The Empire of Ice Cream (review)

Are you familiar with the scent of extinguished birthday candles? For me, their aroma is superseded by a sound like the drawing of a bow across the bass string of a violin. This note carries all of the melancholic joy I have been told the scent engenders — the loss of another year, the promise of accrued wisdom. Likewise, the notes of an acoustic guitar appear before my eyes like golden rain, falling from a height just above my head only to vanish at the level of my solar plexus. There is a certain imported Swiss cheese I am fond of that is all triangles, whereas the feel of silk against my fingers rests on my tongue with the flavor and consistency of lemon meringue. These perceptions are not merely thoughts, but concrete physical experiences. Depending upon how you see it, I, like approximately nine out of every million individuals, am either cursed or blessed with a condition known as synesthesia.

• Title: The Empire of Ice Cream
• Author: Jeffrey Ford
• Genre: Slipstream/Surreal/Fantasy
• Year: 2006

It only takes one story to turn someone into a fan of Jeffrey Ford. For me it was ‘Exo-Skeleton Town,’ in the first issue of Black Gate, that had me looking for more by him, and every story of his I’ve read since has only confirmed my initial appraisal — Jeffrey Ford is one of the finest short story writers working today. Tremendously imaginative but never vague or overblown, at once surreal and concrete, darkly poignant without ever resorting to sentimentality or cynicism, and always managing to achieve a real surprise without the use of cheap tricks, Ford grounds his sweeping fantastic visions in precise prose and real humanity.

The quotation at the top of this review is the first paragraph of this collection’s title story, ‘The Empire of Ice Cream’ (still available at Scifiction by following that link), which concerns a young man with synesthesia — a neurological condition in which sensory phenomena are abnormal to the point that sounds may evoke color, colors conjure scents, tastes create sounds, etc. The protagonist’s world of experience is immediately fascinating. His talent with music is apparent at a young age, and when William plays the piano he sees the composition explode before his eyes in colors and shapes. As a young man he studies to be a composer, and his method of composition is to create first a kind of abstract illustration in crayon. His life, and the strange phenomenon of synesthesia, is an immediate hook for the reader, but there is something even stranger going on. When William first tastes coffee ice cream — illicitly, for his parents didn’t allow him rich foods — he experiences a vision unlike anything else.

A girl, about his age, completely real and engaged in the humdrum everyday of her life. For a lonely young man such a vision is irresistible, and William does his best to obtain coffee ice cream whenever he can, eating the marvelous substance even as it makes him sick, until his doctor advises him that such fancies are best forgotten. And forget he does — until, years later, a weekend retreat to create his most important school project prompts him, for the first time, to drink coffee to stay awake. With the first taste the girl appears before him, real as anything, sipping coffee herself. They speak, two synesthetes who have watched each other over the years, both convinced the other is merely a product of their condition.

And the story becomes even more unexpected from that point on, but I think I’ve conveyed enough of the magic of this story to pique the interest. And the danger of overusing words like ‘unexpected’ and ‘magic’ when covering the other stories in this collection is all too real, for every one is a polished gem of the storyteller’s art. There’s the fairy-tale-like ‘The Annals of Eelin-Ok,’ the melancholy story of a being that inhabits sand castles, and lives only so long as the castle stands. ‘The Beautiful Gelreesh’ gives us a monster that uses its role as a kind of therapist to lure humans to their doom, and the surreal ‘Jupiter’s Skull’ has a man and woman reliving an experience of their dead acquaintance in a place just a little outside our own world.

One of the most striking ideas in the collection is central to ‘The Weight of Words,’ in which a man who describes himself as a Chemist of Printed Language has discovered a mathematical equation that governs the shape of a sentence. Merely by obscuring a single word in a certain sentence comprised of a certain font and point size, he can render words unseen by the conscious mind. The protagonist soon falls in with the ‘chemist,’ working as his proofreader in exchange for the inclusion of subliminal messages of reconciliation in the letters he writes to his estranged wife. But it isn’t long before the power of such subliminal messaging soon comes to the notice of those who would abuse it.

Several stories include rich autobiographical elements as well, achieving vivid portraits of nostalgia and loss. In ‘Botch Town,’ a long novella, Ford recreates the experience of growing up in small town New Jersey in the early sixties, at the time of life when the innocence of childhood is in its final bloom. This small town world is richly drawn, which makes the mysteries that plague it all the more perilous, and the synchronicity of events in the real world with a replica of the town in the protagonist’s basement all the stranger. And Ford’s experiences as a clamdigger come to life in ‘The Trentino Kid,’ where the death of one young man might just give meaning to the life of another.

Each piece is enhanced by Ford’s author notes, that give a great added insight into stories that are masterpieces of craftsmanship. Highly literate and boldly imaginative, Ford creates visionary speculative stories that never lose sight of the fundamentals of storytelling, or the humanity at the heart of fiction. For anyone seeking the best the field has to offer in the short form, The Empire of Ice Cream should be at the top of their list.

• Jeffrey Ford’s website
• The Empire of Ice Cream at Amazon