Book Review: TERRARIUM: NEW AND SELECTED STORIES

Fresh ARC in hand from a writer whose work I have long admired -- always exciting! 

Valerie Trueblood’s new collection, to be released on August 7 of this year, will be a joy to those encountering her work for the first time, as well as to her long-time admirers. To call the book a “joy,” however, is in no way to suggest escapist fiction. Far from it. New stories in the Terrarium section, like those from earlier collections and from her novel, Seven Loves, run the gamut in tone from quixotic to grim, but all are realistic and compelling. This writer’s characters are real people — dreaming, trying, stumbling, falling, and going on as long as they can.

In any collection, it’s difficult not to have favorites, and the story that hit me hardest in this new group was “Crisco.” In only four pages, the author weaves different strands together — the global world of spies and other news, a local high school basketball star, a young reporter, a beautiful killer horse, a baby given up for adoption, losses inflicted by a distant war —  to form a complete world. 

“She did talk about her work,” Madeline told me when I asked. “Who, what, when, where why.” Was that all? “Well, she said you have to do that in her job. Know what the story is. She said that to John when he was shy.” But how, that was my question, how do you know what the story is? And if you do, how do you pull it, like a Slinky in the toy bin, out of the mass of everything else?

The quote above comes from the middle of the story (nearly its geographical center), and the question recurs in the final paragraph, where the narrator suggests possible answers to “What is the story?” That list of possibilities was nearly enough to break this reader’s heart! As always with Trueblood’s writing, however, all remains simplicity, even the all-too-human confusion brought to the question — and this is a paradox, friends, not a contradiction. Again, realistic.

As a terrarium is a small, enclosed world, a miniature portion of earth, just so do many of the Terrarium stories show the author experimenting with more condensed pieces than appeared in her earlier short story collections, Search Party; Marry or Burn, and Criminals: Love Stories. One of the stories in the volume Criminals, “Sleepover,” almost feels like novella, whereas “Harvest,” in the new book, is a single paragraph, and neither, of course, is wrong. A story (like a poem) should be as long as it needs to be and no longer. It is Trueblood’s gift to have such an unerring feel for what is necessary and to pare away the rest.

I’ve been thinking once again in general about short stories, a recurrent subject of my bookseller musings, and it strikes me that the readers who most appreciate the form are other writers. Whether their own work is fiction, nonfiction, or poetry, long or short forms, writers are more aware than any other readers of the level of craft that short fiction (like poetry) demands. A novel may wander or digress, without injury, but the writer of short stories must deny herself that self-indulgent luxury. In a short story, every word has to count.

And here’s something else I noticed in the Terrarium stories. While not every question is answered and many puzzles are left unresolved, at any particular story’s last line I never had the feeling of having been pushed out of a speeding car and left on the side of the highway. I felt satisfied. Not necessarily in every case optimistic or relieved but always, in a literary sense, satisfied. 

Shall I add that dogs figure into many of the stories? Is that an extraneous, irrelevant detail? I have nothing like Valerie’s gift for writing, but her stories are gifts to all readers.

Book Review: CRIMINALS: LOVE STORIES

Previous and current collections

Criminals: Love Stories

by Valerie Trueblood

Berkeley, CA: Counterpoint, 2016

Paper, $16.95

Valerie Trueblood’s writing has called elegant, and the word is apt, but her stories also possess a decidedly feral quality. Found earlier in her nonlinear novel, Seven Loves (2007), as well as in her previous collection of short stories, Search Party (2013), wildness comes to the fore in this new volume, Criminals: Love Stories.

In this new book, within the most ordinary family or inside a quiet older woman’s heart or deep in the past of a gentle and generous young man run subterranean currents of violence. But if we are surprised, we should not be (except for the specifics of each story given us by Trueblood’s imagination and craft), for there is real life in these fictions. Here, as in the best of novels and short stories, reality -- the ambiguity of surfaces and the hiddenness of truth -- is the source of the writing’s power.

