[REVIEW] Late Lights, by Kara Weiss

123 pages, $14

Reviewed by Jonathan Russell Clark

Kara Weiss’s Late Lights is an unusual specimen. A book of stories so connected, they basically make up a novel. But at 123 pages, Late Lights is more like a novella in stories, a combination of two types of fiction that don’t ordinarily sell well. Or even get published, for that matter. Story collections, the popular publishing wisdom goes, only interest MFA students, while novellas, apparently, interest no one. That Weiss not only published the book but also won two Next Generation Indie Book Awards makes the rarity of her achievement all the more atypical.

Weiss’s work follows three childhood friends through five stories: Monty, a troubled delinquent trying to turn his life around after yet another spell in juvie; B.J., a girl who identifies as a boy; and Erin, the straight-laced one, who, inevitably, makes some bad choices of her own. They all grew up in Brookline, a mostly affluent neighborhood of Boston (street-parking, for instance, is forbidden on many streets, so as to keep the area beautiful and unclogged by cars). Weiss’s characters, though, are not rich. In “Kinds of Violence,” we learn of B.J.’s brothers – violent, angry boys who have all spent time in court or juvenile detention or jail. In the title story, while visiting him in juvie, Monty’s father tells him that he’s moved to Roxbury, a poor neighborhood. Only Erin appears to come from a family of means, a fact made even clearer by her choice of college: Dartmouth.

Late Lights gets better as it moves along. The opening, titular story about Monty’s (hopefully) last stint in jail feels a little derivative at times. For instance, Monty goes through the seemingly required ritual of getting into a fight on his first night in prison as a way to establish himself as someone not to be messed with. “An investment,” he calls it. Monty’s father is distant and dismissive when he comes to visit him. At the end of the story, Monty defends a younger boy from the cruelty of Terry, a guard. On first read, this story fails to resonate authenticity and instead feels like a writer’s version of a juvenile.

But Monty isn’t done being developed. In the next story we meet B.J., a young girl who bandages down her breasts (she used to use duct tape until her father intervened). Here we get more of a glimpse of Monty: he and B.J. and Erin were childhood friends, and since Erin was the good one, he and B.J. had a stronger connection. Newly released, Monty comes to B.J.’s house to see one of her fuck-up brothers, and in a stunning moment of tenderness, Monty unwraps the bandage from B.J.’s chest:

“You can touch mine if I can touch yours,” he said.

She looked at him. His chest was cut into hard-muscle divisions that matched his stomach and arms. She looked at her own body. It didn’t match. She felt light-headed.

“Do you need to sit?” he said. Her face was white. She swooned. He steadied her.

“I’m sorry,” she said. She cried, for the first time since second grade. She leaned her face against his chest. They stood, holding each other––at first careful, then reckless––tight and hard.

But in the next story, Erin narrates an encounter she has with Monty. Something happened between Monty and B.J., and Erin wants to know what it is. Here’s what Monty says:

“You’ve gotta be fucking kidding me,” he said, taking deep breaths like he was in pain. “Fine. A couple weeks ago I went to go talk to Sergio about some stuff, and she was there, and I fucked her. You happy now?”

Interconnected story collections can completely change your interpretation of the other stories. Here, the tenderness of the earlier moment is reduced to hurtful carelessness. At the same time, we know what really happened, and how Monty is mischaracterizing it. Moreover, we now know that Monty is the kind of kid who plays tough, even when he doesn’t need to. This explains the somewhat cliché nature of his time behind bars in the first story. He was just a kid––acting like he’d seen people act on television and in films makes complete sense. But I wouldn’t have known that without the subsequent stories. Late Lights is a more like a novel, I think, because these stories need each other to work; isolated they would lose much complexity and nuance.

Weiss is a lovely writer, though there were times I wished she kept her points-of-view straight. In “Something Familiar,” for instance, she moves between Monty and Erin’s father Will’s POV, resulting in confusing sections like this:

The man’s head jerked up. He looked at Will and rubbed his eyes, wiped the winter from his nose.

“Shit,” he said. “Hi, Mr. Broder.”

Will looked at him, trying to place the face, the voice. He didn’t know either, but there was something familiar, something that reminded him of his daughter.

“It’s Monty, sir.” He looked at Mr. Broder, realizing for the first time that there were multiple outcomes possible.

And then it goes right back to Will. I mention this only because Weiss so often presents moments of subtlety, of small movements and tiny gestures. Her fiction exists in oblique intimations. As a consequence, a reader pays more attention, a reward for the author’s skill. When she breaks point-of-view like this (and there are other examples), you have to stop for a moment, take yourself out of the narrative and reposition yourself back in. Weiss’s brand of fiction can’t allow for those temporary transgressions. Hers is a delicate balancing act, one that requires complete maintenance, at all times – but the maintenance is worth it.

***

Jonathan Russell Clark is a regular contributor to The Millions, The Rumpus, and PANK, and his essays have appeared or are forthcoming from Tin House, The GeorgiaReview, Colorado Review, Chautauqua, Thrasher Magazine and elsewhere. More at jonathanrussellclark.com or follow him @jrc2666.