“Asphalt whack-a-mole”: A Review of Brett Biebel’s GRIDLOCK by Allison Renner

Gridlock
By Brett Beibel
Cornerstone Press (April 2024)
190 pp.

Brett Biebel’s stories always have a deep sense of place, and that is true in Gridlock, even when the place is a 200-mile-long traffic jam. His latest collection explores the kaleidoscopic view of the human condition through a satirical yet poignant exploration of the American experience.

The collection starts with the contained setting of the congestion on I-94 before taking “an on-ramp to America and all the little shards that might somewhere still be left.” That includes a group of roommates who pool their resources to invest in a robot sex doll, a University of Minnesota student who hacks the United Nations website, and a community of men who move into stadiums and post about their lifestyle on Reddit.

Through the lens of the titular gridlock, Biebel blends elements of social commentary with dark comedy, offering a biting critique of American consumerism, suburban ennui, and the quest for meaning in a world of perpetual motion. He consistently unearths the extraordinary within the mundane.

Biebel’s characters always feel like people you know. People you recognize. People you’ve heard about from a friend of a friend. The cacophony of voices includes the father who parks his van sideways on the interstate and walks away. The parents who decide to divorce while going through the automatic car wash because it’s the only place their kid will sleep. The kid who falls off a 150-foot water tower and walks away unscathed.

The characters in these stories exist in a world shockingly similar to ours… but slightly off. There are names dropped in ways you’d never expect, like meeting Karl Rove at a bar in Iowa or smoking weed with Eugene McCarthy. You may wonder if these are people you passed while shoplifting from Macy’s in the Mall of America because these characters are all startlingly unique but also incredibly universal.

Biebel addresses different themes in the eight sections of this collection: G.R.I.D.L.O.C.K. Family, relationships, friendships, sports, politics: his stories give us a different approach to understanding. Get inspired by the tenured English professor who promises to give three classes of students A’s–as long as at least 12 students attend every class. Find out about the man who invents a machine that churns out book reviews and then tries to use it to critique his own novel draft. Or struggle to solve “Word Problem” to determine if person “I” will see a license plate from each of the 56 member states in a sovereign nation.

There are stories of deli meat and imitation cheddar, guys itching for a fight in the parking lot of the Rainbow Foods on Snelling, and a father who provides a stockpile of Spam for his family. But regardless of the subject matter, the characters, or the setting, the final line of every story is like an explosion, a mic drop, a gut punch. It’s so good that you immediately have to go back and read the story again, knowing what you know now.

Allison Renner’s fiction and photography have appeared in South Florida Poetry Journal, Ellipsis Zine, Six Sentences, Rejection Letters, Atlas and Alice, Misery Tourism, Versification, FERAL, and vulnerary magazine. Her chapbook Won’t Be By Your Side is out from Alien Buddha Press. She can be found online at allisonrennerwrites.com and on Twitter @AllisonRWrites.