The collection’s stories range in length from two to 37 pages. In some, action unfolds chronologically for the most part, while in others readers are quickly transported from present to past, where lengthy flashbacks set the stage to explain the present to which we eventually, if briefly, return. In all the stories, as whenever we meet someone who is at first a stranger, it is only gradually, one puzzle piece at a time, that we can form -- and then correct and re-form, sometimes repeatedly -- a picture of who these people might be.

In “Skylab,” set in Malaysia, an American doctor’s wife finds herself doubting her old family legend that she, the only daughter, was protected by a magic spell. In the Koran study group where she meets with other foreign women, she notes the moment “when the planned topic would wilt of its own accord like a parachute that had made it to earth,” and at her own cocktail party she wonders why there are so many people she can’t stand in her life now. In the story's present, Skylab is falling to earth. Where will it land? On the innocent or the guilty? And which is she, and how did she come to land in this strange place?

Another young married woman, Shannon, in “Kisses,” puts together a business plan and persuades the bank to loan money to her and her husband, a veteran of the fighting in Afghanistan. She had to see the loan officer by herself.

Garth looked good to the bank. The military, the jobs in high school. Knowing how to lay sod and bed stone looked good, she could tell, despite the fact that the man behind the desk spent the whole time studying her, up and down.

She remembers the way her husband had been in high school.

A boy born to kiss finds that out the way you might realize you can draw, or do math. His ways come naturally to him.

What became of that boy, now so silent and removed, perhaps a container of potential violence? Can he even be trusted with a dog?

I rationed my reading of this book to one story per morning, not wanting to rush from one to the next, losing sight of each in the one that followed, but instead giving myself the luxury of a longer experience -- and also giving each story its due consideration. So it was Sunday when I reached “Sleepover,” perfect for that long, quiet morning.

The story “Sleepover,” the longest in the book, felt the most like a film or a stage play. Like others in the collection, it employs flashbacks, but there is a large cast of characters in the present, onstage, as it were, and things keep happening, one thing after another, the situation continually in flux. Yet the action never becomes comic or even hectic. The author is in control through every line.

Here is the setup: A grandmother recovering from heart surgery has come to visit her daughter and granddaughter. The granddaughter celebrates her 14^th birthday, and the following night, after her mother leaves town on business, she has a slumber party with four girlfriends, chaperoned by her visiting grandmother and the Cambodian housekeeper. A teenage boy breaches the home security with the help of the granddaughter, but later the expensive system is tripped, bringing onto the scene the bodyguard of one of the girls, followed by two city policemen. Who is in danger and from whom? Assaults come from both expected and unexpected quarters, and new evidence casts a changing light on all present. (Cham, the housekeeper, has her own horrific background, as does the uninvited boy.) Time, meanwhile, folds upon itself, bringing past and present together.

(No spoilers! You have to read it yourself. I think it is the necessarily careful pace of the grandmother, who must guard her still-recovering heart, that serves to contain the action, but I'll need to re-read the story again to test my hypothesis.)

One of the most surprising pieces in the book declines to be called a story at all. In “Novel of Rose,” the author gives a sketch of what we would learn about a set of characters if a novel were to be written about them. Four pages, inconclusive – and yet leaving haunting images in its wake.

Trueblood’s accomplishments in Criminals: Love Stories will not surprise readers of her previous books. They, like I, will have been eager for new stories from this gifted writer, and now the new stories are here. What a glorious gift in bleak midwinter!

Resisting Temptation to Resort to Heavy Quoting

Boat dock, Lake Leelanau Narrows

Too many weeks have gone by, and summer was way too busy. Even now, in September, I’m having trouble finding a good, long stretch of uninterrupted time. (Blackberries to pick, jam to make, grass to mow once more, autumn olive to kill, ongoing household chores (never done), fall events in Northport and at the bookstore, etc., etc.)  I’d like to organize myself to write a serious, in-depth book review, but the more time goes by, the more I despair of accomplishing my self-assigned task. Like any good essay, a review needs a jumping-off point, an organizing theme, well-chosen quotations, and a satisfying finish. Absent both theme and starting point, quotations chosen at random do not add up to a review, and they certainly resist summation. But too much time has gone by, and I don’t see a slow period before January, so reader, beware! What follows cannot be called a review! If it were a review, however, it would be a rave.

