Half Wild: Stories by Robin MacArthur
My rating: 4/5 stars
I don’t hate it here; I hate what happens to me when I am here. I hate the way it draws me in. The way it leads to nowhere but itself. The way everyone and everything is connected and a person cannot be free. “It’s too beautiful to hate it here,” I say.
this is a lovely collection of stories about characters living in the less-populated, woodsy areas of vermont. spanning forty years or so, there are plenty of recurring themes and connections between characters, but it’s not a novel-in-stories; each story is its own fully-realized tale. the most prominent theme is the relationship between these characters and their natural surroundings – whether they embrace a peaceful life and a love for the woods, or whether they feel trapped, longing for more “civilization” than what bare nature provides.
this is not at all grit lit – although it’s mostly about working class characters, the tone is altogether different than what i usually gravitate towards in my backwoods lit. this one is gentler, more ephemeral, almost wispy at times. but it’s also very powerful, with some really great fuel for ruminating on later.
i got an arc of this aaaages ago, and i read it in january. i’d planned on reviewing it months ago, and started going back through it, taking notes and marking quotes and i actually ended up reading the whole thing again in the bathtub, where i was soothing my sore back with epsom salts. it totally sucked me in, and i loved it more on my second reading, giving it a whole extra star. unfortunately, the epsom salts were insufficient for what was really going on with my back, and i ended up having to go in for surgery, which meant that i didn’t review this when i’d intended to, and now i find myself back in that hazy place where i’m struggling to remember all the things i wanted to celebrate about this collection and i just don’t have time to read it a third time. so, warning – i’m probably going to make a mess of this review, since reviewing short story collections is always a challenge for me, but if i DO make a mess of it, know that the book is undoubtably better than anything i can say about it, and check it out for yourself. there are several standouts in the collection, and i will * my favorites, as i go through and do the painstaking work of reviewing each story separately, because i don’t know how else to do it.
CREEK DIPPERS
this story is a good introduction to the general themes of the collection. it’s only seven pages long, but it sets up the love/hate relationship that characters will have with their surroundings. it’s about a sixteen-year-old girl named angel and her mother sue, who had her when she was only seventeen. sue is completely at home in the woods, content and tranquil – feeling a spiritual connection that restless angel lacks:
I don’t want to go down to the creek with my mom. Nor do I want to be living here at sixteen in this deciduous/coniferous northeastern no-man’s-land of Vicksburg where we were both born, forty square miles of intersecting roads, intersecting streams, failing farms, and rocky ledge.
despite being restless now, yearning for more and desperate not to become trapped here, angel is also beginning to feel the twinges of a more mature perspective and recognizes that in her future, wherever it is, she will look back on these quiet times with nostalgia.
even though it’s really short, and is one of those wispier stories that feels fragmented and photographic, there are some really strong moments, and the last sentence is just a perfect tonal ending.
THE HEART OF THE WOODS
this story is more developed than the opener, and explores the tricky position of a woman torn between dueling factions: My father’s a logger, my brother a builder of houses, my husband a real estate man. sally’s relationship with her father is complicated by his disdain for her husband’s profession, which he deems vulgar and too far removed from the honest labor of working the land. he’s always testing her loyalties, baiting her for having married up and not having the same values with which she was raised. he abhors nature being gutted to make way for civilization and progress, and believes there’s more dignity in living off the land than selling it, usually to outsiders.
How many years will I have to walk this line – trying to prove myself in both worlds I belong to?
it’s a tricky balance – sally feels the “unsettling hunger” of the woods, and is drawn to it by her family roots, but as an adult, she has other things to consider. there’s a really well-maintained sense of calm forbearance here, and some excellent details.
*WINGS, 1989
this is told from the POV of a little girl born to parents with different opinions about the glory of nature. a young well-off suburban woman with dreams of being a poet falls for a blue-collar fellow and she follows him in his dream to go back to the land, drawn to the romantic idea of homesteading, but she is worn down by the hardship that this kind of life actually entails. this is not the whitmanny life she thought she was signing up for; nature isn’t all bounty and light – nature also erodes, and she finds herself endlessly weeding the garden and repairing the front door and tending to her daughter, lonely while her husband is off building houses, leaving them alone for days at a time. it’s a slow poison that her daughter notices, but is helpless to dissolve. it’s not all doom and gloom, though – it’s about quiet disappointment but also about a little girl coming of age and forming her own opinions and values.
