With “Farewell Transmission: Notes from Hidden Spaces,” Will McGrath offers a series of graceful essays taking us from the mountains of Lesotho to life outside a Phoenix homeless shelter.
McGrath is a thoughtful guide. He’s open enough to enjoy the pleasures of Elvis impersonators and church-basement wrestling matches, but he’s mindful of the depths beneath: a friend stabbed by his own brother in Lesotho, a homeless client embarking on one last bender as he fades out of life.
The author is open with his sympathies. He calls out a racist mine manager who invites him to watch a rugby match and chews out hospital workers who judge his client for turning back to cocaine on a terminal diagnosis. It’s easy to agree with McGrath, but while it’s understandable he doesn’t extend the same graciousness to his foes as his friends, it also feels like a missed opportunity in essays of this caliber. As he notes, he drank the mine manager’s beer, ate his food…and waited until they’d parted ways to write an essay calling out the man’s racism.
That said, the stories here are warm and memorable. Perhaps the standout is “Keyhole to Sana’a,” which shares how a sister-in-law’s lost iPhone made its way to Yemen, where it offered a window into a different world via photos uploaded by a teenage boy into a shared iCloud account. McGarth turns a personal connection into a geopolitical one, delicately linking the threads between this boy’s life and the civil war that may have consumed him. It’s a sensitive story carefully told, one that’s well at home in this excellent collection.
Quotes
“Elvis is a stocky First National man with a thick watermelon gut, thick gold sunglasses, thick black pomp. Very quickly he is sweating hard, aiming for verisimilitude that would make the King proud. His pipes are rich baritone and listening to him is an experience not unlike being rubbed in butter.”
“Come Friday night, the two of us stormed into the Legion, hot for combat. We swept past the horseshoe bar and into the packed community hall, the crowd adorned in flannel, camo, blaze orange, plaid, and Carhartt, all the shades of Minnesota’s rainbow.”
“Professional wrestling occupies a sui generis space in the culture, a strange nexus where “Star Wars”-quoting nerds and juiced-up gym rats might share space together and may in fact be the same person. It is one of the unique American artforms, like jazz, or comic books, or endowing corporations with the legal rights of people.”