The Hospital for Bad Poets Review

J.C Hallman levitates and modernizes literary Post-Modernism in his short story collection The Hospital for Bad Poets by dealing with some of the concerns writers in the twentieth century drew attention to. The clearest example of this is seen in “Carlson’s Team” a story whose main protagonist uses cinematic effects as social commentary on the effects television has on relationships. All fourteen short stories deal with the complexities in intrapersonal relationships. The Hospital for Bad Poets contains characters that are ordinary, much like Raymond Carver’s quotidian settings and characters, but Hallman’s characters are not static, each has a yarning for something—they all have secrets and double lives.

In “Carlson’s Team,” the narrator, Carson, who is also the protagonist of the piece, directly addresses the reader by formatting his tale like a TV script. His interaction with his wife, Wendy, is edited to fit the demand of an audience. The couple is either literally or metaphorically in a sitcom—the reality of that idea is blurred by the narrator’s stab at modern day reality TV and fictitious overtone. It is also important to note that the television set is always on when Carson narrates scenes with his wife. Social media takes over the private lives of the common man, a commentary much noted in Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49 and Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, two Post-Modernist books that use the television set as a prop to emphasize the new mankind. Scenes that are unscripted in Carlson and Wendy’s day-to-day routine are “cut-off” by transitioning from one scene to the next—a quality seen in reality shows today. In this way, reality becomes fiction based on perceptions society has created in deciphering what makes a relationship work, and in this case, what gets more ratings. Nothing of substance can be spoken between the protagonist and his wife because that would mean they would have to face their marital issues along with their audience, and they can’t take that risk without going against the Post-Modern ideology that language doesn’t mean anything—it doesn’t get anyone anywhere.

Another story in Hallman’s collection that uses a prop to avoid communication is “Autopoiesis for the Common Man.” In the first paragraph, the protagonist/narrator tells us his dilemma; he is dating two nurses at the same time, Joan and Marci. The frame of the story is built around the idea of a non-genuine connection he has with the two nurses—the only thing that links him to them is the talk of microbiology. Characters in this short story are hidden behind science. Instead of having typical dialogue between two characters, the protagonist and Joan or Marci replace normal talk with ideas learned from a fictional book titled The Conjugal Cyst. The piece or rather, the main character, loses the frame of the story when he has to deal with something serious, in this case, keeping a sincere tone when he pleads Marci to come back to him. The frame comes back when Marci can’t tell him that he reminds her of her son. By the end of the story, the protagonist realizes that every time he can’t make a connection with a female character, he must go back to science.

Hallman’s plot twists are mundane but his characters reactions and behaviors to each other are surreal and unexpected. Most of the stories in The Hospital for Bad Poets consists of one-liners in dialogue; one dimensional, but the narrative move the story forward. Mundane characters in “Fire” are made interesting by the circumstances that surround them—a fire that is about to engulf his house in flames. Ned’s marriage to Elise is dry and filled with empty, un-kept promises, but their inability to communicate keeps the reader hopeful and reassured that Ned will one day speak to his wife, even if it’s just about the fire that is approaching their neighborhood. Ned wants to speak to a person of the opposite gender so bad that he calls an incident status hotline not to get an update, but to try to communicate to an entity not his own. Ned asks the woman on the other line where the fire is located at the moment. Then he asks her if there had been any fatalities. The woman becomes hostile. “I live close to it. I was just wondering. I’ve got kids” (159). Ned needs her to stay on the phone in the same way that Mr. Gibbs needs to believe that Tom Royce is making their neighborhood decay with his power to stay sane. The poet in “The Hospital for Bad Poets” needs to be drifted in the poet’s hospital to be able to better communicate his work with the outside world.

Hallman’s stories don’t follow a typical arc with closure at the end, but this doesn’t take away from the brilliance of his pieces. At least his characters try to gain closure in their lives—they don’t simply stay static. These characters progress in his or her own way—the reader can only have hope.