Labyrinths and Cathedrals: Outside Is The Ocean by Matthew Lansburgh

Stewart, however, is the present and the future, and Outside Is the Ocean is ultimately his story, a story shaped by the lives of those who have cared for, loved, and harmed him. Though the stories are told in the third person (except for the first-person of the letters and the opening story), we come to a deep understanding of Stewart’s experience. The narrative voice throughout the collection is keenly self-aware, bracing, and heartbreaking, but also funny in the way that philosophy-infused comedy can be funny—comedy that depends upon perspective or distance.

The title story, set in 1994, is both exquisitely frightening and compassionate; Lansburgh seems to superimpose Stewart’s childhood with his father on the one night that Stewart spends with a sadistic but compelling Nigerian businessman who has an equally complex and troubling relationship with his mastiff, Max. (Animals, in Outside Is the Ocean, do a great deal of work.) Sometimes violence, especially sexual violence, can feel gratuitous, or what that master of the modern psychological novel, Henry James, would have called “sensational.” Not here. In “Outside Is the Ocean,” we understand the impact of a cycle of chaos and violence that ends up becoming a pattern in the individual’s nervous system.

With the last story, “Buddy” (2019),” Lansburgh could have left us in the darkness, on the edge of that wood into which the child Hansel—for there is no Gretel—must venture forth. But Lansburgh is compassionate enough to recover Stewart. Here, despite Stewart’s isolation, a hard-won hope emerges from the duress of the visit of Stewart’s former partner, Luis, who comes to Boston for a conference. The event that triggered the breakup is particularly difficult for Stewart, given that Luis left not long after Stewart reluctantly introduced his lover to his mother. Not only did Luis feel compassion for Heike and imply that Stewart had done wrong by her, but Luis actually enjoyed her company. Now, years later, during Luis’s visit, Stewart wrestles with whether or not to tell Luis what happened between Heike and himself; he yearns to share his estrangement from his mother and the circumstances of her death, as well as what he has learned from her letters.

The title to this last story, then, is significant. “Buddy” is a term of endearment, and it was Luis’s nickname for Stewart while they were together; but “Buddy” is also a word used to call dogs or the form of address used by someone who has come to help a stranger, a fellow human being, in difficulty. Stewart is in psychic pain in this story, but he is brave enough to face what he must alone, or at least to let Luis, the man he deeply loved, leave without knowing how much he is suffering. Matthew Lansburgh is a writer whose mind houses labyrinths underground, but also towering cathedrals; even in ruins, they open onto sky.