The lives of others
Let us now praise small literary presses: that growing band of sane, brave curators in an otherwise frantic literary landscape. Shepherding into daylight a selection of excellent new works (that may have been rebuffed or ignored by larger houses), these pioneer publishers do hero duty.
The Bay Area’s WTAW Press (emerging from the monthly Sausalito reading series Why There Are Words) is a fine exemplar. Offering Louise Marburg’s debut story collection “The Truth About Me” as one of two inaugural titles, WTAW Press has, to my thinking, cracked it out of the park.
This is joyful news for literature, and certainly for story collections — a form that larger publishers often snub. That’s a shame, because the best collections can (and famously do) blow us away — Alice Munro, anyone? — when each piece speaks directly into a reader’s skull, and a kind of tonal momentum gathers, casting its spell.
“The Truth About Me” achieves all this, and then some. Delivered in strong, clean, biting prose, each story feels so uncannily right that the tonal hypnosis starts at once, and a reader realizes she’ll have to give each story plenty of “sink-in” time.
In the title story, Harry, 24, gets a “gelatinous feeling” if he doesn’t take his prescribed meds. He buys an old house in a dumpy neighborhood, hoping to pass as “normal,” and befriends a neighbor called Mun, with whom he visits the (delightfully named) HiLo bar for Pabst beer. Mun’s wife tries to fix up Harry with a girlfriend, but Harry’s uneasy. “I had come to fragile terms with the fact that there would be no happy ending for me. I took six pills a day, and heard a malignant voice if I didn’t.”
“I had come to fragile terms with the fact that there would be no happy ending for me” might serve as a tagline for the valiant souls populating Marburg’s tales. We glimpse enough of some part of ourselves inside each of these struggling beings that we turn the pages of “Truth” with personal urgency, as if to find out what will happen to us.
“Your mother is never coming back,” declares Henry in “Vacationland” to his sister’s wailing baby girl, “astonishing himself. He hadn’t been mean to a child ... since his own difficult childhood.” Henry’s sister has married a cheating lout who’s rich; Henry’s girlfriend has begun flirting with the lout, and Henry is cursed with hyper-awareness: “[He felt] sorry for [his girlfriend] ... sorry for himself for exactly the same reason: if she was the bimbo, he was the sucker.”
Marburg does not shy away from the absolute worst, yet presents it so matter-offactly we’re stunned to recognize our own daily realities. “Anything Can Happen,” narrated by a calm, suburban woman, intertwines the story of her husband’s long-term infidelity with that of a neighbor’s sudden shooting rampage. We’re amazed and instructed by our narrator’s compassionate wisdom. “Ivan [the murderer] had been a regular person once. He didn’t lose his mind on purpose.”
There will, indeed, be blood. “Myrna Athena” opens as a man walks off the top of a building. An office worker in an adjacent building — the eponymous, sturdy Myrna — has inadvertently seen the suicide while “standing here ... finishing my yogurt from lunch.” The event awakens Myrna’s scornful colleague, the story’s narrator, to his own shortsighted misery. A similar awakening, in the form of a no-nonsense war veteran, waits for “Mrs. Temple,” a vacationing woman whose husband has left her for (and impregnated) a younger woman.
Spare, striking descriptions give these stories loft and dimension: sailboats “like chalk marks on the water”; hair covering a woman’s shoulders “like a brilliant shawl.” The suicide “is lying on his back, enclosed in an amoeba of blood.” “The sea flowed from cerulean to robin’s egg to celadon green, like samples of paint on a wall.” “A wooden dock, silvery with age”; “a white sand beach in the fruit punch glow of a sunset.”
I wish I had room to describe these stories at length. A resentful mother confronts her past and future on her stepmother’s farm. A maddened Oxycodone addict strives, with his last strength, to break free. A clinically depressed woman gets pregnant, stops taking her meds and winds up in the hospital waiting for meds to stabilize her, as her baby “flipped and rolled like an eel inside her, insistently alive.”
“Stick Shift,” which tracks a wealthy, feckless young girl’s brief encounter with a wiser, older, working-class man, slices the heart with one of the most reverberant endings I can remember. Wonderfully constructed — balancing despair, rage, wit and tenderness — Marburg’s stories demonstrate a near-perfect instinct for when to close. Each enters us like an elegy and bulletin; dissonant, strangely consoling. “The Truth About Me” brings a welcome new talent to light.
Joan Frank’s latest novel is “All the News I Need,” winner of the Juniper Prize for Fiction, published by the University of Massachusetts Press. Email: books@sfchronicle.com