By writing a little story with some very big themes, local resident Kevin McNulty-DeNunzio has recently garnered critical acclaim. The Western Connecticut State University junior has been honored with the Connecticut State University Award for Fiction, the first such accolade the young writer has received. 

The CSU Award has been given out annually the past four years by the Connecticut Review, to acknowledge outstanding student submissions in the areas of fiction, non-fiction, poetry, and art. While there is no cash prize associated with the award, recipients are published in the CT Review, a prominent literary journal put out bi-annually by the Connecticut State University System. According to Dr. J.P. Briggs, a professor at WestConn and Senior Editor of the Review, the winners are chosen by independent editors outside the CSU System to avoid bias.

The story in question, titled “Bulova,” is an astute meditation on - among other things - religion, philosophy, quantum physics, and the ethereal nature of time. It’s ambitious, to be sure, but McNulty-DeNunzio succeeds in drawing parallels and comparisons between his myriad themes through the story’s protagonist, a 17-year-old boy by the name of Langley. Langley, an orphan, has been taken in by a straight-laced family, the Esplans, who have given him room and board–and little else. On the surface, Bulova is a story about a mildly dysfunctional family’s pilgrimage to Catholic Mass on an Easter morning. But the real insight is in the eye (and in the mind’s eye) of the beholder, Langley. Through him, we are taken from flights of puppy-love fancy to ruminations on the extent of the cosmos, all within the span of a few pages.

With a sparse prose style, McNulty-DeNunzio proves that it’s more effective to show than to tell. He populates his story with carefully chosen recurring symbols: black holes, the Dymaxion map hanging on the wall of Langley’s bedroom, depicting the world as “one island in one ocean…from space”, the archaic stone walls which used to denote property lines but have since been assimilated into the New England woods, and, the story’s namesake, a Bulova watch given to Langley by his father shortly before his parents’ untimely demise.

Using these symbols as a framework, McNulty-DeNunzio weaves confidently between the minutia of everyday life and some almost-unfathomable concepts of cosmic proportion. One memorable sequence has Langley nursing a crush on a choirgirl from afar, noting her eyes with “pupils like black holes.” Suddenly, helped by his imagination and some narrative magic, he is looking at the world out of the choirgirl’s eyes. Lacking complete understanding of the situation, he finds himself pining for a “theory of everything”. It is a somewhat mystifying paragraph, but the cerebral gymnastics it asks one to perform attune the reader to the dissonance presented: the rift between those truly pondering the mysteries of the universe and those simply sitting in church, standing up when told to do so.

When asked about the conclusions he wants his audience to draw from this juxtaposition, NcNulty-DeNunzio is demure. “When I first wrote the story, people interpreted it as being very down on religion,” he says, but “it’s a blend of [science and religion] that you really have to find.” Referring to his story’s examination of the very big and the very small, he asks rhetorically, “How do you join the two?”

The answer for him seems to lie in the layout of the Dymaxion map – a deconstruction of the classic spherical globe resulting in a two-dimensional map with irregular borders. The key to this representation of the world is that, not only does it keep the land masses in proportion to one another as few two-dimensional maps do, but it illustrates the interconnectedness of the world by stringing all the continents into a single linear archipelago. This same interconnectedness courses through the sentences of “Bulova.”

Speaking of interconnectedness, McNulty-DeNunzio says he was raised Catholic, but had a falling out with the church–probably not coincidental, considering his somewhat grim depiction of churchgoers. The name of the parish in the story–St. Francis of Assisi–was taken from the church he grew up attending. “I didn’t intend for this to happen,” he says, but “after doing some research into the saints to figure out which one to use, St. Francis turned out to be a perfect fit.” It’s certainly not the only serendipitous thing about “Bulova”, whose seemingly disparate elements come together to suggest a cohesive vision of the universe. With his budding talent now being recognized with the CSU Award for Fiction, we can look forward to seeing more well-crafted serendipity out of Kevin McNulty-DeNunzio in the future.