Glen Pourciau has a knack for crafting moments where ordinary characters find themselves in strange quandaries. In The Art of Subtext, Charles Baxter tells us that the best stories have characters who “create scenes that in life, in all likelihood, we would avoid.” Pourciau’s characters excel in just that. Simple arguments heat up and turn into bizarre tussles. Moral dilemmas raise extraordinary questions in characters’ minds, generating the cerebral back-and-forths we’ve come to expect in his unique brand of fiction. His newest collection, Under, is similar in that sense. Everyday characters are indignant about something, desperate to be seen or heard, or possess an intense, almost morbid desire to take control of a situation that is slowly slipping out of their hands. What’s different in this collection is Pourciau’s attention to brevity, resulting in forty-one pieces, each showcasing his penchant for understated, pithy narratives.
Some tussles begin on familiar ground before tables quickly turn. In “Focus,” the first story, the narrator, a married woman, is accosted by a fellow vacationer, another woman, who out of the blue slams her with a series of questions about narcissism, which she declares to be a “good thing.” The tête-à-tête leads to an “uncomfortable silence” that grows into something akin to fear in the narrator’s mind. The story ends with the narrator and her husband discussing whether they should be afraid of the woman. Nothing dramatic happens, but the questions leave an imprint on my mind as I weigh my own opinions on narcissism, think about offhand contacts with strangers, and even contemplate the power of a couple’s partnership trying to confront an unlikely situation by posing a united front. Another reader’s take on all of this could be totally different than mine, and therein lies the genius of these stories. In several of his interviews, such as this one in The Forge, Pourciau says that “I believe the reader is part of the story and that all readers bring their unique chaos to a narrative.” Each story in Under is participatory in that sense. Often open-ended, their convoluted logic churns our minds and extends a delicious invitation to step into the story.
The next story, “Other,” is also about a couple, where a lonely woman inserts herself in their midst despite being told that she is intruding. Pourciau, in a SmokeLong Quarterly interview, mentions “couplehood,” which is a standing feature in many of his stories. It’s as if through the microcosm of couplehood he is shedding light on the larger, global predicament of complicated, close relationships. This story is longer and spans several pages, each a large block of text, very typical of Glen Pourciau stories, a style he describes as a “one-paragraph format (that) serves to focus the reader on the narrator’s voice or consciousness.” Indeed, the distance between the reader and narrator collapses in this headlong narration. It’s as if we’re in the thick of it, witnessing it all in real time, or perhaps getting the scoop from the narrator himself, over a glass of wine.
“Tread” unfolds under the most extraordinary of circumstances. How else would you describe the situation where the antagonist displays a “DONT TREAD ON ME” flag (aka the Gadsden flag, for the uninitiated) with a coiled rattlesnake at its center, and his adversary, our narrator, contemplates retorting with a “DONT TELL ME WHERE TO TREAD” flag replete with a decapitated rattlesnake? It’s the perfect tit for tat: a lack of apostrophe for a lack of apostrophe. The humor in the subtext is so subtle that only the most attentive will derive complete joy out of these exchanges.
The titular story, “Under” is a “nested” tale where the actual narrator is “a voice from within” the supposed narrator. Pourciau creates a unique brand of horror where the mind plays a mind game on itself and the boundaries of the interior and exterior collapse.
The best story in this collection might be the last one, the only modular story in this set of linear narratives. Fred and Whitney each tell their part of the story, but the he-said-she-said is only at the surface level, under which lurk a horde of questions. When does our writing torment us? Do we self-sabotage? Does our inner critic take a life of their own to the extent that we reify them as a flesh-and-blood person? Identities blur and merge so fascinatingly that at every step we ponder which of them is real. We do get an answer of sorts, but we are free to reject it, which is precisely what Pourciau intends for us.
Each story in the collection is told in the same straightforward, unpretentious, but urgent way. His diction is measured, his style carefully crafted. The tonal quality is consistent to the point that one couple melds with another and protagonists often seem to share the same indignant disposition no matter what the conflict. More than a few stories begin as encounters between duos, neighbors doing unneighborly things, or a person recruiting another for the most unusual errand. However, the moment you think you have encountered a scene before, the arc veers into an unexpected direction. Every encounter dredges a different nook of the human psyche. And, with the evenness of tone, Pourciau seems to concoct a sort of deliberate universality, telling us that this could be you and I, dear reader, and if the right combinations of circumstances present themselves, we would probably react the same way.
Or would we? Pourciau succeeds in tossing a pebble of doubt or self-introspection every time, and the disquiet lingers long after we have left the page.
Under, by Glen Pourciau. New York, New York: Four Way Books, September 2025. 200 pages. $19.95, paper.
Sayantani Roy works out of the Seattle area and has placed work in Emerge Literary Journal, Grist, MAYDAY, TIMBER, West Trestle Review, and elsewhere. She is an MFA candidate at the Rainier Writing Workshop, and her work has been supported by AWP and the Jack Straw Cultural Center. She reads submissions for Chestnut Review and Palette Poetry.
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