Valerie Trueblood’s third book, Search Party: Stories of Rescue, is as richly satisfying as her novel, Seven Loves, and her first short story collection, Marry or Burn. Once again she has given us complex characters in situations that feel exactly like life, with all its unexpected twists and turns. The searches and rescues are of all kinds, some literal, some metaphorical. Sometimes, reading one of the stories, I feared turning the page. Tragedy seemed imminent. Most of the time, though, the tragedies that occur in these pages are, if not irreversible, at least – what? Not ordinary, really. I want to say “not sensational,” but is that true, either? Here I am trying to describe specific works of fiction, these stories, by saying what they are not. Maybe better to say what they are? Life-changing. That’s what they are for the characters involved.

The writing in these works of fiction is quietly brilliant. If Valerie Trueblood were an actor, she would be the kind who could throw away a line, in such a casual, realistic, effective manner that audiences would gasp.

Alan snapped the catch of the mess kit in which he had soaked beans all night in their hotel room in Vancouver. He was as pleased with the beans as if he had smuggled them in. At thirty-seven, with plenty of money, Alan still traveled as if he were hitchhiking across Europe. “Sourdough!” He held up a plastic container.

Somehow, though, it seems all wrong to excerpt and frame these lines -- “as pleased with the beans as if he had smuggled them in” – because to do so is to shine an immobilizing spotlight on something that was accomplished in a quick, shadowy split-second, something you might have caught out of the corner of your eye (and later wondered if you’d imagined it) or maybe not have noticed at all, and I have that feeling about pulling any quotations at all out of the context of these stories. Here, in fact, is one about memory and how it does just what I fear in quoting: “Memories had a way of excluding context, growing more and more concrete.” Some people find the “concrete” more true, but is it? Doesn’t it simply become more and more taken as fact, and, because of that, perhaps, more fixed, reified, further somehow from what was, because more fluid and evanescent, closer to truth?

How else, though to convey the mastery of this writer’s work, other than by presenting examples of the writing? Here: A radio show host, traveling to Lourdes, herself having completed treatment for cancer, imagines describing the scene for her radio audience:

“Unorthodox” -- or maybe I should say “orthodox” – “as such a trip seemed when it first occurred to me at the end of chemo, I saw it as something that would perhaps . . .” “Perhaps” is a little clothespin not really sturdy enough, I’m afraid, for the vast wet sheet of the possible that I have to hang from it.

Do you see what I mean? You read those lines and take in a sharp breath and let it out again in a gusty sigh that says “Yes!” and you race on to the lines that follow.

I made note of another passage and now cannot recall in which story it occurs: “She pictures her feelings as a kind of mold....” After this beginning of a quoted line, I had written “that whole paragraph,” telling myself I wanted to quote the paragraph in its entirety. But I am impatient, wanting to get something posted about this book, and anyway it is in the flow of the story that the truth of expression has its home.

The real  trouble is that with Search Party, as with other of the most powerful short stories and novels and even works of nonfiction, is that what I want to do is to quote the entire book. What can I say? Buy it yourself. Read Trueblood’s stories. Then, as I’m sure you will, read them again and again. There is a lot to learn about writing – and a lot to learn about life – and a lot to be grateful for -- in this beautifully accomplished volume.

In fields and along roadsides, the first asters are blooming. They are the small, light-colored ones, with the larger, deeper purple yet to come. Cornfields look rich and lush. And of course it’s apple harvest time, too, in the Leelanau.

October 4: I’m coming back to add a couple of links to this post. The first is to The Guardian, whose Emma Keller chose Search Party as the best summer short story collection from the U.S.

