LETTERS FROM THE KARST

A volume of short stories revolves around a prominent family in a Kentucky college town.

The Collins girls have had it rough. Meredith’s husband, long-suffering from bipolar disorder, died in a car accident and left her with three daughters, ages 12, 8, and 5. The oldest, Diana, has always been the responsible one; Cecily is the one everyone worries about; the youngest, Molly, is the child who loves horses. Radiating out from these girls is a network that threads through Bowling Green, Kentucky, a city known for its deep subterranean caves. Indeed, caves are everywhere in these tales. Meredith is a geologist and caver. Her deceased husband, David, was a professor who had his students act out Plato’s The Allegory of the Cavein class. In the title story, which features Cecily reading letters sent to her by her family during a stint in rehab, she instructs her mother to “think of me as a mammoth cave. Your letters just flutter through the stale air, talk echoes, memories suffocate.” Some of the tales in this linked collection focus on one or more of the Collins girls at various times in their lives while others follow characters from outside the family. There’s the woman who babysits them when they are young, a perennial student who writes a short story based on things she read in Meredith’s diary. There’s the girls’ uncle, a solitary hunter who can’t quite figure out what to do with himself when he isn’t in the woods. One story is narrated by Molly’s classmate at Western Kentucky University who struggles to navigate the campus—physically and socially—in her wheelchair. Another follows Cecily’s old boyfriend, now a third-grade teacher, taking his class on a field trip to a cave and meditating on the past. Like spelunkers stumbling through a cave system, readers never know what new chamber they might end up in, only that it connects, somehow, back to the entrance.

Olmsted’s painterly prose evokes both the Kentucky landscape and the personalities who reside in it. Here the Collins girls’ uncle spots a rare flock of swans in the sky: “I hear them before I see the swans flying overhead. Trees are so thick, I glimpse only the right leg of the V. Put them on water and they’re self-interested honkers, but when they fly, their wings beat together like it’s one massive body sailing over.” The author has a talent for establishing characters and dynamics quickly, immersing readers in the interpersonal dramas that populate these pages: between siblings, between generations, between romantic partners, and between strangers. She also succeeds at incorporating a sense of local history into the work. Where weaknesses exist, they are mostly inherent in the structure. Not all of the stories really work on their own—readers will always be looking for ways new characters connect to the Collinses—and the book lacks the satisfying narrative arc or the deep character study of a novel. Even so, scene by scene, this volume makes for an engaging and sometimes moving group portrait.

A stirring collection of linked tales with a deep sense of place.