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Like his two other short story collections centered around places he used to live, VanPatten's latest offering takes place where he grew up, in north central California. These intimate tales prove worthy of the accolades for his previous stories and novels.
Their characters navigate current relationships through the lens of past traumas like abuse, divorce, and impending death. Some protagonists are kids forging better futures for themselves than the hard legacies left them by their families. Most stories feature gay, trans, or other people fighting for acceptance by society. The author's career as a bilingual academic shines through the last and longest story, about a Mexican-American family breaking up and coming together again around the youngest member, a teen, in a psychiatric hospital. Its redemptive ending characterizes the surprising and hopeful turn the stories take.
Between every story, an illustration of a shadowy, silhouetted figure not only offers a dramatic pause but also suggests a theme among all the tales: coming out from behind hiding places and secrets. In the title story, a grocery store shopper muses, like the avocado he holds, what pit must lie at the center of a disheveled fellow shopper he observes. "[W]e all have something we carry around, demons we exorcize on a daily basis." Indeed, some graphic and horrific details from several characters' pasts are rendered palatable only by the' forward-looking stances by which they've come through them. For example, a gay man puts his past to rest as he hangs a Christmas ornament with his husband in "Noche Buena." In "Leaving," withholding from his partner that he's dying feels like sweet revenge to the narrator. In "At the Bar," finding out the woman he's attracted to used to be a man makes a bar patron question what he knows about himself. In two stories, literal fog, a staple of northern California weather, figures as the hiding element. The deaths that occur as a result of the fog act as warnings. While not all happy, the endings' revelations offer meaningful takeaways in a resilient tone.
These nuggets of wisdom emerge in the form of images, like an avocado or snow. "Then I thought how we all could become snowflakes when we died." These transcendent images lift the stories off the page and into long-term memory. As the symbols break through the stories' contours, characters break through stereotypes and other barriers. In "The Buzz," a queer man's murder inspires a girl he befriended to defy the odds and pursue her dreams of piloting. In "Dawn," a girl's mom believes in her transition from the boy body into which she was born. Although not everyone may relate to the characters themselves, the contextual and sensory details about place, families, and love appeal to human dignity and make them accessible to a wide audience. The final story adds a religious touch: the Virgin Mary helps a girl see that her pain can be used for good and not more hurt. These illuminating and impactful stories in which devastating pasts are righted in decisive presents show literature changing and shaping cultural mindsets for the better.
RECOMMENDED by the US Review