Jessica Wilbanks: Back to the Elements: The 2008 Flannery O’Connor Award Recipients Andrew Porter, The Theory of Light and Matter.      University of Georgia Press, 2008. Hardcover, 232 pp, $24.95. Peter Selgin, Drowning Lessons.      University of Georgia Press, 2008. Hardcover, 256 pp, $24.95. Since 1983, the University of Georgia has presented the annual Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction to two writers who bring a new level of excellence to the craft of short-story writing. Past recipients include Ha Jin, Antonya Nelson, and Mary Hood. In 2008, Andrew Porter received the award for his first book, The Theory of Light and Matter and Peter Selgin for his collection Drowning Lessons. As in years past, this year’s winners of the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction ply their craft in distinctly different ways. Andrew Porter’s sparsely styled stories often privilege interior revelation over florid description. The stark, generic landscape inhabited by his characters belies the many tragedies lurking underneath suburbia’s smooth veneers. In contrast, Peter Selgin’s chaotic characters demand specific backdrops, each one more colorful and vividly rendered than the last. Selgin’s lush descriptions are poles apart from Porter’s unaffected renderings, yet each collection speaks with equal strength to the tragic and elemental forces at work within human relationships. * * * “The hole was at the end of Tal Walker’s driveway. It’s paved over now. But twelve summers ago Tal climbed into it and never came up again.” So begins “Hole,” the first story in Andrew Porter’s evocative first book, The Theory of Light and Matter. In this story and many others, Porter displays his unique talent for showing that forsythia-filled suburban front yards are not at all what they seem. More often than not, they hide something dark bubbling just below the surface, something capable of swallowing a small boy. The narrators chronicling the ten stories in Porter’s collection often serve as witnesses to tragedies rather than as the primary victims. Their role is that of an observer to the wayward path of a friend, sibling, or parent, but as the fault lines around the situation expand, they begin to share in the culpability. The most celebrated stories in this volume, “Azul” and “Departure,” are both stories in which the violence erupts close to surface, bringing the narrators into the sphere of danger. In “Azul,” a middle-aged couple takes in a gay foreign exchange student who shifts the dynamic of their lives and exposes the cracks already running through their marriage. In the Pushcart Prize-winning story “Departure,” two young boys struggle to understand the desperation felt by the teenagers of a disintegrating Amish community nearby—especially when that desperation explodes into violence. Porter’s narrators are frequently obsessed by an event in the past that they were not able to fully understand at the time. In “River Dog,” a teenage boy dissects the violent behavior of his older brother, unable to understand either his brother’s actions or their community’s response. The bittersweet title story, “The Theory of Light and Matter,” chronicles a young woman’s relationship with her professor. In each story, memory becomes a burden to be borne alone, something that ends up separating the characters from one another through guilt and shame. Unlike fellow award-winner Peter Selgin, Porter’s style lacks grand flourishes, and instead does much of its work through straightforward summary and dialogue. Even so, his paragraphs hypnotize the reader, especially when punctuated with clipped, staccato endnotes, as in this passage from the title story: Perhaps because he had waited so faithfully for me, or because he had not asked me where I’d been, or because when he squeezed me I realized that I loved him too, as much as I could love any man, I let him make love to me that night. I undressed slowly and lay down next to him on the bed, and as he entered me for the first time, it seemed that I had just opened up a hole in my life—a hole the precise size and shape of Colin—and that nothing in the intricate fabric of my future would ever be the same.  (64) Porter’s prose continually lulls the reader into the muggy landscape of faraway memory, back to a place in which the roots of a later tragedy were first born. The pain contained in The Theory of Light and Matter is the pain that comes with understanding a situation fully only when it is far too late. * * * In contrast to The Theory of Light and Matter, Peter Selgin’s Drowning Lessons contains no stark suburban landscapes, no quiet epiphanies or guilt-stricken remembrances. Instead, Selgin’s characters live largely in the moment, careening down a Dominican highway in a stolen Cadillac, tripping over a stingray on a Mexican beach, and disappearing into a frozen New England lake. Even in his simplest stories, Peter Selgin’s prose throbs and pulses with unfettered feeling. From the first story, “Swimming,” Selgin introduces his readers to a permeable landscape in which water represents the uncontrollable torrent of emotions raging within the human body. For the middle-aged narrator in “Swimming,” a quiet lake becomes a site of temptation, and a gesture meant to save a marriage nearly destroys a life. In “My Search for Red and Gray Wide-Striped Pajamas,” the narrator seduces his pudgy cousin during a series of ferry rides, while reveling in the way “banana peels and scum float in the brown, murky waves.” When Selgin’s characters step into the water, they never come up clear and pure, but rather newly polluted and stained. If Andrew Porter’s stories exist as silhouettes in which dark memories shadow the lighter background of ordinary life, Selgin’s colorful prose relies on a textured collage of vivid images and rich characters, often rendered in a grotesque manner similar to that of Flannery O’Connor herself. Like O’Connor, Selgin’s most powerful stories are often his funniest. In “Sawdust,” a young boy develops complicated feelings for a male teacher. His mother reacts by apprenticing him to Sugar Bulfamante, a retired boxer-turned-floor-sander, in hopes of re-masculating him. “During lunch breaks Sugar would give me boxing lessons,” the young narrator relates. “It was all part of his plan to defruitcake me.” Selgin’s characters are continually succumbing to raw desire and falling in love with the wrong people or things, often with disastrous results. In “El Malecón,” an old man borrows a Cadillac and takes off for his childhood village in hopes of impressing its residents. “Color of the Sea” portrays the unconsummated romance between an American tourist, Andrew, and Karina, a Brazilian woman he meets on a vacation to Greece. Selgin’s characters seem almost comical in their inability to anticipate the results from a given situation and react accordingly. At its weakest moments, Selgin’s rich prose can deteriorate into sound and fury, sacrificing theme and character for clever flourishes and rich texture. And yet it is easy to forgive occasional lapses in a writer with such an entertaining style, especially when his own characters seem to anticipate and deflate that criticism, as in this passage from “Driving Picasso”: “And anyway can you not simply enjoy the ride? Why does a journey need a purpose anyway?” says Picasso. “For the same reason a picture needs a subject: merely as an excuse for the paint, to have something to hang shapes, colors, and textures on.” (82) As a painter as well as a writer, Selgin has an artist’s gift for color and description. This comes out in a poignant scene from “The Color of the Sea,” where Karina asks Andrew to describe the color of the water. He tries to gather his thoughts before responding. “‘Impossibly blue’ was ridiculous… And when you scoop up a handful, what do you get? What looks so dreamy from a distance turns to salt water. From a great enough distance the whole world turns dreamy blue, absorbing us, seducing us.” This passage might just as well describe Selgin’s particular genius. He has an uncanny ability to weave a sensual bricolage out of the most scattered remnants of human life.