GOODNIGHT NOBODY
Ethel
Rohan. Queen’s Ferry Press, $16.95 paperback (138p) ISBN 9781938466144
The
shells of SUVs on the side of the road, burned for insurance money. Cereal flakes stuck in the folds of a
brother’s neck. A grow-your-own-baby gag
gift that spills out of its container by morning. These are the details that make Ethel Rohan’s
worlds so vivid. They serve not to drive
the plot forward, but the mood forward.
They show us a character arc without having to tell us. They stop us.
They keep us reading. These
details are what drew me into Rohan’s previous work, what still draws me into
her small fictions in her latest collection Goodnight
Nobody.
Goodnight Nobody is a book of loss. Rohan specializes in longing, whether through
a teenage girl; a kept woman; or a volunteer soldier. Her characters suffer financial aches, both
from lack and from plenty. They suffer
expectations from family and from themselves.
And the self is who they are always trying to come to terms with and
rarely do.
Often her
stories are about quiet inner struggles with loud strikes of violence surrounding
them. The title story begins with a dead
body in a dumpster but spends the majority of its time on the solitude of its main
character. While “Bee Killer” is about
an unhappy marriage, the story is centered on the husband’s new hobby as a beekeeper
and the wife’s hatred of these bees (including the lovely and cringe worthy bonus
of a bee’s leg lodged inside her ankle).
In “Darkroom,” a photographer trespasses into a giraffe enclosure to get
the perfect shot as a way to deal with going blind. In “Flash,” a woman’s nose bleeds
every time she goes into her artist’s shed, but this is her escape from
financial ruin and a disabled brother she can no longer support. The darkness in these stories is often unexpected
and always intriguing. But Rohan makes
sure humor is there for balance.
While
the premises are always interesting, there are stories in the collection that
left me wanting more, mostly when it came to development. Some flash pieces felt like the outlines of
great stories. In “The Defiance of
Gravity,” for example, I felt I was being told how to read the story, how to
understand the character, and I wondered if some of these pieces should have
been longer stories instead of flash fiction.
There were places where more time on character, image, and action could
have led us to those final conclusions.
That
being said, many of the stories in Goodnight
Nobody do exactly what flash fiction should do. In “Priority” we see one moment in a woman’s
life—entertaining a door-to-door knife salesman—that gives us a much larger
story. Simply knowing that the woman has
forgotten her first husband’s name shows us a whole world. And by the characters’ interaction, in only
two pages, we’re left imagining a later conversation with her current
husband. We’re left diagnosing her. We understand a life by only seeing a part of
it. (September 2013)
Purchase
Goodnight Nobody HERE.
Reviewer
bio: Christy Crutchfield writes and teaches in Western Massachusetts. Her
work has appeared in Mississippi Review online, Salt Hill Journal,
the Collagist, Newfound, and others. Her novel How to Catch a Coyote is forthcoming
from Publishing Genius in 2014. Visit her at christycrutchfield.com
