In NEXT TO NOTHING, his second short story collection, Keith Banner presents a series of heart-wrenching, yet at times almost slapstick, tales of the barely working class in depressed Midwestern suburbs. His conversational style features shorthand descriptive techniques including pop culture references and incongruous combinations of smells to evoke an entire milieu: “ancient mop water and total exhaustion, burnt meat and old walls” … “puke and dropped booze and cigarette smoke” … “mildew and mouse-shit.” Without undue attention to past events, these traits tell us more than full pages of physical description. The style is perfectly suited to the people who inhabit this fictional world.

“Quirky” barely scratches the surface.

It comes as no surprise that Banner’s new book is graced with an epigraph from Flannery O'Connor. After all, his stunning first novel, THE LIFE I LEAD, was widely compared to O’Connor’s work. But when I read the quotation he chose for the opening of NEXT TO NOTHING, I had to ponder: “It is when the freak can be sensed as a figure for our essential displacement that he attains some depth in literature.”

It sounds as though we are always-already displaced with no belonging anywhere, and “the freak” is a mere instrument of displacement. This is the condition Banner’s characters face. Their own freakishness, or that of their loved ones’, is so ingrained in their sense of being that it becomes a matter of moral or genetic determinism. I find no questioning of social mores, no laying of blame at the feet of criminal parents or oppressive belief systems. This world acknowledges neither easy explanations nor extenuating circumstances: the characters may be likeable or not, but their eating disorders, sexual orientation, survival of abuse, or other issues appear to render them permanent misfits. Even a case of cancer can leave a person blighted and pitiful and in his own eyes.

This is not to say that Banner belittles or judges his people. He portrays their intractable problems as they feel from the inside: inherent features of life that keep happening to us regardless of what we do or what we promise to do. Flannery O’Connor might well agree. None of us asked to be born into white trash families or to become raving lunatics, but God loves us no matter how freakish he makes us appear to our fellow human beings. Just don’t expect Him to prove that love in a way we might prefer. ( )