Short Dark Oracles, by Sara Levine (A Review by Ryan Werner)

188 pgs/$8.00

I wasn’t necessarily losing faith in the modern short story before I read Sara Levine’s debut collection Short Dark Oracles, but I was experiencing a dry spell of sorts- a month at most in these saturated times- in finding stories that went beyond simple compound emoting, surrogate characters using bad dialogue, or weird anti-narratives with no foundation. I take only partial blame. This book, excellent as it is on its own in a vacuum outside of my life, became my reminder that people are still out in the world crafting peculiar tales that resonate with the humor and sadness inherent in any truth.

There’s natural propulsion to Levine’s sentences. One is a promise and the next is the delivery and the doubling of that promise. In “Must We Stoop For Violets In the Hedge?”she says,

“I was going through a phase in which it was difficult to eat, that is to say I needed to eat but did not like to feed myself because I was so disgusted with my personality at the time.”

Her skill works in more compact ways, as well, and earlier on in the same story she writes,

“For years I had gotten by pretending to be bored with things that, in fact, I could only simply recognize, let alone understand.”

In the title story, she reveals even more in an even smaller space, trouble and beauty with an economy to desire: “Since his father’s death, Alex’s mother had become artistically wide, emotionally narrow.”

These stories, ten of them laid-out with generous spacing over 100 pages, work on a similar level as the sentences. As opposed to the doe-eyed randomness that’s been labeled “adorkable” and sold, unwittingly, as a mere husk of the Manic Pixie Dream Girl, Levine is clever without being self-congratulatory, and her humorous awkwardness has a depth of the utmost importance.

“This friend of mine is not a beautiful person, and yet I notice she requires compliments and takes them well- the sort of compliments I am suspicious of and would never believe if given to me- and she put the idea in my head that my parents did me a disservice by never suggesting that I was pretty “Didn’t they ever say _______?” she asked, and what struck me as odd was not so much that my parents didn’t, but that hers- apparently, with some lunatic frequency- did. She has somehow absorbed it believes she is pretty and has a right to be told so. In fact, she is rather heavy. A feral hair grows out from her chin.

There is something unwholesome about her features which should not be photographed and cannot be explained.”

– from”Must We Stoop For Violets In the Hedge?”

Solid writing is almost never a problem, but some of the stories in Short Dark Oracles survive almost exclusively on it. In “A Promise,” a mother explains minor hardships of the world- train rides aren’t free, some people have to work too late- to her young daughter, and after doing so, the mother becomes exempt from those hardships- the train ride is free, her boss lets her leave at noon. As she presses her luck more and more with commentary on health care and paying for full-time childcare, I realized that the story was designed to fall apart. If I wasn’t given the ending I assumed would happen I would be disappointed, and if I did get it, I would be underwhelmed. But Levine is too damn good, and with the length of the story being what it is, the intrinsic short-comings of such a fable-like tale work, proving that even the weakest material in here is still excellent.

The same could be said for “The Good Woman,”a commentary on ridding oneself of possessions both concrete- chair, cheese slicer- and abstract- fear, dysfunction. When Levine uses magic in a mythological sense, there’s a sense of an off-kilter morality interlude buried in the oddness of it all. However, it’s a tiny story, a few hundred words at most, and its slightness is both its fault and forgiveness: a bit more to weave would have helped, but it passes quickly, and is a wholly forgivable lapse.

Of Levine’s aforementioned use of magic: it’s brilliant. I’ve long loved Rick Bass’s occasional forays into magical realism, and W.P. Kinsella’s constant and nonchalant mixture of fantasy with baseball is endless in its wonderment. Several of the stories in Short Dark Oracles have supernatural qualities, and while I’ve already talked about the odd, fence-sitting fantasy of “The Promise,” the greatest success of these elements is the casual, realistic magic in “The Fainting Couch.”

“Sometimes when she got up to go to the bathroom, the father and the child did a quick search and found the oranges uneaten under the cushions of the couch.

“Your poor mother,” that father would say. “She just gets so tired, doing for you and me all the time. She has been on the fainting couch for fifteen years. Perhaps if she ate more citrus . . .”

On hearing this, the mother would open her eyes and grab her hair at the roots. With a gust of wind the couch would levitate and wheel around the room, grazing the ceiling and rattling the glass beads on the chandelier, and all the while the mother rode, her body so rigid and her eyes so wide and her scream so relentless and terrible, she speckled the walls with her saliva. She always landed a few minute later and was calmer.

The boy grew up to be a very nice person.”

Though this scene in the story is the only one featuring any sort of suspension of reality, it takes a very normal story of familial distress and its effects on adulthood and gives the reader a different window from which to see it. From there, the story breathes through a respiratory device that, upon closer inspection, we realize was never plugged in. How confusing and wonderful the whole thing is.

Aside from the bizarre and entertaining title story- almost a full third of the book- in which Levine moves through faux-screenplay territory and uses the cinematic elements found therein to build to an unsettling ending of discomfort and hyperfocus, these stories come fast and hard. “For the Floor” moves with grace through an entire beyond-fucked relationship in the span of a few pages, and “Baby Love” shows that there is an ever-present speed and strength in the doldrums of the post-partum blues, elements that will eventually catch-up in a ruinous manner. The stories are here and there and everywhere.

Though Short Dark Oracles was the runner-up in the Caketrain Chapbook Competition of 2010, it is a champion in the blowout of my soul, a reaffirmation of life through creativity and craft. At the intersection of those two qualities is a triumph of artistic merit, a testament to narrative labor and a reminder for me to pay attention, always, for somewhere in the world there is magic at work.