FRAYED RELATIONS

Social bonds strain and snap in Bachmann’s latest collection of literary short fiction.

Just because a relationship is longstanding doesn’t mean it’s stable. That’s a lesson learned over and over by the characters in the author’s tales that address such topics as crumbling romances, simmering dissatisfactions, rock-bottom moments, and long-kept secrets. In “An Expensive Surgery,” a woman whose cat requires a hysterectomy is forced to ask her sister for the money—the same sister who she regards as having ruined her life: “How should she summarize the relationship? She might just say that the unprovoked cruelties Veronica consistently put on her when they were younger left invisible but certain marks, enough to send her in desperate search of therapy as an adult, therapy she could not afford for more than a few months at a time.” In “Southern Moon Incident,” an old man discovers an unexpected person stripping at the local gentlemen’s club. A family is forced to take in a loner teenage cousin for a week in “Red Smear on Traveling Gray,” even though something about him makes their skin crawl. (Needless to say, their attempts to include him in social activities goes horribly awry.) In another typical story, “Arbitrary Persistence,” a man, Bill, tries to prevent his newly wheelchair-bound brother, Arthur, from accompanying him and a friend to the local bar, not because he finds Arthur to be a nuisance, but because his sibling has been banned from the bar for life for making lewd comments to one of the bartenders. Arthur, of course, refuses to listen and shows up at the bar anyway. Chaos ensues. The drama turns not on Arthur’s disability, but on longstanding aspects of his personality that drive Bill to his breaking point.

Bachmann’s prose is direct and inflected with a certain grit, as in “The Condition of the Cabin,” about a family gathering for Thanksgiving following the death of its patriarch: “Paul had just inadvertently dragged the past six heavy months into the dining room when he told the one about their father catching those teenagers growing marijuana plants on a patch of their land, how Dad forced those punks at pitchfork-point to eat those plants raw from roots to stem to leaves.” The stories also capture the claustrophobia of interpersonal relationships, in which love and hate sit side-by-side and destruction is often as compelling an outcome as reconciliation. Bachmann is also deft at sketching characters with just a few lines of detail; a man in one story has “a balky lower back, among the other ires of middle age,” which forces him “to hang up his sneakers from the over-forty weekly pickup game at Saint Sebastian’s.” The author excels at concocting situations that reveal the fault lines in a relationship, sometimes bringing an unstable status quo to collapse over the course of a few paragraphs. Fans of the dirty-realism tradition of American short fiction are likely to enjoy these punchy offerings.

An accomplished set of tales that poke at sore spots of love and resentment.