by Scott Blackwood

The Association of Writers and Writing Programs gives big prizes. Big, prestigious prizes to writers of cutting edge, intellectual work. Fortunately, they also give their award out to people like Scott Blackwood for his novel We Agreed to Meet Just Here, a disjointed, multi-faceted and surprisingly accessible narration of various disappearances in an unnamed Austin suburb.

As things go in these sorts of suburban towns, the inhabitants are inextricably strung together while being pulled apart by their own good nature. It begins innocently enough, with eight-year old Isaac falling from a tree and breaking his arm in three places. From here, we meet Winnie, his mother and the mother of a long-estranged child she put up for adoption. There’s also Isaac’s father, Dennis, a lawyer with a penchant for the seductive teen lifeguard, Natalie, and providing for his family with stolen cars (which he not only prays end up helping the needy in Mexico, but he also helps the original owners file their insurance claims).

The community pulls at each other’s heartstrings with the loss of their local hero, Odie, a veteran doctor who has fallen ill with cancer and has recently gone missing. The only one who has seen him in weeks is Ruth, his delusional wife, and Dennis, who catches a glimpse of him in the woods after getting in an accident.

There’s a lot of darkness set up in the disappearances and pullings apart that are inherent in the story. Indeed, the spaces in between the relationships take center stage, each chapter highlighting a disconnect in an otherwise pleasant community. In one chapter, you might learn the origin of Winnie’s first child and how the family deals with her reappearance; in another, the delusional Odie speaks to a deceased war buddy of the reasoning behind acts we’re never totally clued in on.

This is where Blackwood achieves the prestigious award that he’s been given for the book: the disparaging circumstances never bog down the rhythm and beauty of his prose and, as a reader, there’s never a moment where you completely love or hate any one character. Instead, the failures of each character take on a humanist light that pull the reader toward more “understanding” than even Vonnegut could have mustered. The resolution of all of this comes not from the action of the story, but from the gentle hand with which Blackwood paints each page. Without a hair of judgment, Blackwood delves into one of the darkest character’s minds with perfect clarity:

And what had Dennis gotten into? Sometimes, late at night, he’d be working in their den on a living will or bankruptcy filing and the close lotion and chlorine smell of Natalie’s bedroom closet would fill his nostrils. He’d feel again the welcome weight of her clothes, pinning him in. Then the watery pressure would build in his ears. His heart would race and he’d have to go outside on the porch to catch his breath.”

In the end, Blackwood reveals almost all the truths behind the community’s deceptions and anxieties. There’s enough left open and enough shut closed to satisfy a traditional reader. For those of you who are looking for something more ambiguous, there’s plenty of questions raised about this particular social class and the way that they handle tragedy, while maintaining the story’s and the character’s most attractive quality: everything is distinctly human. At once traumatic, triumphant, and distinctly clever, We Agreed to Meet Just Here is a True story, if nothing else, imagined through the voices of everyone involved, living and deceased. At one point, Odie has a conversation, with his expired colleague:

The end, when it comes, is a small thing, a stick in the river – but it parts the water, alters its course, all the same. Otherwise the goddamn thing flows on. Tick without tock is nothing.
It was said you were dying. That you mistook your dying for theirs.
Words fail, Odie.
Yes, they do.”

Poignant, effervescent, and remarkably imaginative, this AWP Novel Winner will be a win for anyone that is more satisfied with questions than answers.

Reviewed by Mark Steffen

We Agreed to Meet Just Here by Scott Blackwood
New Issues Poetry Press, 2009
Cloth, $26.00
ISBN-10: 1930974809