Books — Subtle Man Loses His Day Job and Other Stories

As I’ve said before here, I love that my job means I work with talented authors whose work I can platform from time to time. Such is the case with Thomas Allbaugh’s collection Subtle Man Loses His Day Job and Other Stories, a set of unvarnished portraits that center characters wrestling with the extraordinary weight they bear while living the most ordinary of lives.

Throughout the collection, the stories revolve around shared characters and places echoing the world of George Willard in Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio or the way Hemingway’s In Our Time wraps itself around Nick Adams’ experiences. Stories shift with the characters at the center of them, but the world always feels connected, even in the less directly linked pieces.

For my money, though, Allbaugh’s tone and delivery are reminiscent—strikingly at times—of Larry Heinemann’s surprise 1987 National Book Award-winner, Paco’s Story. That novel, which follows a Vietnam veteran’s attempt to reintegrate with life back home, leans on a sparse directness that presents the main character’s lowest and highest moments in the same way: trapped in the amber of all he lost in his time in the military. 

Similarly, Subtle Man presents a series of people who want to create something meaningful in their lives but are very often prevented from doing so because they cannot free themselves from an anchor in their past. 

Turning on the hub of the Side Step bar, paths cross and uncross in meaningful ways that act as a practical framework holding it all together. However, what most connects the elements of this collection is a shared wistfulness for a time when sadness and loss could be held up to the light and examined, not so much to convert those feelings to something more positive, just so that the characters and the center of it all can catch a glimpse of what’s gone, if only to give shape to the hole their lives revolve around.

This is not to say that there aren’t moments of humor throughout Allbaugh’s stories. In truth, there are several, but they act as attenuators for the losses borne. The beauty of this book, then, is the way in which subjective notions trapped in the past are made objective in physical things that hold present grieving and rumination.  

A supermarket manager’s lost name tag becomes a cipher for relationships fizzling in middle age. (Full disclosure: I edited and published the initial version of the story carrying this symbol more than a decade ago in a journal I worked at, and seeing how it had progressed, in the light of the entire collection, was very satisfying.)

A teenager’s transistor radio saves him nightly even as it can never be the stereo his father took that would allow him to connect with the music—and, by extension, the world—of his high school peers.

A once-open garage door found closed resides as both a youthful infatuation squashed and a metaphor for almost every story in the collection as every story seems to return to what its characters must do when they’ve been cut off from what they thought they needed for their life to mean something. 

The recording of a lost father’s voice and the headphones that play it for his unborn child intersect one man’s worries, pressing his attention out into the wider world of concerns that daily swirl around him. 

An empty picture frame affixed to a cubicle wall becomes a provocation no one seems provoked by except the man who hung it there.  

All told, the stories of Subtle Man hold space for what their characters could not hold onto in order for them to see how those losses helped lead to what they do have. And, if we’re paying attention, they allow readers to see this in their own lives.  

As one of those reader, I appreciate the subtle way Allbaugh goes about giving me the chance to do so.