Welfare by Steve Anwyll
A review and Q+A by Teddy Burnette
There is one scene in Austin Powers where the titular character attempts a three-point turn while driving in an extremely narrow hallway, which quickly turns into a million-point turn, no progress ever made, a simple retreat before a tiny advance, before yet another tiny retreat. In not just one scene, but for the entire duration of the story, Stan Acker, the main character of Steve Anwyll’s novel, Welfare (Tyrant Books, 2017), is the epitome of this backing up to go forward, only to go back to where you began. Acker leaves the home he lives in with his dad and step-mom while he’s still in high school, and lives in squalor, finding a room in a one disgusting apartment before eventually moving to a different, yet equally trashed and dirty apartment somewhere else in the city he lives in, far away from anything he’d ever need to get out of his mindless routine of failure. He walks and sweats, listens to drivers going by scream insults and hurl empty coffee cups at him; he arrives to the welfare office to speak with his case worker, he chafes his thighs to oblivion walking to a useless meeting about a job, or a resume workshop he’s required to go to, because all he wanted was a little freedom. Freedom from school, and parents, and expectations, and needing money. One day, Stan arrives to an interview along with a group of other men also applying:
“I look at them all. So hopeful. Thinking of the many ways this day is going to change their lives. And I laugh at them. Every single one of them. These poor fools. Don’t they know they don’t stand a chance against me?”
Throughout, Acker for one moment dreams of the job he’ll have soon, some idyllic factory job, when he’ll have enough money to always have food and cigarettes, and women to spend time with and not his roommate who plays video games all day. Yet there is always the reverse. The next moment finds Acker dismayed over the loss of time that a new job will entail, the realization that he values time over money, and that he’d rather sit around smoking and reading than serve any sort of power-that-be. Stan thinks, at one point:
“I like the pace of my life. And when I say sure, I’ll come in for the interview, I can’t believe it.
I watch my roommate. My friends. The poor saps. They might have more possessions. And brighter futures. But god damn, they work like animals. Come home sweating. Angry. Complaining that it’s no fucking way to live a life.
And here I am, walking right into it. Willingly.”
This is a novel of repetitions. The story again and again returns to the flip-flopping of Stan’s brain, always happening in the same place, his room or on the couch, he readying for yet another long walk to nowhere, or a meeting with a person who will see him as the failure that he knows he is. The novel feels like it goes nowhere, and that’s because it really does go nowhere, it operates alone inside Stan Acker’s mind, ping-ponging around until it settles back where it started, nothing having changed, except for the reader.
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Q&A with Steve Anwyll:
Q: What are your thoughts on Welfare now? What’s it like thinking back on it?
A: Welfare is probably the best book I’ll ever write and I’ll never live up to it again. Which is a sad and beautiful thing. It changed my life. Gave me purpose. Opened up my world. I’m not sure what I’d be doing if Giancarlo didn’t publish it. Pushing up daisies sounds right though. So I look back at it like it saved me.
Q: What are you working on now, if you’re willing to share?
A: Books. My self.
Q: What are a couple important important books and authors to you?
A: Quiet Days in Clichy by Henry Miller and The Clown by Heinrich Böll.
Q: Anything you’ve read recently you’d recommend?
A: The End of Eddy by Éduoard Louis.
Q: Are we all lost and waiting to be found? Or is that crap?
A: I can’t speak for everyone … but yeah I’m lost. Though I’m not waiting for someone to find me. I firmly believe that’s my problem to solve.
Previously: Elizabeth Ellen Interviews Steve Anwyll.