It’s so subjective, really: whether one likes or dislikes, is moved or unmoved by a poem, story, or nonfiction piece. I will discuss the exceptions below, but I felt unmoved by most of the material in the New England Review (NER)’s Volume 36, Number 1, finishing poem after poem and several of the stories with a shrug, a shake of the head, or perplexity: how is it that this or that particular piece found favor with the editors? Certainly I have been similarly stumped before. Is it my failing or the authors’? Or the editors’? Or nobody’s, since who can account for taste?
The poem with the most staying power, because of both the oddity of its premise and its unexpected implications, was Nick Lantz’s “Balloon Animal.” In a balloon world, with sentient balloon beings, balloon man has found and become mesmerized by a tack:
staring at that point, he feels the thinness
of his skin, how the taut air inside him
longs to get out…
Lantz’s not so playful lark of a poem points to our universal susceptibility and the precariousness at the heart of things.
In “High School in Suzhou,” Cate Marvin raises an affecting cry at sexist inequities she witnesses on a tour in China, where, as boys “play/ ping-pong ceaselessly in the vast gymnasium…” and girls wear masks to protect their lungs at the textile factory they work at, Marvin moves “…along with the throng of idiots I’ve joined/to crawl this country as fleas do a dog.” Visiting so-called “scholar’s” gardens, Marvin is told that “Gardens are traditionally entered through a narrow passage” and that “Scholars were not girls” and “Girls are not scholars.” She muses that girls, too, “are gardens entered through a narrow passage,” including such gardens as“The Garden of Letting Him/ in Despite Many Protests.” Marvin’s anger, sarcasm, and exasperation capture the relentlessness of certain injustices.
Other poems of interest include works by Jennifer Chang, Kevin Prufer, Emilia Phillips, Erin Lynch, Jehanne Dubrow, Daisy Fried, and Anders Carlson-Wee.
Of the half-dozen short stories, Lisa Taddeo’s “Forty-Two” stands out. Taddeo offers cutting observations of what life is like for Joan, a single, forty-two-year-old woman in New York City. Of Joan’s experience of sex with a “hairless NYU professor…” who “had recently fucked a student” and to whom Joan must seem a “reedy downgrade,” Taddeo writes that “the most she felt of it was his eyes on the wall in front of her.” Of another short-lived relationship she writes, “The twenty-seven-year-old caught her plucking a black wiry hair out of her chin, like a fish dislodging a hook from its own face. The bathroom door was ajar and she saw his eyeball out of the corner of her degradation.”
But Taddeo also illuminates the viewpoints and internal lives of the other principals of the love—or loveless—triangle Joan gets involved in. Molly, Joan’s much younger rival for the affections of Jack, considers that her upcoming wedding ceremony “will be shorter than the lifespan of a piece of gum.” The world Taddeo gives us is funny and harsh, bleak, sad, and on-the-go, with “a silver lining, like the one in the oatmeal tin that cuts your finger if you aren’t careful.” Her characters fully experience disappointments and sharp corners, dwindling and missed opportunities, though less so their hopes and dreams.
In “Front Men Are Forever,” Brendan McKennedy’s knowing take on life in a band on the verge of making it big, albeit in “our tiny alt-country corner” of rock and roll, Oliver, one of the band’s founding members, has given an overly candid interview to a rock magazine. As he awaits the fallout from its publication, we see numerous painful instances of how what’s going on in the band echoes, with uncanny mimetic reverb, what went on in his failed marriage: “I’d come to this point also with Laurel… The night before she asked me to leave, I entered that place between the end of the long horrible tension of trying and the beginning of the empty despair of having failed; that moment of serenity…” In his marriage and in his relationship with Clark, his bandmate, best friend, and bete noire, Oliver is at times a victim, at times the agent of his own undoing. Like the kids Oliver describes who “had warmed up to the idea that country…is the authentic American sound of loss and longing…” Oliver seems more wedded to that myth of “loss and longing” than to the alt-myth of success and connection.
In J.T. Price’s “Survival,” Davis, the protagonist, has “hit a rough patch.” Feeling left behind by the phenomenal acting success of his younger brother, Luke, Davis has retreated from L.A. and returned to his childhood home, where his mother remains a sometime occupant. Through the medium of Davis’s viewing of a film in which Luke stars as Jack Kennedy, we delve ever more deeply into Davis’s efforts to comprehend the turn his life has taken. Harboring a seeming pipe-dream of connecting with his long-absent father, who has gone off the grid, if not the rails, he tries to understand and more importantly, rectify, the estrangement from his brother, his only real ally. As the story zeroes in on its conclusion, the reader can’t help but feel the intensity of Davis’s need and share his hope that Luke will, if not need him back, at least allow for and respond to that need.
Nonfiction highlights include Rachel Hadas’s “That Little Room Which They Have Taken For Her,” a very personal reading of a passage from Proust; “Melville’s ‘Billy Budd’ and the Disguises of Authorship,” by Roger Stritmatter, Mark K. Anderson, and Elliott Stone, an intriguing, scholarly, involved piece which, however, may be more specialized and theory-laden than a casual reader would prefer; and Lorraine Hanlon Comanor’s crystalline “In the Shadow of Parsenn.”
Fifty years removed, Comanor tells of her sixteen-year-old self, a world-class figure skater living and training in a Swiss village, but laboring under the shadow of the previous year’s plane crash which had killed many members of the U.S Figure Skating Team, on a flight she had originally been scheduled for. Comanor struggles, too, with the expectations of her domineering, overbearing mother, who is nevertheless presented in three-dimensional fullness. Add to the mix a mostly chaste, yet deeply felt and then deeply mourned romance, and the young Comanor finds herself dealing with more than she can channel into the exacting figures and demanding routines she must perform on the ice: “But with no pleasure in the process, one’s body simply did not skate; it went through the motions.” Comanor feelingly depicts the enormous strains and constraints she faced in this “place of self-reckoning,” her loneliness in an insular world, and the beginnings of her emergence from that world.
Just about all the contributors here can boast of having significant publication histories. NER has been around a long time and Middlebury College, which publishes it, is an elite institution. The pedigree is there, but except for in the examples above, the traits you’d expect were not fully present. Or maybe it’s just me.