Aaron Kreuter's You and Me, Belonging

Reviewed by Aaron Schneider

Tightrope Books, 2018

I read the stories in Aaron Kreuter’s debut collection of short fiction, You and Me, Belonging, quickly, pulled forward by the momentum of often-peripatetic protagonists whose restlessness carries the narratives towards their conclusions, but, since finishing the book, I have found myself regularly returning to it to think about the satisfyingly complex hearts of its stories. At their core, the six stories and closing novella are, as the title of the book suggests, about belonging, but about belonging in the fullness of its meaning—existential, communal, cultural, historical, social, and always, as the title likewise suggests, although somewhat more obliquely, mediated by intimate personal connections.
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In “Ninety-Nine,” one of the collection’s standout stories, Orly, the narrator, struggles with the decision to circumcise her soon-to-be-born son. As she wrestles with “something so huge, so benign, the whole weight of Jewish history imploring us to just get on with it,” she turns to the memory of her childhood friend Marni. She and Marni shared their “first cigarettes. [Their] first vodka shots. [Their] first hangovers,” but, after their Birthright trip to Israel, Marni became steadily more conservative, growing away from Orly, marrying an Orthodox man and moving to New York. At first, Marni calls at least once a year, between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur to apologize for any wrongs she has committed. But, by the time Orly is pregnant, even these calls have ceased. Orly’s childhood friend is lost to her, and that loss becomes the frame through which she grapples with the weight of “Jewish history” and the decision she will soon have to make. The story ends on a complex, mournful and deeply personal note:

I stand by the window thinking of Marni, of our lost friendship. Even after so much time, I still feel severed. Halved. Sometimes I am stupefied with guilt. I think of the little boy being synthesized from pieces of me [. . .] I fill with exhaustion, with numbness, with resignation. I will blink first. I picture me and Marni as teenagers, trying on each other’s clothes in her bedroom, laughing for minutes at a time, melting over our latest rock-star crush, his poster on the wall, gorgeous, talented, and unattainable, pondering late into the night what our forbidden offspring would look like.

In “Amsterdam,” Josh and his friends Greg and Barry visit the city after their Birthright trip, wandering the streets, visiting the sights (including the Anne Frank House), getting a prostitute in the red-light district, and smoking prodigious amounts of pot. While in Israel, they have seen two Palestinian kids kicked off of a Tel Aviv beach. After visiting the Anne Frank House, Anne becomes the mechanism through which Josh mediates his changing opinion of Israel and his experiences in the Dutch capital. Josh imagines 

Anne Frank on Birthright. [. . .] arriving at the airport, shy but ridiculously perceptive, watching as the group solidified along clique and gender lines [. . .] enduring the twelve-hour flight that ended in cheering and clapping as the plane touched down on supposedly sacred asphalt.  

​Anne is “his constant companion” in Amsterdam, and, when the three young men decide to get a prostitute, there is a strange, crass, poignant scene worthy of Philip Roth during which Josh thinks of Anne while Barry gets ready for sex:

Anne looking out the bus window at dilapidated villages, huts made out of cardboard and tires. Anne sneaking into the Arab Quarter, the soldiers in green fatigues standing in twos, guns that stretched from their knees to their chins, meeting a friendly shopkeeper, buying a thin silver chain. Anne writing “birthright” over and over and over again in her journal until the word lost all meaning.

Barry stood up, exhaled, and unzipped his pants.
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Anne cracking through the bright, loud surface. Anne rising above the noise, the arguments, the cacophony. Anne understanding. 

It is scenes like this one that keep me coming back to these stories. They are difficult, rich, and reveal new dimensions of meaning every time I return to them.  
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There are several things Kreuter does quite well. He is very good at conveying the numbing effect of repetitive manual labour. The main character in “A/V” works setting up and taking down elaborate A/V systems for events. The story begins:

After rolling the road cases out of the truck, through the loading bay, up a skinny elevator, through an endless industrial kitchen of stainless steel tables, and closet-sized ovens—milling cooks eyeing us suspiciously as we wheel past—down a long hallway of dirty carpet and peeling walls, and into the even space, we get to work. It takes the four of us a half dozen round trips from the loading bay to the banquet hall to unload the truck. Once the thirty-odd cases are arranged in the middle of the room, we spend the next four hours opening, rolling, placing, powering, setting up, plugging in, locking, adjusting, taping down, booting up, testing.

Precise, technical descriptions like this recur throughout the narrative, transforming the repetitive nature of the work and of the rut in which the narrator is deeply entrenched into a rhythm, folding it into the aesthetic experience of the story. This plays in fascinating ways off of the obsession the narrator develops with the Holocaust, and reaches its climax in the impressively well-paced final paragraph.
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Kreuter is just as strong when describing the rhythm of following jam bands across the United States in the book’s closing novella, “Chasing the Tonic.” And he is even better on the effects of the copious amounts of drugs that are consumed across this novella and stories like “Amsterdam” and “Movies.” After the three friends smoke their first joint in Amsterdam, Kreuter describes them walking through the city, capturing a very specific mixture of wonder and juvenile humour:

The stone streets began to fan out and connect to each other in a system that was both unintelligible and hilarious, the canals long strips of grumbling blue water. The fronts of the tall, many-windowed houses leaned forward at slight angles, the triangular brick roofs topped off with rusty hooks hanging from oxidized pulleys. They walked through crowded streets, bought a half dozen fresh stroopwafels, then, amazed at their sugary softness, bought another three batches. They laughed into the moist air, got high again and again, took turns pronouncing street names. Keizersgracht. Huidenstraat. Niuewezijds Voorburgwal. Damstraat. Sour Diesel. White Widow. Big Buddha Cheese. Love Potion #1. Spirit of Amsterdam.

Or, in “Movies,” the narrator walks back down a hill where he and his friends have gone to smoke a joint before going to a movie:

The wind brought in the cool night air. The highways blurred into a single burning conduit of liquid gold. The five of us walked through the long grass to the theatre, diamond sharp stars coming down all around us, cutting deep gashes into the night sky, lighting up the cineplex’s fake treetops.

Kreuter is just as good at describing the music that runs through the stories alongside the drugs. In “Searching for Crude,” a story in which a rich, middle-aged businessman’s life is taken over by his obsession with a musician, Kreuter gets that very difficult thing to capture, the ecstatic way music can transport us, just right:

too-painful rawness ensconced in sizzling bliss.

In “Chasing the Tonic,” concerts punctuate the story, and the descriptions of the music played at them are regular, lyrical interludes in the narrative:

the music is extravagant emotional an ocean Janice’s guitar searching the starsky for release for meaning Cody’s bass a rumbling powerful engine trotting drum licks high octane piano surges the music carving out its own place in the cosmos with carful abandon reaching reaching reaching grabbing at what it almost has.

​Music, drugs, identity and always belonging in its many forms. This makes for a heady, complex and satisfying blend. And I very much hope Kreuter continues to explore these veins of experience in his next book, perhaps a novel, because, just as I keep returning to these stories, I want to keep reading his work and to keep thinking in the directions it sends me.

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Aaron Schneider teaches in the Department of English and Writing Studies at Western University, where he also runs the Creative Writers Speakers Series. His stories have appeared/are forthcoming in The Danforth Review, filling station, The Puritan, Hamilton Arts and Letters, untethered, and The Maple Tree Literary Supplement.  His first book, Grass-Fed, is available from Quattro Books. Visit his website here.