Jody Hobbs Hesler

[REVIEW] Seven Stages of Anger and Other Stories by Wendy J. Fox

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Anger
Press 53
124 pages, $14.95
Review by Jody Hobbs Hesler

 

It would be unfair to say I hungered for more emotion in Wendy J. Fox’s Seven Stages of Anger and Other Stories, because my very hunger is what the writer meant to evoke. These are, after all, stories of the modern West – a sere place peopled by characters who are just emerging from generations of isolated farm and desert life or who are working desk jobs and living in the now tamed-to-sterility post-Wild-West suburbs. The emotional hollowness and dislocation of Fox’s characters matches their positions in and relationships with this New West.

This collection is Fox’s debut, as well as the inaugural winner of the Press 53 Award for Short Fiction. All the stories take place somewhere in the West – some in rural, others in urban settings, mostly in Washington state. Sometimes the characters are young and house-hunting, about to start their families. Sometimes they have fled a life they knew in the rural wasteland and are seeking a new way in an unknown place. Sometimes the characters are in love. Almost all the time, the love is mistaken and breaks. Some of the characters recur, and Fox varies points-of-view, usually between first-person and close-third, though the title story experiments with second person. All the stories hearken to something missing. Continue reading →

[REVIEW] Deathbed Dimes, by Naomi Elana Zener

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deathbed

Iguana Books

294 pages, $19.99

 

Review by Jody Hobbs Hesler

 

Have you ever been a token at your workplace? The only woman? The only Jew / Asian / Hispanic / African-American? What if you are two of these things – a powerhouse of a double-token for your firm? And what if you are good at your job, but the junior colleague whose dead weight you always have to carry winds up being promoted ahead of you? Welcome to Joely Zeller’s world, as wrought in Naomi Elana Zener’s debut novel, Deathbed Dimes, and watch what she does – Stanford Law School grad, Jewish woman double-token for her New York City law firm – when her ignoramus of a junior associate becomes partner instead of her.

For Joely, this horrible workday happens the morning after her fiancé ditches her, having realized late in the game that he is gay. His self-discovery is so beyond Joely’s expectations that when she comes home to an eerily empty apartment, her first reaction is, “Obviously Yan had been abducted.” Continue reading →

[REVIEW] Doll Palace by Sara Lippman

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Doll Palace

 

 

Dock Street Press

 

Review by Jody Hobbs Hesler

 

 

Every story in Sara Lippmann’s debut collection, Doll Palace, is a finely crafted, stark distillation of a different kind of loss, loneliness, or alienation. A motley of bleak quests for happiness in a world of irony, desolation, and shabbiness, the collection features the seedy-carney side of beach towns, broken relationships, families reckoning with their babies’ complicated and heartbreaking illnesses, a father-daughter knife throwing team, and more.

With such weighty and often off-beat topics, it’s no surprise that the tone of the collection swerves toward the melancholic at times. The story that left me with the most cheer was “Houseboy,” narrated by an immigrant working for a ridiculously wealthy man. The “rock-n-roll hootchie koo summer” he yearns to experience in the U.S. contrasts with the bitterness of what he’s left behind, leaving the character to conclude in his broken English, “The whole world is cry.” Still, the character’s humor and sweetness left me with humble hopes of better things for him. Continue reading →

Books We Can’t Quit: The Long Home, by William Gay

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long home

 

Review by Jody Hobbs Hesler

 

William Gay’s novel The Long Home is epic in scope. Its rural, desolated landscape offers up the sublime as often as it portends doom. Its villain, Dallis Hardin, bends an entire rural community to his evil designs, gaining power from their weaknesses for liquor and prostitutes. Most of the book focuses on its hero, young Nathan Winer, as he pursues an unlikely love and strives to preserve his dignity while working for the devilish Hardin. The book’s sage, though complicated, elder, William Tell Oliver, opens and closes the story with his struggles to reconcile what he knows about the disappearance of Nathan’s father and his fear of what will happen when he comes forward with the truth. Oliver holds onto his corrosive secret until he must share it in order to prevent young Nathan from an inevitable act of honor-redeeming vengeance that would either land him in jail or in the grave.

Gay’s characters range from solid and kind to phantasmagorically evil. But even his best characters are flawed by pride and poorly-timed righteous indignation, and his worst characters offer glimmers of humanity. So The Long Home pits good against evil, but the rivalry is not entirely fabular but true and possible, too. All this against a backdrop of a 1930s – 40s rural Tennessee, where not everyone has electricity or telephone service, and a lot of people run homemade liquor and bury stashes of cash in the ground. They are dirt-poor dirt farmers, bootleggers, day laborers. They live (and die) by the work of their hands: honestly, dishonestly, generously, greedily – in a web of their own histories full of double-crossings and death. Continue reading →

[REVIEW] Byrd, by Kim Church

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Byrd

Dzanc Books

228 pages, $14.95

 

Review by Jody Hobbs Hesler

 

Kim Church’s debut novel Byrd is essentially a love story for a lost child. Its main character, Addie gives the child up for adoption after she finds herself unexpectedly pregnant. The pregnancy is unintended and almost miraculous (you’ll have to read it yourself to find out why), but Addie never imagines keeping the baby. Giving him up, though, leaves a hole that Addie never quite fills. So she writes letters to her absent son, nursing “hopes but no expectations” that one day they might meet.

