Review: `The story is the place, and Rick's Place is a café américain.'
Rating: 5 out of 5
Date: 05 18, 2014
Jason Akley grows on you, or grows into you, or at least makes you reconsider how stories can happen in a way that bathes the reader's mind with exquisite prose, as comfortable in stream of conscience ramblings about spaces or sounds or the other entries to senses. At the same time he can spin a story so palpably real that we are pulled into a timeframe and a place and a familiarity with characters so that metaphors and analogies simply seem right, seem natural, seem focused. He writes about historical ideas as reincarnated in his own character creations. So how did this Tulane graduate in physics and mathematical economics change partners to dance with a muse? Who cares? He did, and that is enough. . But to discover what the man is truly about it is necessary to read his books. He has the gift that imbues Bukowski's writings, the poetic balance of such poets as John Berryman, Allen Ginsberg, and Hart Crane, and the imagination and flights of fantasy that circle reality like few others writing today. Think Foer, Burroughs, etc. Jason Akley tells fine stories, yes, but it is in the bathing of his literate skills that provides the real pleasure of reading his experimentally designed work that makes him so extraordinary.RICK'S PLACE is a tavern that became a church. That doesn't really matter because what Akley has created here is a gathering place for expressing a lot of idle conversations, musings, moments of quotations all revolving around a strange cast of tavern hangers - Jim, Cal, Angela, Poopsie, Billy, Jay, Cooper, Sam the writer, Patrick, Tom - and of course our narrator who is like an eardrum, taking in the mental meanderings and making them into a pixilated puzzle. `It's funny how you still can be in your own world though, how you see other people because of that.'  The best way to summarize what happens on the pages of this `experimental' book is to put it into quotes from the contents: `You shouldn't be fooled by Rick. You can't let the long hair fool you. He used to be hippie once, but that was before he owned a business, and being a bar owner wasn't his first venture into making money. I say this to continue the narrative, and not the plot. Because plots are boring-- you always know how they end-- because they do end. Despite the twists and turns, a formula is followed-- a given. And this narrative is stripped of that. And if you're not afraid a garden awaits. Where you accept your humanity without anger-- your eternity as a sinner-- the fate of your vanity... I know what I am . I know in having you stare at me. And I've held many stares. But even I too must end, and not just when you look away. Because Rick kept me-- after he sold the place-- this after Sam felt forgiven. Cracked now, and in his garage, but the inscription still there. I'm not on any walls, but I still reflect something. I reflect the other things he's left behind, stored. And if I have any plot at all it has no surprises. I know how I must end. I will return to what I came from, and if you have any love for this earth you too will be a part of it. You too will be recycled. Forever.'Or as Akley comments, `You relive your past in each day, in each moment, and sometimes invisible, like a ghost seeing what was once desired. And it's funny when you realize it, when you become aware you're this ghost, and like through some tunnel of ice, you look out--focused--all peripherals lost, until you almost think you know too much, and only that one seed of doubt to distrust the whole menagerie, and the truth there... And of course you look away, because you must--it's the only way to be involved in it once again--to come back to what the other sees in you--that reflection in your memory, and the truth from where you were traces an indelible history, with facets to every moment, becoming the past that you live. A response to your fate.'RICK'S PLACE is a birthing station, a room where thoughts and peoples responses to life flow like the beer they drain. You have to surrender a bit of time to get in through the doors, but once you are inside then the radiant flowering of Jason Akley's gifts will keep you there - through poetry, responses to death, and ...responses to these strange new friends he as created. Grady Harp, May 14