Barrelhouse Reviews: The Circle That Fits, by Kevin Lichty
Driftwood Press / October 2022 / 145 pp
Review by Nick Rees Gardner
A former writing professor of mine calls the novella “the perfect form.” It requires the concision and pacing of a short story but is long and deep enough to draw the reader into its world and hold them there. As it happens, Kevin Lichty understands the challenges and rewards of the form, the sitting or two in which the reader lives inside a narrator’s life, rather than the weeks or months it might take to invest in a longer work.
I sat down first thing in the morning with Lichty’s book and an espresso. From the first paragraph I was transported into the narrator’s orbit, his surreal carnival world: “the smell of hot oil and fried batter and powdered sugar, the heat of our bodies trapped by the small metal walls of the trailer, the windows where people waited… the darkness and colored lights and roar and music.” The first section of the story, which encompasses Daniel’s childhood and teenage years, reads like a fever dream of the carnival circuit where Daniel and his father fry their elephant ears. Scenes, symbols, and images are repeated, but never redundant. The prose is beautiful, ornamental, but also specific and unaffected and unexpected. Daniel describes “eyes the size of Ferris wheels,” and “the blackened ends of funnel cake embedded in our fingernails.” Though he tends toward the sentimental in his stream-of-consciousness narration, Daniel’s wonder and desire urge the reader, too, to hunger for the next vignette.
As Lichty builds and complicates the novella’s circles, circuits, and orbits, the narrative skips through time and place in much the same way memory works. The circle that at once confines him, a metaphorical fence his father puts up to protect him against emotion and pain, is also a cage that keeps Daniel from socializing with other children and understanding their games. In this first section, Lichty introduces the carnies that make up Daniel’s “circle.” Joe Joe introduces Daniel to gore and violence when he loses his arm to the gears of the Ferris wheel. Rolfe, the lion tamer, who moves “like his muscles floated in liquid,” teaches him how to be quiet and still. Llewelyn, who mans the pony rides, explains that the horses, blinders on, are forced to walk in circles. But in their orbit, they are free. This metaphor seems a little obvious, but it isn’t Daniel who breaks the circuit. He explains how he and his mother “would make a circle with our arms and we’d spin and spin until I lifted off the ground.” In the same terms, he confronts his mother’s escape from the family and carnival life: “One day, my mom let go… I was unstuck and floating free of everything until I fell to the ground and all the wind was knocked out of me.”
I took a break for breakfast at the end of this first section, an intermission long enough to step away from the pages and consider what would come next. In its most basic parts, the story Lichty tells is not unique. Unsatisfied with his life after his parents split, a young man hits the road in search of his long-lost mother and, in the end, finds himself. It’s the story of a teenager exploring and expanding his world, breaking outside of his circle and then being drawn back in. However, Lichty weaves right when I expect him to go left. He leans into language and surreal imagery to queer the reader’s assumptions and, instead of his learning general truths through aphorisms, Daniel’s world grows more complex, with more questions than answers. The timeline of his story, instead of moving in a straight line, spins like the anxious mind of someone trying to contextualize and organize the strangeness of childhood. When Daniel takes off on his own, he describes how “the black slick of the road stretches out into that possibility of unknowing. And the asphalt that used to hold me tight… unfurls and lets me go and my body feels unrooted, hurled and spun in the air.”
This is a lot for a book of 120 pages to tackle, but Kevin Lichty employs condensed prose, poetic language, and innovatively posed questions about how a man should be in the world. In the carnival crowd of beer-drinking, bonfires, and bloody knuckles, Daniel is, in his early years, often mistaken for a girl, so he hardens himself like his father. But, once he experiences the real world, befriends a walking, talking tree and a naked, enigmatic lion tamer, he learns how to be tender. The final moment of violence at the end of the novella is tempered by Daniel’s feelings, the soft and kind way he handles his calloused father.
I exited The Circle That Fits before noon much like I exit a carnival ride. It all happened so fast, and there I was, blinking in the sunlight, trying to reaccustom myself to the physical world with its crowds and traffic and noise. Any book worth its salt can be called an immersive experience, but The Circle That Fits spat me out, disoriented, after the final sentence. On one hand, it was over too quickly. I wanted more strange carny anecdotes, more road stories from Daniel’s travels outside the carnival. And I’m always game for another vignette about a weirdly raised kid like Daniel enduring the chaos of a commercial kitchen. But my disorientation speaks more to Lichty’s engaging story-telling than to the brevity of the form. The Circle That Fits completes a cycle, and does so perfectly, prettily, and economically. I don’t want a longer book from Kevin Lichty—just a second one.
Nick Rees Gardner is a writer and critic from Ohio and Washington, DC. He holds an MFA in fiction from Bowling Green State University and his writing has appeared in The Adroit Journal, Epiphany, Atticus Review, Ocean State Review, and other journals. His novella, Hurricane Trinity, is forthcoming in 2023 from Unsolicited Press and his book of sonnets about opioid addiction and recovery, So Marvelously Far, is available through Crisis Chronicles Press.