Some stories don’t need a strong narrative. Some stories wash over you, under you, carry you with them until the tide lets go, and that doesn’t always mean when it reaches the shore. J.A. Tyler’s second novel, A Man of Glass & All The Ways We Have Failed, is a different kind of storytelling. It breaks all rules of traditional plot and narrative, and instead relies on its staggering language and imagery to move the reader steadily from one page to the next. Call it prose, call it a poem, call it a mirage, if it seems necessary. It isn’t. Here, labels fall between cracks, like sand. Your mind will abandon reality and physics, but this certainly isn’t sci-fi. It’s a love song. It’s a snapshot. It’s a man and woman aching to communicate but never saying a word. Maybe one is dead. Maybe they lost a child and never fully recovered. There is evidence for both, but it’s still not the point. It’s the emotion that matters, the description, the different elements in the earth that they both become as a result.

“Winter came early into us he says, and she would now had she heard him that this means they are frozen and the lack of movement is not their fault but a matter of glaciers and ice, how cold seeps in.

We have grown cold he says but he is the only one showing frostbite on his cheeks and the extension of his nose. He is the only one who looks bruised by winter. He is the only one waiting in the street for more garbage to scatter, for more leaves to fall, for her to hear him again like she used to hear him, before there was so much gutter between them” (59).

This style isn’t new to Tyler. He runs Mud Luscious Press (see here and here for Fringe interviews with Mud Luscious writers), and in an interview with The Faster Times, claims that the term “experimental” is overused.  ”I want a text that shatters, that buries me in its lines,” he says, “works that reach into me without pandering, hand-holding, without guiding me as if I am blind.”

Which, ultimately self-describes his own work.  (See Terry, Tawny & Lucinda, Tyler’s short story in Fringe, for further proof.)

Spanning only 111 pages, this book deserves a second read, a third read, a fifth read, even. New layers will stick out like a hidden bassline you couldn’t hear because you had in different earbuds. This story is timeless, placeless. It could happen in the clouds, in space, in the desert or in Wichita, Kansas, because the setting is the map of a relationship, of longing, what is said and what isn’t, the voice that screams through a glass that no one on the other side can hear.