Barrelhouse Reviews: Bark On by Mason Boyles

Reviewed by Sarah Rose Cadorette

Driftwood Press / February 2023 / 362 pp

Bark On is a horridly perfect novel for this modern American moment. Mason Boyles’s lyrical debut centers around Ezra and Casper, two young triathletes being trained by a mystic in Oakleys known simply as Benji. Each of these men trades narrating the novel with a fourth character, Ezra’s mother (“Ma”), who is a triathlete herself. On the whole, Bark On explores the American way of obsession: forgoing personal safety and even freedom to pursue a desire to its absolute end.

The narrative begins at the Chapel Hill Ironman, where Ezra suffers a fantastic defeat, and Casper—an unknown who competes without any of the expensive equipment—comes in fifth. Benji encourages Ezra’s mother to leave, which she agrees to immediately, as she has been anxious to bike across Canada. Benji then “cocoons” the boys: no phones, no laptops, no semblance of a consistent sleep schedule. Nothing to anchor them in time and space except their own bodies, which he pushes until they feel outside of those, too.

Benji asks for the moon (in triathletic terms), and Ezra and Casper strive to give it to him, even past the point of self-injury—but, the novel asks, why? Is it Benji’s strange rituals, which seem based on some dark magic? Has he put a spell on them with his herbs and his insistent humming? Do the boys feel they don’t have the power to say no? Or is it something, perhaps, more frightening: “Without the burden of the next effort, he’d never give up; it would be crippling, the freedom to do whatever.” Ezra and Casper both willingly give Benji control over their bodies, essentially over their whole lives, precisely because he provides them with boundaries. But then, the novel asks, what is our notion of self when we abdicate it to another? And what do we gain by doing so?

Ezra’s hometown, Kure, the fictionalized island off the coast of North Carolina where most of the novel takes place, is obsessed in the original meaning of the word: to be besieged, to be surrounded by an encroaching army. The enemies who encroach are many: coyotes have overrun the island, the abandoned Dow chemical plant leaves a legacy of contaminated water, and the ocean claws its way slowly up the shore. As we foray into Ma’s past, and the eventual return of the characters to the Chapel Hill Ironman, each site is clogged with manmade destruction: fatal stampedes, avalanches of trash, throngs of masochistic athletes who destroy themselves at the same rate they discard cups of Gatorade along the race route.

Boyles dedicates a disproportionate amount of attention to these landscapes, which burst, leak, seep, and lose form as they absorb and become their wounds. The experience as a reader inhabiting these worlds is extremely frustrating. Benji puts out traps for the “varms,” but otherwise none of the characters seem too concerned with any of the threats to their home. “Look around you!” I wanted to scream. Boyles details each eroding habitat for the reader’s benefit, to ask us to see what no one mentions. We are not omniscient, and yet we hold knowledge which the characters, in their stringent myopia, do not. The cost of their ignorance is literally earth-shattering.

Bark On’s momentum lies in the sparkling, biting prose, on which the reader can rely to surprise them no matter which of the four characters narrates. Boyles has crafted strikingly original voices for each perspective, which he flourishes like a magician’s cape to obscure and reveal aspects of their personalities and histories. This exchange between Casper and Ezra, for example:

Casper stops and squints past Ezra. “Got show him.”
“You can.”
“Open your own self. I’m too fast to be full-up of beans.”
Ezra steps back, fumbling to translate that. Open up…can of…

Even after you’ve gotten used to Casper’s galloping whomp of narration, which Boyles bases on the rhythms of a triathlon (the staccato beat of running, the long trance of an oxygen high), the technical aspects of conditioning for a triathlon still feel like reading another language. That is somewhat the point. You needn’t understand the words to catch their meaning: only the obsessed would know this detail, and only the obsessed would know how to write it.

The novel ends where it begins, at the Chapel Hill Ironman, but even before the competitors take their marks, it’s clear Boyles won’t be giving us the expected hero’s journey. All four of the narrators have an ostensible path to redemption, an obvious panacea that would justify the intense suffering they’ve all lived through: winning the race. If Ezra were to win, both he and Ma would be gratified by the sacrifices they’ve both made. If Casper were to win, he’d get the thrill of beating Ezra, and making Benji proud. Either way, Benji would have trained a winner.

But, of course, Bark On is not a novel about training a winner. An Ironman victory would be little more than a stepping stone to the next race for four people already consumed by the discipline and self-denial of training for victory. No, the real transformations happen—or fail to happen—around the secret desires that each character has allowed to germinate: trust, intimacy, the ability to be alone with oneself, a family, a feeling of home. Gradually, we watch all of the characters realize what will release them from their obsessions. But knowledge is not the same as actualization, and some of them will be freed by force, or perhaps not at all.

The structure of the book sometimes feels like looping the track, covering the same ground with a slightly newer perspective each time. Any story told from multiple points of view risks repeating information to the reader, as the narrators reestablish facts for the sake of lending their interpretation of events. But for Bark On, the structure seems to function in another way. You hit the same themes, crunch the same thoughts over and over until you’re, as Benji would say, “zenning,” just allowing the momentum of the language to carry your thoughts ahead of you, as if on some predestined conveyor belt. Isn’t this the nature of following an obsession?

Sarah Rose Cadorette is a nonfiction writer whose work has received awards from The Southampton Review, Blood Orange Review, and Sonora Review, and received support from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, Kenyon Review Writers Workshop, Hypatia-in-the-Woods, and others. She is the Prose Co-Editor for Action, Spectacle, and is currently working on a book of essays about obsessions and possessions. Find her at sarahrosecadorette.com