Bennett Sims spent a year in Rome at the American Academy after having received the Rome Prize for Literature, and the influence of his time there is evident in his new collection, Other Minds and Other Stories, just out from Two Dollar Radio. The very short opening and closing stories are ekphrastic meditations on photographs by fellow Academy fellow Sze Tsung Nicolás Leong, the first one of a mummy, the second of a mosaic depicting Medusa. An interior story, “The New Violence,” takes place at a fellowship in Rome and interacts with an academic fellow’s lecture on a famous Etruscan jug. Its neighboring story, “Portonaccio Sarcophagus,” is the most extended ekphrastic story in the collection, a nineteen-page single paragraph launched by an encounter with the titular treasure in the Palazzo Massimo.
In Other Minds, Sims seems to be channeling Italy’s ancientness as if he himself were a medium through whom the dead might speak. Not in a way, however, that risks archaism or exoticization. His characters are typically enamored with horror and the gothic, and the influence of Italy coaxes their obsessions even further toward death, toward long-gone cultures, toward blankness, facelessness, nonexistence, dementia, violence, the surreality of dreams, the uncanniness of others’ minds, and the depths of time. Even more than with his fine first collection, White Dialogues, the new Other Minds reads like a book of philosophical essays. “Literature preserves the conscious experience of other minds in language,” Sims asserts in an interview with his publisher. This preservation is a key interest of the collection, one that’s right there in the title. “Reading the work is the only way I’ll know, however approximately, what it was like for them: the different, the distant, the dead.”
There is a symmetry to the first and last stories in the collection that reminds me of Sims’s description of the Portonaccio Sarcophagus’s lid: “The frieze was bookended by the crescents of two oversized gargoyle heads, each staring in opposite directions, such that the entire scene appeared to take place between parentheses.” The ekphrastic act of looking is a similarly parenthetical way of holding each story in a cohesive suspension. As the second and the second-to-last stories are both the most plot-driven in the collection, the shadow of a palindromic structure lends an overarching reflexivity to the table of contents. In the collection’s most unnerving story, “Unknown,” a woman borrows the protagonist’s phone in the mall and appears to whisper aggressively to her interlocutor, “You’ll never find me,” and “Never.” From there, things start to go wrong with the phone; for example, he receives voicemails of non-phone conversations he had with his girlfriend. The cell phone begins to reveal its neurosis-inducing capacities, the ones we’re good at suppressing due to the object’s sheer omnipresence. The narrator becomes increasingly suspicious of his girlfriend, and what follows is a sort of It Follows with cell phones, the end of the story a perfect ouroboros.
In the Twilight Zone-y penultimate story, “The Postcard,” a private detective is sent to investigate an invitation his elderly client has received, apparently from his dead wife, to meet at the remote coastal hotel room in which they’d honeymooned years ago. Like two other stories in the collection that seem symmetrical in their brevity and their form, dream narrations, “Afterlives” and “A Nightmare,” elements of “The Postcard” begin to morph according to what feels like dream logic: the foggy motel, the scatterbrained motel clerk, the menacing GPS directives, and in particular a building in the deserted town that morphs from factory to hospital to prison and back. It also suggests Juan Rolfo’s purgatorial Pedro Páramo, as the detective could be dead, or he could be the elderly client, or he could be suffering from dementia and thinking he’s married to a woman he’s not. As in “Unknown,” Sims maintains a sense of ambiguity to the end while also calibrating a trajectory of momentum and cadence that imparts a sense of fatalistic rightness to the story’s final sentences.
“Portonaccio Sarcophagus” is my favorite story in the collection. Noticing that, on the sarcophagus’s lid, the memorialized man’s and his family’s faces are featureless (“they lacked likenesses”) sends the narrator down an associative rabbit hole that includes: the movie The Ring, Ring doorbells, blurred faces on Google Maps, his mother’s worsening dementia symptoms, and an old photo of his mother at a tombstone with a glitch that made it look like she was being visited by a faceless reaper. “He is dead, and he is going to die,” but the story doesn’t tell you it’s quoting Roland Barthes’s caption for a photograph of Lewis Powell, condemned to hang for plotting to assassinate William Henry Seward—this from Barthes’s love letter to photography, Camera Lucida. In the blockbuster film The Ring, if a character watched the forbidden video, their face in subsequent photos would appear grotesquely distorted. “The Ring’s cursed photographs reversed [Barthes’s] formula,” the narrator considers, “showing you the dead faces of people who were still alive. The prophetic or proleptic glitch in the camera served to implant their future seven days in their past, like a stain that had leaked backward through the week.” The end of the story finds the narrator wandering the streets of his mother’s Baton Rouge neighborhood on Google Maps, wondering if he might see her blurred visage, a sort of memorial. (Baton Rouge is also where Sims’s 2013 zombie novel, A Questionable Shape, takes place.) Then the narrator realizes that, instead of seeing his mother, it’s more like he’s become his mother, wandering another Rolfo phantom town in which any son or passerby maintains an initial lack of identity that gives way either momentarily or never. The story’s movement is less associative logic than an enacting of Freudian dream-condensation—a phenomenon the story mentions before devolving into a rush of its entirety over the space of a few lines: “No, Mom, I’m your other daughter. Your sister. I am Prado, I am also Prado’s father, I venture to say that I am also Pompilius, your son’s friend. Where’s that hundred you owe me? Features emerging as if from smooth stone. Yes, that’s right, I remember now. How silly of me.”
Like the greatest writers we’ve been gifted, Sims changes how I see the world. His books are about infection, and they infect. “The window’s muntins divided the glass into a grid of squares, which gave the view outside the appearance of a split screen,” he writes in “Minds of Winter.” As I read this story, I looked up through the muntin-framed glass panes of a coffee shop window. My whole summer was muntins, as I’d gone through the torturous process of reglazing my house’s windows. “My summer has become gridded,” I wrote in a recent essay. Sims does better, importing the way Zoom has recently hijacked our eyes and minds: “I had the momentary sensation—a kind of afterimage of the application—that I was on a conference call with several snowfalls.” In the coffee shop, I noticed tiny lines of glyphs in one corner of each glass pane; it looked like no alphabet known to me, and my mind went in fanciful directions. Then I realized the letters were upside down and backwards, and with difficulty I spelled out one line as tempered april. Why was this tiny taxonomy on every pane of glass? Panes not just like pages, but true planes of text. In his 1966 book For a New Novel, Alain Robbe-Grillet cautions against such anthropomorphizing in literature, how it sets up a “subterranean communication” or “sublime communion” between humans and the nonhuman world. The danger is that it becomes so habitual that we get to a point where “the world of things has been so thoroughly contaminated” by our minds that we can “no longer discern the origin of anything.” Sims is a mesmerizing enough writer to turn even a Robbe-Grillet critique into a ringing endorsement. “Minds of Winter” culminates in lines so beautiful that I felt a weird and maybe pretentious stab of pity for everyone who hadn’t read them. Observing the snow “write” difficult things it “wanted to say” on the sidewalk in snowdrifts, Sims’s speaker builds to, “On the sidewalk outside, a wanting to say was taking place. What I wanted to say about its want to say was the way it was wanting to say in place.”
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