Fjords Reviews

HOME | BOOK REVIEWS | Review of Jessica Treadway's Please Come Back to Me
Please Come Back to Me by Jessica Treadway

 

 

Fjords Review, Jessica Treadway, Please Come Back to Me

Review of Jessica Treadway's Please Come Back to Me

Athens, Georgia: University of Georgia Press
216 pages $24.95 (hardcover), $19.95 (paperback)

Reviewed by Tara Menon

X

About Tara Menon

Tara Menon is a freelance writer based in Lexington, Massachusetts. Her book reviews have appeared in Na'amat Woman, Calyx, India Currents, Parabola, and Hinduism Today. Her poetry has been published in the following publications: Azizah Magazine; Aaduna; Yellow as Turmeric, Fragrant as Cloves; the view from here; and 10x3 plus poetry. Additional poems are forthcoming in Lalitamba, Damazine, and Cartys Poetry Journal. Tara's fiction has been published in the following journals and anthologies: Contemporary Literary Review India; Catamaran; The APA Journal; Elf: Eclectic Literary Forum; Many Mountains Moving; India Currents; The South Carolina Review; Living in America; and Mother of the Groom.

Jessica Treadway's second collection of short stories, Please Come Back to Me, winner of the Flannery O'Connor Award, is not for those who seek fiction as a means of escape, but rather for readers who would welcome an immersion in reality. She packs a lot in her fiction with very little redundancy, giving us protagonists whom we could meet in our everyday lives. Not a single story is narrated in the fashionable first person, but we are privy to the minds of her protagonists. Perhaps it is for this reason that though we empathize with them we may not love them and sometimes watch their fates unfold like interested bystanders rather than active well-wishers.

The collection includes a novella with the eponymous title, Please Come Back to Me. In the story, a young couple, Dorrie and Chris, who have imagined their children on the moon, waiting to be summoned, engage our compassion. At his wife's urging, twenty-six year old Chris goes to a doctor to find out whether the poppy-sized mole on his left arm is cancerous. After he is diagnosed with cancer and undergoes chemotherapy, Dorrie tells him she is expecting. Unlike in the past, when they even gave names to their conjured children, they fear to envision the future. Dorrie wants to ask him to give her a sign after his death that his soul is still around, but she can't manage to communicate her wish. Chris dies, tragically, ten days after his son is born in the same hospital. Dorrie raises the child with her mother's help until her mother dies. The deaths of Chris and his mother-in-law, both from cancer, portray the kind of coincidence that happens all too often in life. The story is tinged with the longing of the widow for her husband, and Treadway imparts a touch of the surrealistic when the dead man saves his son. (Elsewhere in her collection, too, she inserts a bit of surrealism, making the reader marvel at her skill in incorporating it in the midst of so much reality.)

In the first story, "The Nurse and the Black Lagoon," we feel sorry for Irene, whose son Brian has set fire to a playground, and the tension builds up chillingly, horrifyingly against the background of family drama. She had encouraged creativity in her children, taking them to crafts stores to get supplies for projects they did together after dinner. "I am a good mother, Irene could hear in her head as she dropped the items on the counter in front of the cashier." Though Brian had once buried a kitten alive, Treadway does not depict him as a monster, only as the child of ordinary parents, a troubled individual who merely says, "I'm sorry" when his sister confronts him. The writer is generous with details, but she also uses restraint effectively, making the reader wonder what went wrong with Brian.

Treadway, in "Dear Nicole" relies on credible coincidence and the "what if" to carry out her plot. She links her characters' childhood and adult lives creatively, giving us a wonderful image of a pond with skaters, and capturing small town life adroitly, in a manner comparable to Elizabeth Strout's Pulitzer prize-winning depiction in Olive Kitteridge. "Ice glittered on telephone wires. The flickery bulbs suspended above the pond had been replaced by floodlights, which illuminated the whole rink, even the corners, where it used to be you could hide, if you wanted to leave the game for a few minutes to be alone with your heartbeat and the stars. The girls didn't sit on a crate to watch anymore, but stood in a circle, some of them smoking cigarettes with their backs to the boys, all of them talking while the action passed by. They wore their daytime clothes under their coats and jackets, instead of pajamas and gowns. Occasionally they said something to one of the players, or admired a shot with a flirty hood, but it was a tired admiration, and Gerald saw that the girls might just as well have been hanging out at Costa's, laughing over pop and French fries, for all they cared about the game."

"Shirley Wants Her Nickel Back" could have been titled "Every Marriage Has Its Secrets," based on the protagonist's mother's words that reverberate in the daughter's mind in a key scene. It is a story with two car accidents and another that turns into a near miss. Treadway's explorations of her characters' minds are vital to the dramatic action. Norine's husband kills a drunk woman when he is driving. Fortunately for him, he is released on what at first seems to be a technicality. The couple's financial and parental responsibilities add to the tension in the marriage. Norine's resentment toward her husband accelerates to the point where she decides to do something bold and impetuous, which she will regret and try to undo.

One of the most interesting, albeit slightly familiar premises, belongs to the story "Revelation." Treadway elevates the premise and makes it her own in the conclusion. The story features a stalker who sends a woman notes with a sentence from the Book of Revelation in the Bible. "Do not fear what you are about to suffer." This is the shortest tale, less embellished with details, but again, what is withheld adds to the effect.

