My Abandonment

In one sense, My Abandonment by Peter

Rock is about a little girl's journey from

kidnapping victim to kidnapping perpetrator.

The interesting part of that interpretation is that

the narrator doesn't explicitly say anything

about kidnapping; instead, the novelist

describes the day when Caroline's "real father"

came to "save her" from her "fake family." In

another sense, the novel is a metaphorical

exploration of a teenager's first experience with

existential dread.

This novel does something very clever:

it describes the process leading up to a horrible

act of evil (kidnapping). The narrator vividly presents his father’s appearance and sense of

fashion using varied choice of vocabulary. She describes how he wears long underwear

throughout the year and uses a simile to enhance the perception of the scent of his dark plaid

shirt. He says: “He wears a dark plaid shirt that smells like wool and him, his hair

and  everything.” Using this simile, a more profound understanding of the smell of the clothes of

the narrator’s father is enhanced. Intense descriptions enhance the reader’s understanding of the

scenes depicted in a literary work. In the presentation of the narrator’s house, descriptions are

used, and the imagery of the house is enhanced using a simile: “Our house is like a cave dug out
with the roof made of branches and wire and metal with tarps and plastic on top of that and then

the earth where everything is  growing.” The dire and inhumane living conditions of the narrator

and his family are thus made explicit by the description. The comprehension of the smell and

taste of Randy’s skin is enhanced with a simile where his smell is likened to that of a chemical

and paint whereas the taste of his skin is likened to salt: “Father gave Randy to me and when I

first got him,  he smelled like a chemical and paint.” The taste of Randy’s skin is brought out

when the narrator notes: “I touch my tongue to him, and he tastes like salt from my hands.”

The irony of Sisters. Sisters, Oregon is the city where Caroline loses her "father" and chooses to

return to her—you guessed it—sister! The irony is that the city is called Sisters, which means

that when Caroline gets to Boise and discovers that her old life isn't calling her back, she leaves

her real, literal sister to go to Sisters, Oregon.

Its genre is Coming-of-Age / Young Adult. Setting and Context is the present day in

Oregon and Boise, Idaho. Narrator and Point of View is First-person narration from the

perspective of Caroline. Obsequious, naïve, isolated are the tone and mood of the story. Caroline

is the protagonist and antagonist is that the harsh and unideal circumstances she must deal with

due to her father’s post-traumatic stress disorder and inability cope with society. The author also

showed foreshadowing: “Beware of all enterprises that require new clothes.” The lessons the

father conveys to Caroline resonate with her even later in her life. The statement foreshadows

how Caroline lives her life after rejoining society and leading a normal life. You can also find

personification in the lines: “An electrical station humming inside its own fences…”
 The Night Swimmers
A strange and sonorous book, Peter

Rock’s The Night Swimmers captures the

eeriness of deep water — its competing

currents and sudden shifts between warm and

cold, the swimmer’s combined sense of

inconsequentiality and escape from the

strictures of time. Early on, the novel’s

unnamed narrator recalls: "I imagined all the

lost drowned bodies, worn down by currents,

nibbled by fish caught in the weather of that

deep water, of that zone between top and

bottom. That is where they often reside, the

dead, sliding through the currents.” This is a

novel of highly charged and transformative

thought and soaring physicality; The Night Swimmers explores the depths of an identity in

motion with lyrical insight and reflective imagination few works of fiction can summon. It lays

bare what it means to come to terms with your fraught and weighted choices as you struggle to

make peace with the person you’ve found yourself to be yet giving the readers many layers,

drop-offs, storms, wrecks, and submerged themes as the great Lake Michigan itself. He does

dazzle things with meta-crypto-autobiography in this novel, playfully commingling curation and
creation, and wrestling with a writer’s compulsion to solve past mysteries that leak into the

present.

Though it eschews linear plot and resolution, the book’s moody sense of hidden depths

and dangers will intrigue those open to an atmospheric and contemplative novel. It has a genre of

biographical fiction, family life, small town and rural, which also involves open water

swimming, fatherhood, psychic photography, and the use of isolation tanks to inhabit the past.   A

crucial site of discomfort in The Night Swimmers is the act of writing itself: the narrator is trying

to make sense, through writing, of memories and feelings and artifacts that resist (to varying

degrees) sense-making. He wonders—and the reader wonders alongside him—if it’s even

possible to impose order on these unruly relics. 

