So There! By Nicole Louise Reid (A Review by Janet Freeman)

Stephen F. Austin University Press

176 pgs/$12

Reading Nicole Louise Reid’s short story collection So There! is like reuniting with someone you thought had left the planet years ago—or in this case, a host of someones: sassy, fearless girls capable of driving a semi-truck through brick with all the quiet longing stored in their hearts. This tension—between what appears and what is revealed bit-by-bit, between clauses and commas, is a rendering so masterfully drawn you find yourself reading sentences, paragraphs, entire pages three times over to see just how Reid has managed to pull it off. What you discover is a writer whose descriptive talents are reminiscent of Molly Giles and Walker Percy, one whose attention to detail is a welcome throwback in this age of contemporary fiction, where irony often replaces depth and conversations takes place in the stark white rooms of the Great Non-Place. In contrast, Reid’s characters are so entwined with their setting it’s at times impossible to tell which has more influence over the narrative: the quirky southern towns in which her characters reside, or the characters themselves. 

In “To the Surface for Air,” a mother hosting a garden party struggles to come to peace with the fact her grown son now has his own family; in “Someone Like Me,” an adult protagonist looks back on a time when she wanted acceptance so badly she ends up treating a peer with the same contempt others have shown her. What makes Reid’s characters endearing is the fact they possess a clear-eyed view of their flaws and desperation, even if they don’t know how to escape them or it. But they are good storytellers, all, talented ambassadresses into the potholes of the psyche.

For instance, in “If You Must Know,” Pearl tells us:

“And so you get stuck. Eating Yodel cakes in bed…Sniffing at a dusty bottle of Dry Shack sherry Father forgot in the bath cabinet, loving that it smells like soy sauce, and you used to think he’d maybe come back for it. You used to think maybe you’d get him to stick around if you offered to pour it for him. But he doesn’t even drink that stuff—just some gift ‘round Christmas instead of a raise. Still, you sometimes think about him sipping it with you. You even dream it sometimes, though he’s often a number of people, men-people, in that dream, shape-shifting and out of focus.”

While I enjoyed all nine stories, the titular story, “So There!” deserves far more space than is available in this review. Reid’s complicated portrayal of a family falling apart is unlike anything I’ve ever read. Told through the eyes of a young girl, we come to know her parents, Celia and Charlie, childhood lovers who used each other to escape the same small town. Each is as much a force of destruction as the other; together, they form a hurricane. But it is the narrator’s unflinching observations that allow us to understand their inability to let each other go:

“Nothing she ever did surprised me. I know their story: young things leaving town together not because of who the other one is but because it’s a way to leave without feeling so quiet at night. And I know he could be blood-awful mean. But I also know she did things to bring it out of him; and that’s a mean of a different order.”

Reading “So There!” was a true pleasure—and one I wasn’t willing to forgo, staying up late to finish it. When I finally did, it was with the kind of readerly satisfaction that comes from knowing your view of the world has been enhanced, your ideas of a place to which you’ve never traveled transformed. It’s why we hunger for books, and it’s why Reid possesses so much talent: she transports us far and away while making it all seem entirely effortless.

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Janet Freeman lives in northern Colorado. Her award-winning fiction has appeared in Chicago Quarterly Review, Necessary Fiction, PANK and elsewhere. She can be found online at:janetfreeman.com.