plans with, no one he can call on for counsel or aid.

  He has only the one friend, the same one he’s had for years.

  This friend is coming over later.

  This will likely be a problem for everyone, particularly the woman.

  But neither principal is thinking about this now. Now the man is thinking about the woman’s new friend and the woman is thinking about something else.

  The man heard the telephone ring earlier and assumed it was the woman’s new friend. They seem to talk on the telephone once or twice a month, always on Sunday mornings.

  The man thinks this is intrusive and presumptuous.

  No one else calls on Sundays, let alone in the morning.

  The man says, Was she naked?

  The woman says, When?

  The man says, When you spoke with her?

  The woman says, I think she was. Yes.

  The man says, Did you ask if she was naked?

  The woman says, No, I forgot to.

  The man says, Did you forget or did it not occur to you?

  The woman says, What’s the difference?

  This is a short pause because the man likes to think about certain questions, pondering the whys and wherefores. He enjoys nuance and language and the language of nuance.

  He likes to think about time and how it can feel like five minutes or days or years, depending upon everything and nothing all at once.

  The man says, I’m not sure.

  The woman says, Neither am I.

  They go back to reading. It seems as if this conversation is over.

  When it says they go back to reading, this isn’t entirely true. The woman does indeed go back to reading. She is in the middle of a feature about the proprietor of a new business downtown that combines industrial design and Zen meditation.