The Distinction of the Mature and the Horror of the Naive

"I started thinking that Grant was right, that we all came from too much money. Not enough to spare us any hardship, but enough to take the edge off. We were never going to really fail or really succeed. Everything was going to be blunted by a buffer of money. There would always be money. We were never going to be destitute or struggling or starving. We would have to break entirely from our parents and their money to get anywhere near an experience that was not lessened by the knowledge that we would always be protected, looked out for, and kept from anything unpleasant or dirty. It was not life at all but something else, something lived walking six inches off the ground. I had never dropped anything that could not be replaced or transgressed in a way that couldn't be corrected." - from THE DISTINCTION OF THE MATURE AND THE HORROR OF THE NAIVE A pair of teenagers live their own version of Hemingway's fiesta in Pamplona; a group of college students spends the weekend at a hotel for a friend's wedding; a young bartender at a Mexican resort flirts with a pretty tourist: the characters in the seven stories that make up Fowler's collection - his "youth in limbo" - share youth, but they also share a palpable uncertainty, a wavering and fragile becoming made all the more perilous by their awareness of it. They are characters on the brink: they are preparing to sacrifice their infinite possible futures for the singular lives they will live. While the anxiety of this phase of life is often forgotten in time, when memory has made the course of one's life seem inevitable, in Fowler's hands it becomes vividly palpable once more: these are characters staring down an impending tragedy, one made all the worse by its intangibility, by their uncertainty about it, by their inability to articulate its character, by the older world's indifference to it. It is a tragedy Fowler captures with due restraint, subtlety, art, and compassion. Written by Ellison Fowler Cover Design by Tom Maven