The black waves of The Night Swimmers are not scenic; they’re a repository of lost and

hidden things: ghost ships, suicides, shoals, grief, intentions, youth. For the narrator, the water is

a locus of anxiety, aimlessness, desire, erasure, and all the mysteries, big and small, that occupy

him as he tries to identify who he is and what his life should contain. On its surface, The Night

Swimmers is about a man trying to reconstruct a strange series of events that occurred in his

twenties, but its primary preoccupation is far less whodunit than “why and what does that say

about me?” It’s a self-indulgent project, made even more so by Rock’s inclusion of

autobiographical materials like photos, photocopies, and art, but that’s not a slight. One of the

reasons we write and read is to access the internal scripts that govern our lives and the thoughts

and actions of others. Rock’s use of deep water and night swimming as metaphors for searching,

discovery, and of all we can’t know is apt. If the symbolism feels obvious, this device is more

than compensated for by the beauty of Rock’s prose and his complex, surprising weaving of

ephemera and literary allusions into the plot. It has said that it’s a “Part page-turner and part
aesthetic treatise, like the currents of the Great Lakes, subtle and haunted, deeply complex and

‘quietly...sinister.’” So, this novel is worth the dive if you’re seeking a book to get lost in.

The Unsettling
The Unsettling is quietly acclaimed

local author Peter Rock's first collection of

short stories. They are a strange lot—

beautifully written, dreamlike, but like

dreams, frequently ambiguous, brimming with

eerie, colorful details that are rarely, if ever,

fully explained.

He uses Japanese words that most

Japanese would not know, (“Tadasu-san,’ she

says, her voice low and melodious. “Watashi

ga dareka wakaranai no ne?”) uses English

words that Americans would never encounter,

Rock writes of Asada, a Japanese American

translator of technical manuals who embarks

on a hike to see a ghost in "Shaken."

Together, these two groups of words are like a third language—one beset by redundancy,

with two words for each one, with almost no one to share it. Such eloquent arranging of

uncomplicated language is typical Rock, and here it gorgeously illustrates Asada's literal

predicament, which is a mirror of his metaphorical predicament. The ghost he encounters will
tell him something that will offer a flicker of clarity—but only a flicker; the rest is up to him, and

us. Rock's work is fraught with the beginnings of change.

This novel is populated by strangers, ghosts, and other shadowy figures, the

thirteen stories (Blooms, Stranger, Shaken, The Sharpest Knife, Thrill, Gold Firebird, Lights,

Signal Mirror, The Silent Men, Halo Effect, Disappeared Girls, Pregrine Falcon, and

Disentangling) in The Unsettling attend to those startling moments when what we have

understood as familiar is suddenly revealed as mysterious and foreign. Told through Rock’s

imaginative and wholly original voice, these are haunted tales about fascination, transformation,

and the relationship between the two. Its genre are paranormal fiction, suspense, and thriller.

Rock loves to find lost characters who crave such a potentially dangerous shakeup—but

the result is always surprising. It's tempting to call Rock's stories incomplete, but that implies

carelessness, and they are anything but that. A feeling that something is lost permeates them, but

also a feeling that it can be found again, if only you look hard enough.

The stories were filled with the ordinary, beautifully described, but the situations, meant

to unnerve, are jarring, each attempting a sleight of hand that leaves me confused. Touted as

"those startling moments when what we understood as familiar is revealed as suddenly

mysterious and foreign", the surprises arrive from strange juxtapositions of external rather than

internal realities. The title is meant to suggest the nature of the collection, but, though they have

odd moments of potential menace, the threats always dissipate with the dawn, intimate peeks into

the secrets of people's lives, if only for a moment, but with less threat than the disturbed nature

of the protagonists, the stories themselves vague, as though the author is circling different

emotions with changing images, scenarios where the themes are acted out, characters positioned

in the landscapes, confronting memories, disappointments and losses.

 I struggle to find a cohesive theme, a recognizable fear or realization, honestly wanting to

like this collection. Stories inform when they reveal truths when we recognize ourselves in others

or share the burdens of their choices, but over and over, I ask myself why these people, this

place, this situation? And at the end, I question if I have understood anything at all. I also noticed

that the characters never inhabit real lives, a problem I find unsettling. Many of the short stories I

was sad of how they ended because I wanted to keep on with the story which is common for me

with short stories.

The end of each story was a little disconnected. I understand the style, but I was hoping

for something a little more solid, an answer instead of more questions. These stories were very

creative and dark. Each one uniquely eerily surreal culminating the final masterpiece at the end.

Many of the short stories I was sad of how they ended because I wanted to keep on with the story

which is common for me with short stories.