Once again making my job easier this month, Michael Czyzniejewski writes another guest post for SSM:
Kevin Wilson’s excellent debut collection Tunneling to the Center of the Earth is one of my favorite new books of 2009. The title story, lodged in the middle (perhaps a physical metaphor), is quite excellent, as is every Kevin Wilson story I’ve ever read.
“Tunneling to the Center of the Earth” speaks of an underserved age bracket in fiction, that growing demographic of unemployed recent college grads. The three characters in the story find themselves in need of something to fill the time, their liberal arts degrees (in Gender Studies, Canadian History, and Morse Code) keeping them from fast track to working-world success. So what do they do? They start digging a hole in the narrator’s back yard. The first three lines of the story set up the basic scenario, as well as the absurd logic that pervades the entire piece:
”First of all, we were never tunneling to the center of the earth. I mean, we’re not stupid. We knew we couldn’t get to it with the materials we had.”
From the start, Wilson establishes a naïve optimism, the overall theme of the story. On one level, the trio just decides to dig a giant hole, which is pretty intriguing on its own. On another level, they think that the only thing keeping them from the earth’s core is a technicality, blaming their failure on something out of their hands. Life’s lessons are becoming more clear, but they don’t yet realize how harsh those lessons might be.
The diggers continue to dig, establishing a new world underneath the real world, in a way finding their promised success, but not in any way they ever dreamed. Wilson really has his finger on an interesting plight, the aforementioned world of aimlessness for a college grad. The characters, like a lot of diploma holders, are smart, enthusiastic, and capable, yet the world doesn’t necessarily have a place for them. Instead of besmirching their parents, guidance counselors, and professors for lying about the brightness of tomorrow, they simply carve their own world underneath. They keep hitting obstacles—cave-ins, boulders, etc.—but they adapt, forming what they can with what they have, all the way to the point where the shovels are whittled down to the handles.
I love the big metaphor in “Tunneling to the Center of the Earth,” but other aspects of the story as well, such as the straightforward, magically real descriptions, and the tight first person singular that often doubles as first plural, the narrator often speaking for the entire team. This is also a timely story, one every college grad waiting for that interview callback should read. If they’re anything like the characters in Kevin Wilson’s story, they’ll laugh the whole way through, never realizing that when it’s happening to you, it’s not all that funny.
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