All the short stories with the exception of Deprivation (though not without virtue) are of equal and meritorious caliber. Treadway makes us wonder what we would do if we had her characters' predicaments, whether we were the mother of the boy who set a playground on fire, or the widow who had to raise her son on her own, or the spouse who married the wrong woman, or the sister with her memory of being sexually abused by her father, or the desperate mother whose baby wouldn't stop crying. She lets us see that it is human nature to at first deny or mitigate one's problems. "He must have lit a match for some reason, and it got out of hand," says Irene to the police officer, knowing that every mother in a similar plight would say the same thing. "It's just a mole," Chris says, blissfully ignorant that melanoma will kill him. Treadway, with two award-winning collections of short stories (her previous one garnered the John C. Zacharis First Book Award), is a master of the genre at a time when novels are flourishing. She makes us realize not just that every marriage has a secret, but that every family has a story.

Archives

Hush by Nikki Ummel

Alexis Rhone Fancher’s Erotic: New and Selected Poems

Chasing Homer by László Krasznahorkai

Eight Perfect Murders by Peter Swanson

The Death of Sitting Bear by N. Scott Momaday

WHILE YOU WERE GONE BY SYBIL BAKER

MY STUNT DOUBLE BY TRAVIS DENTON

Made by Mary by Laura Catherine Brown

THE RAVENMASTER: My Life with the Ravens at the Tower of London

Children of the New World By Alexander Weinstein

Canons by Consensus by Joseph Csicsila

And Then by Donald Breckenridge

Dear Everyone by Matt Shears

Magic City Gospel by Ashley M. Jones

Intimacy by Stanley Crawford

Lunch Poems by Deborah Kuan

The Best American Poetry 2016

One with the Tiger by Steven Church

Crosstalk by Connie Willis

The King of White Collar Boxing by David Lawrence

They Were Coming for Him by Berta Vias-Mahou

Verse for the Averse: a Review of Ben Lerner’s The Hatred of Poetry

That Other Me by Maha Gargash

Simone by Eduardo Lalo

Swimming by Karl Luntt

Ghost/ Landscape by Kristina Marie Darling and John Gallaher

Enchantment Lake by Margi Preus

Bad Light by Carlos Castán

Diaboliques by Jules Barbey d’Aurevilly

Staying Alive by Laura Sims

Core of the Sun by Johanna Sinisalo

Fireflies by John Leland

Maze of Blood by Marly Youmans

Tender the Maker by Christina Hutchkins

Little Anodynes by Jon Pineda

Conjuror by Holly Sullivan McClure

Someone's Trying To Find You by Marc Augé

The Four Corners of Palermo by Giuseppe Di Piazza

Now You Have Many Legs to Stand On by Ashley-Elizabeth Best

The Knowledge by Robert Peake

The Darling by Lorraine M. López

How To Be Drawn by Terrance Hayes

Watershed Days: Adventures (A Little Thorny and Familiar) in the Home Range by Thorpe Moeckel

[INSERT] BOY by Danez Smith

Demigods on Speedway by Aurelie Sheehan

Find Me by Laura Van Den Berg

Singing Bones by Kate Schmitt

Knuckleball by Tom Pitts

Wandering Time by Luis Alberto Urrea

Teaching a Man to Unstick His Tail by Ralph Hamilton

Domenica Martinello: The Abject in the Interzones

Control Bird Alt Delete by Alexandria Peary

Twelve Clocks by Julie Sophia Paegle

Love You To a Pulp by C.S. DeWildt

Even Though I Don’t Miss You by Chelsea Martin

Women by Chloe Caldwell

Fifteen Dogs by Andre Alexis

ESSAY 2:12 A.M. by Kat Meads

Revising The Storm by Geffrey Davis

Quality Snacks by Andy Mozina

Nature's Confession by J.L. Morin

Midnight in Siberia by David Greene

Strings Attached by Diane Decillis

Down from the Mountaintop: From Belief to Belonging by Joshua Dolezal

The New Testament by Jericho Brown

You Don't Know Me by James Nolan

Phoning Home: Essays by Jacob M. Appel

Words We Might One Day Say by Holly Karapetkova

Murder by Danielle Collobert

Sorrow by Catherine Gammon

The Americans by David Roderick

Put Your Hands In by Chris Hosea

I Think I Am in Friends-Love With You by Yumi Sakugawa

Third Wife by Jiri Klobouk

Box of Blue Horses by Lisa Graley

Review of Hilary Plum’s They Dragged Them Through the Streets

The Sleep of Reason by Morri Creech

American Neolithic by Terence Hawkins

The Hush before the Animals Attack by Carol Matos

Regina Derieva, In Memoriam by Frederick Smock

Review of The House Began to Pitch by Kelly Whiddon

Hill William by Scott McClanahan

Seamus Heaney Aloft

The Bounteous World by Frederick Smock

Going Down by Chris Campanioni

Review of Empire in the Shade of a Grass Blade by Rob Cook

Review of The Day Judge Spencer Learned the Power of Metaphor

Review of The Figure of a Man Being Swallowed by a Fish

Review of Life Cycle Poems by Dena Rash Guzman

Review of Saint X by Kirk Nesset

Review of The Tide King by Jen Michalski

Interview with Jessica Treadway

Eve Asks by Christine Redman-Waldeyer