Between two burning fields, in a dying industrial village, a child’s sprint toward a coming-of-age is about to be chopped at the knees. The development of our unnamed, laconic narrator, alongside his soon-to-be ex-best friend, has fallen into the hands of a rotating gaggle of older boys. These wayward teenagers, engaging in self-harm, early drug experimentation, and sexual explorations with a neighbor lady often too drunk to know one budding body from the next, ring our two prepubescent principals dry, catching and squashing them in the pressures of filling the desire of the other.
In a breezy 148 pages, divided into 48 micro-chapters, Jinnwoo’s POLO details its narrator’s descent up to the point of his most formative trauma. To avoid spoilers, the text’s turn can be formulated in terms of grammar: it is the slide from subject to object; and, if the heightened spirit of the ending is to be taken faithfully, the re-subjectification found through forgiveness
Jinnwoo’s narrator is a strange child. Or, perhaps it is the narrator’s recollection of himself as a child that is so strange? Told in a close first-person, POLO displays its material with a numb tunnel-vision—as a memory wished forgotten:
The general format is 2 of them sit and play Micro Machines on Carl’s Mega Drive—lifeless and staring on the living room floor. The remaining 2 practise French kissing with Laura and me in the kitchen. They tag in and out of the kitchen to kiss us, depending on whose go it is on the Sega Mega. If we’re convening in the wood, the 2 waiting sit and smoke cigarettes stolen from Raqesh’s parents’ corner shop, and we kiss the others around the back of the pheasant holding pen.
Regarding the text’s style, author Jinnwoo, interviewed by his publisher Expat Press, has said: “I wanted this book to read like an espresso shot. I have a very short attention span, and I hate over-elaborating [sic].”
Despite the author’s deflection regarding attention spans, POLO at first seems to sit well within, and can be read through the lens of, the post-Lish school of literary minimalism. This school, one of the more enduring of the last half-century, epitomizes Jinnwoo’s sentiment of “espresso shot” fiction. The writers therein focused on hyper-compression of meaning and content—no word wasted, and not a sentence that doesn’t justify its purpose perfectly. Every gesture within the text, a microcosm of the whole. Meaning upon meaning upon meaning, rendering forth stories and novels that read quickly, if not easily, and pack dizzying punches. Each decision made with the precision of information and semantic density in mind—which meant that every decision had to be made …
This is the limit to which POLO can be read in this context—this “making” of the decision.
Regarding the previous extract from the text: it may be the case that the locution of the average working-class nine-year-old in the UK is higher in register and diction than the children over here in the States, but the use of terms like “general format” and “convening” coming from an eight-year-old reads strange. There are greater examples of this tonal hiccup: a brief episode wherein the child laments the family’s financial woes, but in language that’s far too exact and understanding. Those of us that were young during the 2008 financial crisis certainly learned the words “mortgage” and “foreclosure,” but to say they were anything more precise than the names of inscrutable wrath-gods would be absurd in most cases …
All to say that there is no shortage of questions for us to wrestle with when considering POLO as a text object. As a story, a generous read is easy enough. At the bottom here is a beautiful, humble little thing—a hurt child and the long arc toward forgiveness of the past. Good stuff by any standard. However, the rendering of the object that contains this humble little thing—its language—falters.
There need not be any car-crash-in-slow-motion, belabored verisimilitude. The text need not take an elegiac or nostalgic tone. The spartan mode is perfectly fine, an affect that, well-wielded, is capable of bringing forth great emotional effect. But, in POLO everything is plopped down flat and brushed away in the same motion. There’s the feeling that the traumas on the page have been processed; that the narrator has grown up and almost isn’t bothered; or perhaps so bothered that he can’t stand to spend our time on details … From the author:
Two of the final chapters are written as letters from the protagonist to the older boy who abused him – Lee. The reader plays the role of Lee by reading these letters. As the addressee of these letters, it’s up to the reader how they interpret them. There’s enough in the letters to be seething and threatening, but I think there is also a lot of forgiveness and understanding in the letters.
But this “reader playing the role of Lee,” hardly holds water. The text specifies that these letters were never sent. They were written and stowed away. If they were never sent, if within the imagined world of the text they were never read by Lee, then … there is no role of Lee to be played …
This oversight, maybe small, compounds with all of POLO’s other minor formal difficulties and teeters toward incoherency. And this is a tragedy for the simple fact that POLO’s content is done a disservice by its technique. The actual story, the narrative, these characters, are beautiful top-to-bottom …
But, maybe treating this text as argument in-and-of-and-for itself alone is the wrong tactic to take—the self-containment theories of mid-20th century New Criticism have been pummeled to paste by our current post-everything environment … It’s forever apparent, woefully so even, that no created object can be observed in a vacuum, that none are produced in a vacuum, and that everything made serves fundamentally as a reflection of the world out of which it was made, no escape, no true faith … The old axiom applies: style is substance. But perhaps now, operating under large-scale attention deficits, neuroses running wild, and literacy beyond tweets falling rapidly, style is no longer substance but the symptom of some greater condition …
Anyhow, being brief, the establishment’s aesthetic and ideological standards have shifted—quieter styles and saccharine neoliberalism. But, it still maintains these standards in as rigorous a fashion as ever. The fear here is that the reaction to this, therefore, is one of anti-rigor—and further the worry that some of these small presses have gotten so caught up in gnashing their teeth, they haven’t realized they’re biting their own tongues.
All the difficulties taken—attention spans, politics, social media, whatever, whatever—now would seem the time for books to make their case in spite of it all. Now, as everything moves faster and narcissism becomes a cultural psychosis, would be an opportune moment for books to act as the much-needed roadblock before catastrophe. Art doesn’t save the world, do not misunderstand. But art that demands time, that doesn’t apologize for being in the world, and that refuses inattention, wouldn’t be the worst thing.
POLO, by Jinnwoo. Expat Press. 148 pages. $16.00, paper.
K Hank Jost is a writer of fiction born in Texas and raised in Georgia. He believes language is the only remaining commons, and through its meaningful deployment all lost commons may be rendered fresh. He is the author of the novel-in-stories Deselections, the novel MadStone, and is Editor-in-Chief of the literary quarterly A Common Well Journal—produced and published by Whiskey Tit Books. His fiction and poetry have been recently featured in Vol.1 Brooklyn, The Burning Palace, Hobart, and Poverty House. He is currently seeking representation for his newest novel, Aquarium, while he works on his fourth book. He has led fiction workshops at the Brooklyn Center for Theatre Research and writes event reviews for the New Haven Independent. Residing in Brooklyn with his partner, he reads as much as he can, writes as much as he can, and works as much as he must. Instagram: @hank_being_a_better_ape.
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