Life Becomes Profligate
Janet Desaulniers. What You've Been Missing. University of Iowa Press, 2004. Paper, 125 pp., $15.95.
Review by Brad Hipps
In her terrific debut story collection What You've Been Missing, Janet Desaulniers revels in the form, exalting the small moments that lead to a life lived, moments too often squashed beneath the tread of the novel's larger machinery. Her keen eye is drawn particularly to those instances—sometimes the very minute—when life shifts from good to bad, or bad to good.
In perhaps the collection's strongest story, "The Good Fight," we see forty-somethings Liza and Dutton in a bar in Chicago. Liza is consoling her friend and former lover, who is in love with a woman twenty years his junior. She muses on the attraction older men seem to have for younger women:
They always say, "Well, she's gonna break a lot of hearts," and then everyone feels warm. But maybe what they mean is something more serious, you know, like what old generals must feel when they review enemy troop movements, that mixture of fear and hope for the good fight and then the disappointment of their own distance from it.
The insight is funny and striking, all the more so when it's revealed that Liza's husband has recently left her for a younger woman. It is actually she who has called Dutton for consolation "because he was not part of her jeopardy. She wanted to believe her jeopardy had bounds, that there was some part of her life that could not be touched." As the evening progresses, we see Dutton eager to rekindle old passions—at least for the night—and Liza reluctant to take her search for solace so far. But a minor (and beautifully rendered) mishap at a restaurant brings them together. In their brief and fumbling passion behind a coatrack, Liza notes, "Every place he touched became a place where her sorrow was not." Her emotion is simple, compelling, believable: the immediate as shield against the imminent. The small contact brings Liza a shock of awareness about Dutton's life and her own, as well as notions of love, loss, and loneliness. This is the epiphanic story in its glory. The deftness with which Desaulniers builds to and carries the moment is remarkable.
The collection sparkles with these instances. In "Everyone is Wearing a Hat," the narrator grieves the loss of her young son. The story begins in familiar scene: an otherwise humdrum bedtime conversation between husband and wife. Their banter is light, typical, a portrait of people plowing dutifully through life—except that the couple's son was killed in an accident a year earlier. After the lights go out, the narrator observes: "My throat and eyes fill suddenly with tears, but I lie there still as a stone, watch the digital clock change, 29 to 30, and wonder at how a sorrow so much larger than this moment can be so neatly contained by it."
It is a moment not primarily of tears but bewilderment. This seems to be Desaulniers's insight into loss, as something not merely wrenching but also disorienting. The narrator recalls that in the days following her son's death, she felt an odd awareness of things around her, a "sudden self-consciousness . . . Life, no longer ordinary, becomes profligate—a reckless boil of mute, mystifying details." The story draws its title from her curious realization that she's the only hatless rider in a crowded elevator. We become aware of the broader significance: in the wake of tragedy, one's sense is of an uncomfortable peculiarity nearly indistinguishable from alienation. Desaulniers offers something far more intriguing than stories based on tears: a sense of what it is to straddle the interstices among grief, bafflement, and healing.
A flawless story collection is as difficult to find as a perfect album, so it's not surprising that What You've Been Missing is imperfect. The story "Roll," in which we find Louise, a girl precariously balanced between her devout Catholic aunt and restless, resentful mother, never elevates the reader's pulse. The characters remain uncharacteristically flat and shapeless—it is difficult to imagine their goings-on as anything beyond words on a page.
But this is an exception. What makes the collection as a whole feel so complete is the fact that Desaulniers's gemlike insights are set among such strong craftwork. Her story components—dialogue, body language, character appearance—collaborate exactly as they should. A husband is described as looking like "the brute in a children's story"; a worried mother opens a phone call to her daughter with: "This is not a discussion, Ellen. I need you here." The elements are compelling and relevant—quietly so. Desaulniers resists showy brushstrokes and avoids distracting the reader from the larger picture. This is discipline joined to originality. The result is stories that live and breathe.
Brad Hipps is a first-year MFA student in the University of Houston's Creative Writing Program.
