QUARRY
LIGHTClaudia Smith. Magic Helicopter Press, $14 paperback (134p) ISBN: 9780984140657
Claudia
Smith, writing from the perspective of young girls in her short story
collection Quarry Light, often slips
in and out of the language of imagination that should be familiar to anyone who
remembers their own childhood. The girls
speak of their imaginary friends hiding in the walls as if it is the most
natural fact; they sometimes call themselves cat girls because that’s exactly
what they are. Imagination is a part of
their lives, just as it is for every kid.
But Smith’s children don’t live in safety where playing pretend is the
fun in and of itself. There is real
violence in their lives and within their families, so much of it that it seems
to me that these girls’ imaginations are less of a fanciful accent to their
lives, and more of a kind of escape.
They use imagination as a sort of panic room, thrown up to shield them
from their monsters. It’s a flimsy
defense.
Each piece is about a woman, usually told
from their adult self, though almost always switching back to and from their younger
pasts. The women in these stories are
all trying to manage their lives under countless different anxieties: parental
anxiety, sexual anxiety, relationship anxiety, and so on. A woman with a ruined marriage thinks back to
a horrifying weekend from her childhood in “Cat Girl”. In “Lucy”, another woman tries to manage her
personal life and relationships while unpacking her history with her long-dead
mother and more recently-passed grandmother.
To say that their past “haunts” them would be inaccurate, I think,
because that cliché would imply that their past is always nearby, tormenting
them, influencing their every decision.
Instead, the past and present are laid side-by-side in equally
unsympathetic tones in order to compare them, see the similarities, the
patterns, the thematic repetitions of each character’s life as she muddles
through it.
Smith writes with powerful precision,
establishing each setting with exact nouns and adjectives, filling her
paragraphs with “balls of string” and “empty bottles of long-discontinued
beauty creams” that smell of honey. The
effect of these small nouns is to triangulate the stories to a specific time
and place, enhancing the feeling that these are all personal memories. It gives everything an aura of nostalgia,
though the unhappy events of these stories contradict the pleasant implications
of the word.
While the mechanics of her stories are
confidently presented, the characters usually felt flat to me. There is a tone to Smith’s writing that makes
every choice the character makes seem inevitable, and unworthy of much
remark. Everything seems like it happens
because it has to happen, it’s all inevitable, and the reader should accept it
just as the character has. It’s like
there’s a resigned “sigh” hidden beneath every verb, dissuading complete
engagement in the action. Perhaps that
is just a result of a purposeful distance that Smith applies to the narration,
giving it a hazy disconnectedness to add to the feeling that most of this book
is written like a memory.
The reader should be warned that there are several
instances of sexual violence and coercion that involve children. Smith is totally unflinching in her approach
to the topic, which is probably necessary, but it does make for some
uncomfortable reading.
Quarry
Light tells the stories of some women who have lived through the worst of
it, have been mistreated by those they should
trust the most, and failed by the rest. More importantly, it tells their stories after the worst of it. They haven’t necessarily moved on, or moved
forward, or moved very far, but they are still moving, and that’s a story worth
looking in on. (October 2013)
Purchase Quarry Light HERE.
Reviewer bio: Tom Taff
lives and works in Saint Paul, Minnesota.
