Virgins & Tricksters Rosalie Morales Kearns. Aqueous Books, $14.00 paperback (335p) ISBN 978098838370
In “The
Associated Virgins”—the first story in Rosalie Morales Kearns’ captivating
collection—Elihu Wingate, “an expert on the psychology of consumer behavior”,
experiences a morphing reality as both his personal and professional lives collapse.
This frantic fracturing of one man’s career,
relationships, and mind is a slow burn, and the escalation is steady and sure
of itself. At a certain point, an assortment
of porcelain Virgin statues amass themselves around him, and when, by the end, he
feels their hands “patting him, soothing him” as he suns himself near the pool,
we realize that his life has shifted from the mundane to an obliterated
strangeness. We understand how he got
here, but we’re surprised to find ourselves there with him, too, half-believing
that the statues are alive and enveloping the remains of his world. It’s this balance between the actual and
surreal that’s so tantalizing in Kearns’ work.
The characters
that inhabit these pages include those that other writers might render as peripheral
or ephemeral. However, in Kearns’
stories, these characters—most of them woman—are made actual: their dilemmas
are compelling, their choices often difficult, and the roles into which they’re
pressed can’t quite contain them. “The Wives: A Story Cycle” is comprised of
four separate tales—“The Revolutionary’s Wife”, “The Pirate’s Wife”, “The
Priest’s Wife”, and “God’s Wife”— that complement each other in powerful
ways. While the titles might suggest women
“types” often evoked in broad, familiar strokes, Kearns challenges any
assumptions we might make: these wives are precisely, painfully human.
In “The
Priest’s Wife”, a woman wrestles with her marriage to a man who assumes the
priesthood in his deceased brother’s place.
As her simple ploughman husband rejects her, she’s left to consider
what, if any, happiness might be left and where she’ll find it. She confides to the Virgin Mother as she
watches her husband “lumbering up to the altar” in the ornate and ill-fitting
cassock. She recalls who he used to be:
“You’d never know how graceful he looked chopping wood or baling hay.” It’s in
this simple, heartbroken memory that readers understand this “wife” is much
more than the role she plays. She is grounded in a sad, complex reality that is
particular, all her own.
While
some stories in the collection are short, the most compelling pieces are those
that take time to unspool, sprawl, and build.
In these tales, we come to know the protagonists, the tension in the
choices they make, their desires. Kearns
has a gift for using a slow escalation to deepen the reader’s relationship to
her narratives. The stories that percolate, gaining urgency and surprising us
bit by bit, are satisfying because we often arrive somewhere unexpected yet
earned.
The last
piece in the collection, the novella-length “Triptych”, is one such story. An
engrossing portrait of three strangers—Larry, a divorced father wrestling with choices
he’s made and those that stand in front of him; Patrice, a middle-aged woman in
a memoir class at the YMCA; and Julie Anne, a young woman with a complicated
relationship to her mother—their lives converge in ways we don’t
anticipate. What might feel like a device
in another writer’s hands makes for engaging, graceful storytelling: the shifts
between perspectives are fluid, the momentum builds incrementally as our
knowledge of the trio deepens, and the intersection of their lives both
surprises and delights.
It’s
been years since I’ve settled into a book like this. Rosalie Morales Kearns
writes stories you pull a chair up to, you lean in close to hear, you get lost
in as the afternoon passes and you forget you had other things to do. Yet, it’s not that the stories are
comfortable—these worlds of virgins, tricksters, wives, daughters—are fraught
with complication and searching. Nor do they lack surprise: by blending precise
realism with wild magic, Kearns subverts our expectations in subtle yet
astounding ways. (September 2012)
Purchase
Virgins & Tricksters HERE.
Reviewer bio: Ashley Farmer is the author of the
chapbook Farm Town (Rust
Belt Bindery, 2012) and her first story collection is forthcoming from Tiny
Hardcore Press in 2013. An editor for Juked, she writes and teaches in Southern California. Please
say hello at www.ashleymfarmer.com.
