Sun Sentinel Palm Beach Edition
Catherine Lacey offers up gems of perspective
Short stories explore emptiness, ennui, loss
In the 19th century, newspapers warned of a mysterious illness afflicting the first settlers of the American Midwest. They called it “prairie madness” — a psychological response to the region’s emptiness. Willa Cather fictionalized the phenomenon in “O Pioneers!” (1913) and “My Antonia” (1918), where simply living in Nebraska drives farmers to murder and suicide.
The characters in Catherine Lacey’s first collection of short fiction, “Certain American States,” suffer from a similar condition. In these 12 stories, people are tortured by the mundanity of their lives in Minnesota, North Dakota, Texas and nameless places in between. Many are mourning a loss; others are mired in ennui. One man, a reluctant father who abandons his teenage daughter in a trailer park, says it plainly: “The loneliness of certain American states is enough to kill a person if you look too closely.”
If depression is a clouded lens that distorts reality, Lacey, who lives in Chicago, is perhaps the finest crafter of these lenses in American fiction. In her two previous novels, New York-based protagonists were desperate to escape the prairies of their own minds. The anxious narrator of her debut, “Nobody Is Ever Missing” (2014), flees the country in an attempt to “go missing from herself.” In her second novel, “The Answers” (2017), a long-depressed character expresses the same desire: “I’d give anything to be another person — anyone else — for even just a day, an hour.”
The lost souls in “Certain American States” are just as miserable, no matter where they live. In the most powerful story, “ur heck box,” an aging mother complains about Texas, “a horrible, lonely place,” where “even the light just wasn’t as yellow as it used to be.” And yet her daughter — ice-skating in one of New York’s most beautiful public spaces, Bryant Park — is just as disgusted by her surroundings. “This is just the world,” she thinks, “ice and vomit and rare flashes of brilliant colors.”
These narrators, one after the other, would be suffocating were it not for Lacey’s sublime prose. On every page, she slips a tiny gem into your palm, a little miracle of perspective. “You only learn who you’ve married after it’s too late, like one of those white mystery taffies you have to eat to find the flavor, and even then, it’s just a guess,” a man muses after a fight with his wife in “Learning.” In another, a woman questions her attraction to a lover’s hair, since “hair is less a body part than a cell graveyard, reshaped into an identity, a death halo.”
A less celebrated strength of Lacey’s — her pitch-dark sense of humor — is on full display here. “I have thought often of what it would take to kill a cat, quietly and quickly, with my bare hands,” a woman thinks in “Because You Have To,” after a neighborhood cat keeps leaving dead birds in her yard. “He is more than animal, he is evil, a plain enemy of the world. I wish him ill. I do.”
This is all to say that “Certain American States” is exactly what you would expect from Lacey: perfect sentences, penetrating insights, devastating epiphanies. Like the most intense chapters of her novels, reading this collection takes an almost physical toll. Each story inflates like a balloon until, with the very last line, Lacey cuts the string tethering it to the ground.
But the final story in the collection, “The Grand Claremont Hotel,” suggests an interesting new direction for Lacey — surrealism. When the narrator loses his job at “The Company,” he decides to stay in his hotel room indefinitely, living off minibar drinks and snacks. Weeks later, after a series of upgraded rooms, he discovers it’s physically impossible for him to leave. It’s an exciting, Lispectorian departure from the brutal realism of “Nobody Is Ever Missing,” and together with the weirdness of “The Answers,” suggests Lacey’s fiction will continue getting stranger. If so, or even if not, don’t miss it.