Small-town New England gets contemporary update in new novel
LIQUID, FRAGILE, PERISHABLE By Carolyn Kuebler Melville House, 352 pp., $19.99
Small-town new england has long been a rich and fertile subject for writers looking to plumb the depths of the human experience, and the literary geography of the region is flush with iconic locales both real and fictional — from nathaniel Hawthorne’s salem to edith Wharton’s starkfield up through thornton Wilder’s grover’s corners and grace Metalious’s peyton place.
The stories set in these places made hay of the region’s reputation for blind conformity and emotional repression, their characters beset by melancholy, stifled by obligation, tortured by hidden desires, and often haunted by dark secrets too terrible to name.
Into this well-trodden territory comes carolyn Kuebler, resident of Middlebury, vt. and editor of the esteemed literary journal new england review. Her debut novel, “liquid, Fragile, perishable,” is an account of a single year in the life of the residents of the fictional glenville, vt. With the help of a large ensemble of characters, she strives to paint a portrait of contemporary rural new england. And while the circumstances may have changed a bit here in the 21st century, the angst and restlessness that Kuebler’s literary forebears so artfully rendered nevertheless endure.
Glenville is full of restless people, from its native sons and daughters, who see no future in the town’s anachronistic austerity, to its recent transplants, who fled the hustle and bustle of the wider world in search of a simpler, truer way of living — only to find that their rockwellian redoubt is more complex than they realized.
Among the book’s crowded cast are Honey, the sheltered beekeeper’s daughter desperate to escape her overbearing, religious mother; Will, a bookish boy newly arrived from new York city who is charmed by Honey’s ethereal good looks; nell castleton, the local recluse, for whom self-sufficiency is a shield against the threat of intimacy; and the labeau family, whose bad reputation goes back decades and weighs heavily on its youngest generation, cyrus and eli.
The town is an insular place, so much so that just about everyone feels like an outsider. the characters pass in and out of one another’s lives, sometimes meaningfully, most times incidentally — through gossip, often. they notice but rarely see one another. they aspire to a romantic rural camaraderie but are often wary of getting too close. “You can’t help but know things,” says Jeanne, who works the counter at the post office. “in a town like this, someone’s always looking out for you. or talking smack about you.”
The book’s primary narrative concerns Will and Honey, teenaged lovers who embark on a heedless, fervent romance that brings their two families into conflict. We experience this mostly from the perspective of Will’s mother, sarah, whose liberal, tolerant facade belies an arch snobbery. Having brought her son to glenville in the hopes of exposing him to a more enriching way of life, she comes to see the town as a trap that has ensnared her family and spoiled Will’s bright future. “sarah should know these people,” writes Kuebler, “should remember their names. but she always forgot about them… they were never part of the picture when she thought of her new life here.”
By choosing to tell the stories of a large group of characters over a long span of time, Kuebler opts for breadth over depth, sometimes to the book’s detriment. Will and Honey, for all their prominence in the plot, rarely feel like more than flat archetypes. but this approach has its benefits. in depicting the fleeting flow of life, Kuebler aptly conveys the quickness with which situations can develop and take on their own momentum. How easy it is to lose touch with someone, to miss out on things, to get so caught up in your own life you become oblivious to the needs of others.
Still, her most interesting characters are those who exist on the fringe of the narrative, the ones who chafe against the limits they face in glenville and are desperate to escape. sophie, an impatient teenager, knows her humdrum present is merely a prelude to bigger and better things and is eager to get on with it. “sophie doesn’t need any of them,” writes Kuebler. “she hasn’t even met the people who will matter in her life.” down-on-his luck cyrus, whose sharp mind and entrepreneurial spirit are hampered by his lack of resources, is something of a foil for Will. though they never meet, cyrus’s thwarted efforts to rise above his station are all the more compelling when contrasted with Will’s willingness to abandon his privileges, secure in the knowledge that his affluent parents won’t let him fall too far.
Despite its sweeping scope, “liquid, Fragile, perishable” is modest in its aspirations and is all the better for that. Kuebler succeeds in capturing the rhythms of small-town life, and her peculiar style — each sentence is an island unto itself, separated from its neighbors by a full break — seems to imply that the reader should take a deep breath between each thought, to pace themselves in order to truly feel the slow, yet inexorable passage of time that is practically palpable in a place like glenville. A reminder, perhaps, to not just be a passive onlooker, gawking at these characters’ foibles and flaws, but rather to immerse oneself in this place and become a part of it to ensure we truly understand where they’re coming from.