Long ago, during the first Clinton Administration, your friendly critic, then a mild-mannered Seattle boy, spent two years teaching elementary school in rural southern Louisiana. Young writer that I was, I had read Faulkner and Flannery O’Connor with some attention — and, I confess, skepticism. I did not believe the floridly peculiar world depicted by those bent wizards could exist. Surely the mad, pervasive spookiness they described was an exaggeration, and I was off to do some fact-checking.
Of course, your critic found the real South was far stranger than any fiction could possibly capture. Maria’s vampiric boyfriend, the elderly macrobiotic lawyer who broke both his arms running down a New Orleans sidewalk, the swooping white ghost in the plantation-era mirror, as caught on film. The list goes on. Gloomy history, and personal extremis, and wild nature combined to create a world of dense, delightful and often terrifying oddity. What a humbling surprise it was. How exciting, as a young writer, to discover the world is bigger than you can possibly grasp.
What makes an interesting, useful story collection, as this one is? Balance is key. Newman has managed variety without eclecticism, coherence without dulling redundancy, motion without corny effort. (Image courtesy of Leigh Newman) If the American South has since become, arguably, the somewhat less evocative realm of mega-churches, speedways and fraying Trump signs, where is a writer to go for inspiration? Why, Alaska! The oddest people end up there, and the oddest things happen, sometimes without notice or remark, and it’s just the sort of overlarge, mysterious, human-haunted wildness that makes a writer feel necessary. Someone, after all, has to be there to make sense of it all. Or at least get it down on paper.
Which brings us to lifelong Alaska resident Leigh Newman’s excellent debut story collection, “Nobody Gets Out Alive.” This is not exactly, or maybe not at all, the Alaska you think you know, but it is a place Newman knows exceedingly well. Her memoir “Still Points North” was long-listed for the National Book Award last year, and Newman writes of her home state with a wry, effortless flair.
Newman’s Alaska is a mixed-up, contingent, irreducible place, rich with contradiction and overlapping realities. So: a story about Dutch, a lady with at least five ex-husbands and that many miscarriages, selling a crappy tear-down house on a lake near Anchorage, the open house featuring some moose ribs, which are stolen by a dog named Pinkie, who has been dropped off by the ailing Carl, an ex-lover headed for the grave. But there is also Costco guacamole and a private room full of wolf pelts, plus a neighbor, Candace, who “like more and more of the younger wives on the lake had dealt with turning forty by investing in injections that left her with a stunned, rubberized expression,” but who also has a pilot’s license. Indeed!
It is a lot to manage. And that’s just part of one story (the shapely “Howl Palace”). But Newman lands this, and several other teeming, tumbling entries, with a graceful hand. “High Jinks” features a twice-stolen taxidermied bear, which is also supposedly blue, and a raft trip without enough food, and a bush-pilot plane crash — or at least an extremely errant landing which seems to those involved about as consequential as a panel ding in that Costco parking lot.
In “Nobody Gets Out Alive” a polished mastodon skull sits in a log-cabin mansion owned by Neil, but the story is actually about Connecticut native Carter and his new wife Katrina, Neil’s ex, who is from Anchorage and who is a futures-trading savant, a “blond, carnivorous meteor” who “flung her drumstick bones on the bedroom floor” but also “turned around and wept over obscure Italian cinema.” (Lots of bones in this book.)
What makes an interesting, useful story collection, as this one is? Balance is key. Newman has managed variety without eclecticism, coherence without dulling redundancy, motion without corny effort. When stories feature repeated characters, we enjoy the surprise of seeing people afresh, from different angles, as though we have arrived at a familiar clearing from a new path. The author is comfortable at length, with the novella-sized “Alcan, an Oral History,” a model of the form.
It is not quite a flawless book. Newman is at her best when she inhabits the turbulent interface between wilderness and culture, and two longer stories miss the mark in this regard. But for the most part, these merry jumbles tend not to feel gratuitously weird. Instead, they are the means by which Newman sets off her generally grounded, essentially decent people.
In a landscape in which one might feel lost, with one’s delicate personal essence diffused into the vastness of the landscape, a robust private perspective becomes crucial. Staring up at Neil’s hunting trophies, Carter wonders: “Back in New York, wouldn’t he have found it upsetting…? He couldn’t say. There was something unicorn in all this carnage, something silvery and make-believe and authentic all at the same time.”
Michael Byers is on Twitter as @TheMichaelByers.