The second is to an interview with Valerie Trueblood, and anyone who cares about the writing of fiction will not want to miss this.

Every Good Book Can Be "Harvested" Over and Over

I am an inveterate re-reader. This is, in some ways, a handicap for a bookseller and would be a real problem for me if I sold only new books, because, as people sometimes ask, “How can you keep up?” and the answer is that I can’t. A quick search for book reviews here since the first of the year will show that I do not ignore new books; on the other hand, reaching for old ones keeps me from being familiar with all the current best-sellers. For instance, I have yet to read The Kite Runner, let alone the author’s latest book, a single glaring example that should serve to illustrate my point without a long, embarrassing-myself list.

So there’s my “Books Read” list, and there’s Ellen Airgood’s South of Superior again, read for the third or fourth time. There’s a Barbara Ehrenreich title read twice already this year (and the year less than half gone). There are titles by Ernest J. Gaines that came out years ago – these not re-read but discovered by me for the first time and only because I do not read only new books. Already I yearn to re-read Bonnie Jo Campbell’s Q Road and Once Upon a River and the indescribably vivid short stories of Katey Schultz in Flashes of War.

Valerie Trueblood has a new book coming out very soon, her third. I have it back-ordered but meanwhile, while waiting impatiently, I began re-reading her first book, Seven Loves (2006), a nonlinear novel. The novel tells the life of the main character episodically rather than chronologically, and what strikes me on this re-reading, since I already know the “end” of May’s story, is the poetic economy of the writing: nothing is missing, and nothing is extraneous. I am in awe of flawless writing that proceeds so quietly and modestly.

Many fiction readers seldom if ever read poetry. There must be devotees of poetry who miss a lot of new short story collections, too (Trueblood’s upcoming publication is a collection of short stories), and a lot of people who love novels don’t give short stories a chance. But is there a reader alive, I ask myself, any lover of writing excellence, who could resist Seven Loves? It’s hard for me to dog-ear books any more, and I’ve kept my copy of Seven Loves pristine for all the years I’ve had it, but the other night, well into the book (p. 130), I finally gave in to temptation.

“That was all right. That was as it must be. Eventually the past went from being cards laid face down to cards not held at all.”

“The gait, all her own, with which Jackie now advanced, awkward yet delicate, like a loaded camel led on a bridle.”

“When Nick died, her way back was as slow as the arrow that never arrived because the distance it was traveling could still be cut in half.”

“Twenty years had taught her to sense the approach of a given scene by its aura, and to stop the drift toward certain occasions of the past. Almost always, if they stirred in their fog she turned back.”

Only a small sample --. The thoughts and impressions of one mind, at different times of life, a rather ordinary life – but oh, how extraordinary the life of that mind’s expressions! May was a teacher for years and after her stroke is thinking back to papers her students wrote. One perennial favorite topic, she recalls while looking through an old encyclopedia, was bees.

She studied the head-on enlargement of the worker bee’s face, the giant badge eyes, blind-looking, innocent. Poor hunched compelled undesiring female. No student had written about that, the sadness of the facial configuration of the bee.

The phrase takes my breath away: “the sadness of the facial configuration of the bee.”

As author and bookseller, Trueblood and I have been in off-and-on e-mail communication since her first book appeared. I seem to remember asking her if she wrote poetry, certain that the answer would be yes, and receiving a negative reply. Well, in this novel we have May’s entire life, not merely one hushed, distilled moment, set in the middle of a page with wide margins around it -- and yet I read many poems in May’s responses to life.

How many poems are born and die unwritten and unacknowledged in a single mind? Trueblood’s gift to readers of this novel is the preservation of unique moments in her fictional central character’s life.

There was also Marry or Burn between then and now, and you can follow the link to my review of that book. You see why I am impatient for the new one? 

Yes, of course I read new books, too: Every book, if ever to be re-read, must first be read for the first time.