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Wait: A Place ‘Matte’
By Max Quayle
Roy Kesey has prepared a perfectly external setting in his work,
Wait 
. There are troupesof actors sidling, running, rolling and jumping across his stage – but the reader is forbiddenfrom intimate knowledge of their individual characters – all revelations are handed in a voice of retrospection. The tale is an exercise in emotion-implicate: Each major actor is given opinion bydescription of his place in time – his attitude with respect to physicality. Throughout
Wait 
, RoyKesey manages and delivers all emotion through external place descriptions which are viewedthrough the eye of a distant, yet all-seeing narrator.In order to display the diversity of the characters in the tale, a sort of anchor is cast outearly on: The accountant vs. the poet. These two men provide a deliberate foreshadow of a cycleof indifference, ignorance, irritation, intimacy and intolerance as the larger scenes around themseem to follow the miniscule exchanges between them. As an intimate study of a larger group,they show, by degrees, a natural progression through states of man as the situation that is presumed out of any one’s control simply breaks down as it is burdened by complications androadblocks. The craft employed is to draw the reader into the narrator’s interpretations, but only by inference and clue.A journalistic repartee encourages reader interpretation of place, throughout. In thisexcerpt, the author requires certain, if simple, jumps of logic to make sense of the scene: “The poet elbows the accountant, points to the checkerboard protruding from the Mongolian boy’scarry on. Four hours later, with the score 9-7 in favor of the accountant, the old Honduranwoman asks if she might play as well. She wins the next twelve matches, falls asleep mid move
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