*MAGGIE IN THE TREES
this is about a woman named maggie and the two men who love her. maggie is the embodiment of moody nature; a truly free spirit, skittish, restless, but not restless for another place like other characters in the collection – she’s “all mountain,” restless the way a stream is restless, embodying the constant animation of nature.
and to two best friends, transplants from the massachusetts suburbs to the vermont mountains, she is “quiet and wild and inscrutable,” symbolic of all the fierce hunger of untamable nature. she is rich’s wife, but pete quickly becomes infatuated with her:
…I thought then how she looked like she was of this place, like she was some kind of creature or tree that had grown here, and wondered how Rich had landed something as spectacular as that.
maggie, though, is as sad as she is restless, and when a relationship develops between her and pete over time, it throws him for a loop, unsure what he can offer her that rich cannot, complicating his thirty-year friendship, and ultimately satisfying no one. except me, because i loved this story.
*KARMANN
“But I can’t fucking wait. I fucking hate waiting. We’re all just fucking waiting.
“Everyone here is waiting,” I said.
“Flipping their wigs, waiting,” Annie said. It was true: we were all waiting for the people we knew and loved to disappear, or die, or not.
this takes place during the vietnam war, where annie and clare are two seventeen-year-old girls dreaming of all the places they will go when they finally break out of their smalltown lives.
California was where we wanted to go most: a place our mothers had never been and would never go, a place where we thought no one believed in war.
annie’s brother jack, who is “everything this place was not,” and who clare has a crush on, is off in vietnam, and while he is gone, the girls smoke pot and imagine their lives and all the rich world of possibilities that will one day be open to them.
and then jack comes back.
and both girls will be confronted with reality and consequences and how even when you get what you think you want, it’s never how you’d imagined it.
GOD’S COUNTRY
this is one of the longer pieces in the collection, and i liked so much of it, but overall it wasn’t a favorite. it’s about a woman named cora whose grandson kevin has gotten mixed up with a terrible crowd; taking part in an evil she initially cannot comprehend. but as she tries to understand where he went wrong, her memories become an examination of racism, and the ways it has always been present in her life, although its target has changed over time. she begins to understand that her own past weakness has made her culpable in perpetuating racism – that sometimes saying nothing is as much a part of the problem as hate speech and signs. i loved-loved all of the story of her past, but the present-day storyline was less interesting to me.
BARRED OWL
this story is about a girl who most definitely wants out of vicksburg, and she’s using every red dress, bad boy, sex and drugs cliché to burn her way through the place where she’s at until she can make tracks for somewhere more.
and yet…
*WHERE FIELDS TRY TO LIE
Home – a facet of my life as substantial as love has been, or work. The place I am always trying to leave or return to, the place that will not let me be.
a man returns to his family home, and confronts the demons and dramas of his past; his failed marriage, his childhood, his brother, and mostly – his father.
This morning this room smells of cellar dampness and mouse shit, and the driveway, visible through the window, my two-year-old red Volvo incongruent in its center, is a line of black mud leading toward the doorway of the large barn where my father took his life one morning at dawn. So I am not back with any romantic dream of returning to the land. That dream, with all its sweetness, is for others with far more innocence than I will ever know.
this one is probably the best-written story in the collection, and it’s a wonderfully descriptive account of grief and guilt and learning how to forgive ourselves.
It’s a terrible thing to have been the lucky one.
THE LONG ROAD TURNS TO JOY
this story didn’t leave much of an impression on me. super-hippie mom named apple waits for news of her marine son (named sparrow – jeez) stationed in afghanistan and reflects on her life. meh.
*LOVE BIRDS
i loved every little bit of this story, and i don’t want to say much about it. it’s about an older couple and their peaceful connection to the land and each other, and it’s a beautiful and haunting story of quietude.
We emptied the thermos and Tub started driving home. He took some of the skinny back roads we like going on; Turnpike, Old Farm, Fox. They’re roads we’d known our whole lives. Roads we’d seen change like our own faces. You could map our whole lives on these little two-bit dirt roads and not have to go farther than forty square miles. I don’t say that like I think I’m missing something.
THE WOMEN WHERE I’M FROM
like the first story, this one is about mother/daughter relationships, as a woman returns to her family’s vicksburg farm to help her mother, recently diagnosed with breast cancer. it’s another case where the one who got out returns to find that time has stood still, with only a few deaths and births changing the scenery.
i wasn’t crazy about the first story and i wasn’t crazy about the last story and i wasn’t crazy about them in the same way, so at first i thought this was more character-overlap and that they might be the same characters further on in their lives, which i think would have been a nice way to close the collection, but no. it’s a perfectly good story, but it didn’t stand out enough to be a favorite. however, as with all of the stories in this collection, there’s some truly brilliant writing on display, and i didn’t dislike any of the stories.
okay, that’s the best i can do, but i think if you decide to read this for yourselves, you will find it a very strong debut, and much better than my scattered blatherings have made it sound.
