In “Origin Story,” a piece that’s less about looking back than moving forward, the female protagonist muses: “Freedom wasn’t to be found in words but in being alone…thinking thoughts that would not appear in her stories because they were shameful in their intimacy and small in scope, the product of a lack of imagination or will or knowledge or something methodical that gave rise to what men wrote.” Vallianatos’ second collection is shot through with startling revelations like these. Offering only the thinnest scrim of plot—in one story, a husband contemplates ending an affair while his wife considers embarking on one, though neither character appears to know what the other is planning, while in another a teenage boy suddenly falls in love with his mom’s friend for no reason—these stories reject convention. They end abruptly and sometimes tantalizingly opaquely: In “This Isn’t the Actual Sea,” the narrator’s friend makes a film about an incident involving a poodle that ruptured their friendship. A screening brings them back together without resolving their conflict, and the narrator’s final thought is, “I could hear the poodle barking and smell something coming off [my friend], a stab of deodorant, a sort of unnatural hope and exertion, and I felt then the terror and promise of friendship, the daily encounter with what the other dares to be.” Some readers will surely be put off by Vallianatos’ rejection of “something methodical” while others will thrill to her characters’ intimate, profound revelations: In “Dogwood,” a mother and writer offers, “I love doubt. I’m not sure how I feel about certainty. Certainty is like a closed door. Doubt leaves a way open.”
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English (US) ·