The Matador Waits

Dashiel Carrera reviews Nathan Dragon’s “The Champ Is Here.”

By Dashiel CarreraMarch 6, 2025

• Fiction

NATHAN DRAGON’S DEBUT COLLECTION, The Champ Is Here (2024), is a stolid, meditative work of fiction, as much at home with the Americana folk tradition as it is with American literature. It’s easy to place this work in the lineage of modern microfiction masters like Lydia Davis, Diane Williams, and Kathryn Scanlan, who appear in the pages of NOON alongside Dragon. For these writers, as for Dragon, the sentence is champion, and life’s ambiguities are rendered through a paradoxical assemblage of sparse copulas and aphorisms. One feels hyperoriented in the surface texture of such works, intimately familiar with the domestic matters discussed, while slowly unmoored by the increasing awareness that the apparently simplistic world depicted is shifting in an irreparable way.

Though similar to much of the pithy, enigmatic, and stubbornly experimental work for which NOON Annual is known, Champ charts its own course. Its sentences are finely crafted but humbly unadorned, like a well-whittled pipe at a flea market, and are frequently blunted by tongue-in-cheek delivery. Sometimes they’re enigmatic, rolling with the tangled mystique of a Bob Dylan aphorism (“Traveling west is going backwards, he’d thought then, and since he’d covered some ground he should be a little younger”), while other times they unwind with the pithy, bathetic wisdom of a Yogi Berra quote (“the short and long life of a one-liner”).

Dragon’s characters are concerned largely with the staples of American rural life: woodpeckers, beverages, dogs, road trips, fishing, produce, dishware, over-the-counter pharmaceuticals, Food Lions, the highway, and the woods. Their world seems at once intimate and expansive, concerned largely with the workaday but often drifting off to brief recollections of lost connections, a passing awareness of life’s meandering course. We see here domesticity, as we have in Raymond Carver and John Cheever, but we see also a passing longing and familiarity with competition, aggression, and an ideal of masculinity that has since passed on from mainstream American culture. Dragon’s characters aren’t pushing for adventure or freedom like Cheever’s titular character in “The Swimmer,” but they briefly recall past victories, picking up a dusty plastic boxing trophy only to put it back down a sentence later. Though the collection is aptly named The Champ Is Here, the work seems more concerned with the champ that once was: what does it mean to have been a champion, to have forgotten how to be a champion, to be unsure if you still are a champion?

It’s this fleeing nostalgia for a former conception of masculinity that makes Champ such a timely collection. I find myself writing this review once again in the wake of social upheaval, returning to the Deep South as the political left reels from its second time losing the confidence of rural America, dumbfounded that such a vague promise as “make America great again” could have swayed 300 million people to elect a convicted felon for president. Champ provides a partial decoder ring for this phenomenon, revealing a rural masculinity that is not angry, toxic, or involuntarily celibate, but which longs for something missing. “Like a cowboy,” Dragon writes. “He wanted to be seen by someone.” Other times, these characters seem to be anticipating the return of a more machismo world: “I kept looking at the matador stuck up there in the TV, still waiting for his bull.”

These vignettes pass like eyeball floaters of thoughts, specks of images wandering on their protagonists’ peripheries before crossing the threshold of attention. Narrators get calls about electric pet fences they didn’t put up months prior, or they long to phone up “that kid [they] knew from that one city who looks for the luck in things all day. The clover kid.” Adrift, neither unhappy nor frustrated, these characters live lives pieced together from small anticipatory desires that roll past on to nowhere: “He knows what it means to be hopeful, like the hour you get off work and you’re on your walk home”; “Came back with a six-pack that I didn’t really need or want”; “Eventually the company collapsed and that was it for him, half glad. Had made some money. That was that ’till it was gone.” How to embody and acknowledge these desires without letting them erupt: This is Champ’s meditation.

Meditation, I mean here, in the Taoist sense—not a Bernhardian obsession that unpacks and catalogs its subject with the intensity of an archaeological dig but, rather, one that plucks thoughts from consciousness with a catch-and-release policy. One imagines Dragon’s characters crouched on a shore somewhere, reeling in fish, watching them flip on the line with a cigarette hanging from their lip. “[C]ast out and reel, cast out, reel in, cast out,” he writes.

Small regrets pass by as groceries are packed and unpacked, turns of phrases half-remembered—things we carry with us lingeringly, quietly, in the back of our minds. Dragon’s prose manages to draw attention to this thread of life while allowing us to look away just as easily.

This is no easy feat. Champ breaks Kurt Vonnegut’s cardinal rule that “every character should want something, even if it is only a glass of water.” But Dragon does so with such precision that the few times desire is expressed, it ripples beautifully on the surface of Champ’s world, concentric circles expanding slowly to other shores.

In an era when writing seems increasingly conflated with thinking, essaying, and argumentation, Champ’s words seem strikingly unthinking, presenting thought as a stream rather than a tour de force desperate for its voice in the crowd. Dragon’s prose invites us into its reeds to make a home, as best we can, in the waiting, watching, windows of American life.

A lambent flame of talent, glowing in the US heartland. The champ is here.