Spanning more than 20 years of Addie’s and birth-father Roland’s lives before and after the pregnancy, through alternating points of view, the book slowly leads us to understand why Addie feels unprepared for parenthood and why she neglects to tell Roland about the child until many years later. Inter-spliced throughout are poignant letters to Byrd, which is what Addie calls her child, intending it as “a name no one else would ever call you. One thing about you that would be only mine.” Continue reading →

[REVIEW] Danceland, by Jennifer Pieroni

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danceland

Queen’s Ferry Press

150 pages, $18.95

 

Review by Jody Hobbs Hesler

 

Spare, poetic, and strange, Jennifer Pieroni’s novella, Danceland is the story of a child raised on fantasy in the wasteland of a former town. As Lettie understands it, “Their rickety cottage, its shingles loose, was all that was left of Danceland. They were Danceland’s survivors.” By day, Lettie and her father, Frank lead a life of simple sustenance. He goes off to work as a tree trimmer, and she helps with chores, such as carrying wood for their fires in bundles as “wide as Lettie’s hug.” At night, she and Frank read old reviews of her mother’s performances. All Lettie seems to know of the world is the steady regularity of her father, “a frown sticking out of a plaid overcoat,” and the mystery of Danceland, where she believes her mother once danced and entertained all comers.

Why doesn’t Lettie remember Danceland when her mother was there? Her father invents the story of a fever: “‘Higher than natural. It changed your mind and took away your memory.’” Even while Lettie believes the fiction, she “wished things would come clear, but she knew she was lost when it came to what was real.”

Lettie’s curiosity about the world beyond their drab existence develops suddenly when she is twelve. Until then, “Lettie knew no fear. Then, one day, it came.” It seems to arise from her concern over the seizures their pet cat, Nosey begins to suffer. In reaction to Lettie’s desire to find someone to help their cat, her father declares, “‘Nobody knows anything.’” Perhaps the flimsiness of this response finally overtaxes Lettie’s coming-of-age intelligence. Continue reading →

BOOKS WE CAN’T QUIT: Green Water, Green Sky by Mavis Gallant

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It gives me great pleasure to reintroduce PANK’s Books We Can’t Quit series – reviews of books that are at least ten years old and have shadowed and shaded, infected and influenced, struck and stuck with us ever since we first read them.  And it is with a certain bittersweetness that the first book I’m offering is by the late, great Mavis Gallant.  An expatriate like so many of her characters, Gallant left her native Canada for Europe in 1951. There she wrote stories about rootless and possibility – more than 100 of them appearing in The New Yorker – and two novels, one of them Green Water, Green Sky.  She died in Paris, on 18 February, at the age of 91.  –Randon Noble, Reviews Editor at PANK

 

Green Water

Green Water, Green Sky by Mavis Gallant, 1959

 

Review by Jody Hobbs Hesler

 

Whartonesque in its focus on the travails of the unfortunate wealthy, Mavis Gallant’s Green Water, Green Sky uses lush language and sharp insights to tell the story of a young woman’s mental deterioration.

Bonnie McCarthy is an expatriate in self-imposed exile.  She and her daughter Flor bounce from one European resort community to another, surviving mostly on the good will of Bonnie’s brothers and some form of child support. Flor, by turns emotionally friable and drily vicious, eventually succumbs to a psychic woundedness that seems to arise at least in part from the instability and vacuous rootlessness of their nomad’s life. Continue reading →

[REVIEW] Sorrow, by Catherine Gammon

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Sorrow cover


Braddock Avenue Books
304 pages, $16


Review by Jody Hobbs Hesler

Catherine Gammon’s Sorrow is an unapologetically dark book. In this case, you can almost judge the book by its cover, which shows slants of waning sunlight, a silhouette, and a fraction of a bed surrounded by darker and darker darkness. This is not a book for the faint of heart.

In her acknowledgments, Gammon reveals that she has structured her epilogue as Dostoevsky structured the epilogue to Crime and Punishment, and the flavor Sorrow conjures is the flavor I remember from a long-ago unit on existential literature in AP English my senior year of high school. Gammon nails the sense of epic despair to the point of despondency. Continue reading →