The back cover synopsis of Bernard Cooper’s book Maps to Anywhere, explaining how Cooper “digs into the glimmering surface of the southern California landscape, observing the collision of the American Dream with the realities of everyday life” doesn’t do the book justice. And if not for “Winner of the PEN/Hemingway Award” printed on the bottom of the cover, Maps to Anywhere is easily mistaken for a collection of nonfiction essays.
Cooper has an uncanny ability to take the mundane, and draw it out with finite observations. Take the purchase of a globe, as described in the title essay, “Maps to Anywhere.” The simple, mundane act of forgetting one’s name when addressed is described in detail as “the world feels chilly and sad and small, metallic and hollow and inconsequential” (37) while he is shopping for a globe. And then, as if to remind him his name is Stone, his finger falls on an “archipelago’s braille, abstract and hard as rock” (37). Yes, his name is Stone, or at least that is the name that he gives to the woman manning the shop. Since the essays in Maps to Anywhere are told in first person, yet the protagonist in the essay “Maps to Anywhere” is named Stone, the reader is left to wonder if Cooper purposely gave a false name in order to hide his attraction to the woman running the store. Yet even taking the mundane and drawing it out, Cooper is able to bring an unexpected tenderness.
The short section or essay “Horseradish: Lessons in Pleasure and Pain” that is part of the longer essay “The Wind Did It,” Cooper brings to bare this unexpected tenderness towards his father. His father has called him, and Cooper rushes to the house, and let himself “in the front door with key I hadn’t used in years” (60). That immediately lets the reader know there is strife in the relationship, in the even the reader opens the book random to page 60, but also as a reminder to those who started from the beginning. What follows, though, is a paragraph of unexpected tenderness. Cooper describes how he dresses his father “guiding his arms and spindly legs, softly repeating ‘There we go’” (60) before he sees “a collision of gratitude and shame that [his father] worked his mouth to talk about. No sound came out” (60). In a book crushed beneath observations of the mundane, and thick with minute details of “the realities of everyday life,” this particular paragraph almost redeems the book.
That particular paragraph, so deftly conveying relationship through observation, can also confuse the reader as, again, it reads like nonfiction. Perhaps that is the greatest strength of Maps to Anywhere. It is fiction that reads like nonfiction, putting the reader in common, everyday occurrences so as to better make the journey anywhere an essay decides to go. The minute details, though tedious at times, paint a picture of surroundings as well as character, further dragging the reader along until the last page.