Banango Lit

What better way to celebrate Banango’s entrance into the Big Blog Leagues (check out our new URL!) than with a long-overdue review of “Ambient Florida Position,” a novella by Josh Spilker. The protagonist of the story is 26-year-old Wallace, recently out of a job. Wallace heads to interview after inane interview in a wetsuit. He moves in with his Uncle Ander, who’s considering buying a run-down motel. He starts a synth band that samples from 80s movies. None of this is nearly as twee as it sounds. It takes place during the 2008 presidential campaign, and some chapters are interspersed with quotes from McCain and Obama. The specifics aren’t as important as the general atmosphere painted of 20-something life in Florida.

Spilker expresses the quality of place really well. He pins down the aimlessness, the slight absurdity underlying everything in this small Florida town. I can’t even find the name of the specific place. Maybe he never mentioned it. It’s not really necessary; just Florida is enough. The town seems to belong quintessentially to the Sunshine State, and yet I recognized a lot of the Midwest in it too. White-bread towns, flyover country. Daily life grates in these places. The title kind of hints at this specific-yet-universal quality: “Ambient Florida Position” tips you off to where the story actually takes place, but the “ambient” makes me think of a Google Maps green arrow hovering over Florida, ready to go to any such asinine place in the United States of America. Instead of beaches maybe there’ll be cornfields. Spilker conveys this tangible sense of place by frequently interweaving contemporary references, like with some girls standing outside a bar in “girls in short Kohl’s dresses and Nine West heels.” You know who those girls are. You’ve seen them. You probably went to high school with them.

Or how about this description:

The Bronx Bar, more assurances made that not too many New Yorkers would be there, that it was good clean honest fun, with pool tables and at least (count’em!) three pinball machines and the music was of the punk rock variety, (“They cater to working-class hipsters!”) a burly third-baseman type had said to one of the unattached, who in her Ann Taylor Loft-but really Target clothes was neither assured or assuaged, but seemed okay once there and that guy taught her the words to an Against Me! song, then in the most fluid prose explained why they had sold out. Truly moving. 

You can picture that exactly, right? That clever description made me laugh, and not even ironically. This happened more than once while reading Ambient Florida Position. Spilker really used brand names and references effectively to shape the manifest sense of place, without overly weighing the story down. References like this can seem like a pandering or even well-intentioned attempt to make the story accessible and interesting to a young audience, which often strikes me as (1) annoying and (2) clunky and (3) vapid. But I didn’t feel that way at all here. These cultural touchstones of our generation were a necessary part of the story. And they were skillfully mixed into the writing.

Another possible reason that a story ostensibly taking place in Florida seems so universal is the various quotes from Obama and McCain, ca. 2008. They lent an ominous overcast to the whole thing and made me think of the story as a movie: local action on the ground in Wallace’s life cut with sound bites from the presidential candidates. All the quotes seemed to be from speeches given in Florida, about Florida, but they served to break up the story and remind the reader of the world beyond Wallace’s small one. The selection of quotes didn’t seem too keyed to what was actually happening in the story.

There’s one thought-provoking point when Wallace starts his band with his brother and a new friend:

…a look in Nathan’s eye and Court’s eye that sometimes the best creative ventures are haphazard and gimmicky at the same time, that this repurposing would be fun, could be fun, loaded with potential and possibility without over thinking any of it too much, nobody had a pen to write a mission statement down but we believed in it all the same, searing onto our frontal lobes, where the best and worst memories always reside.

This is, I think, something worth keeping in mind. Not just for Wallace and his friends, but for any creative people today: knowing the mission of your creative work and acting in kind. Wallace doesn’t discredit creative pursuits that are fun, but keenly believes in some sort of point to his work. I wouldn’t go so far as to say every creative venture needs a coherent mission statement that’s borne out in the work, but it’s an interesting point to think about, particularly in light of the vapid quality that certain “fun” works seem to have.  

Like I said before, what’s actually happening doesn’t seem as important as the general atmosphere of the story. Spilker mostly pulls this off, though there are a few characters that aren’t very fleshed out. One of these is Laurie, a friend of Wallace’s. I spent the entire story trying to figure out if he had feelings for her. Maybe it’s supposed to be ambiguous. I liked what I saw of Nathan, Wallace’s brother, but he just kind of came and went. I didn’t really even have strong feelings about Wallace. Like the plot, the characters were secondary to the ambience—the ambient Florida position—of the story. 

So yes, on the balance, I really liked this story. Don’t be thrown off by the title: there’s something in Ambient Florida Position that’ll ring true in your own youth and young adulthood, no matter where it took place. Check out a digital copy here.