George Saunders writes about the short story genre in his new book A Swim in a Pond in the Rain: “A story is a linear-temporal phenomenon. It proceeds, and charms us (or doesn’t), a line at a time. We have to keep being pulled into a story in order for it to do anything to us.” Therefore, the writer’s goal is to compel the reader to want to continue to read the story, but why? “That’s the million-dollar question: What makes a reader keep reading?”
For Genevieve Plunkett, in Prepare Her, her first collection, the convincing realism of her meditative prose, the way she limns setting in archetypal Vermont, and the development of characters who are often in a state of emotional stasis, all entice the reader to proceed.
The opener, “Something for a Young Woman,” an O. Henry Prize-winning story, is meditative tale about Allison, a young woman who tries to seduce a significantly older shop owner. Without a lot of exposition, Plunkett dives right into their unconventional relationship:
“The girl and the shop owner liked to talk. Once, they had been talking in the storage room, searching a heap of bubble wrap for a lost piece to a tea set, and he had gotten very close to her, blocking the door with his body. She had looked up and met the buttons of his shirt … and a flight of nerves had gone up inside her. “
The author moves the story along with passages reminiscent of Lolita. Allison starts paying attention to her appearance and “she saw less and less of her boyfriend.” When the shop owner goes on vacation, Allison finds a necklace, a gift he left her. Years pass, Allison marries a teacher and they have a son, but she dreams about the shop owner and even stalks him: “He still had the same broad carriage, the same security of strength.” She had mixed feelings about the visit, but it is at the shop owner’s funeral, in which she wears the necklace, that the reader ponders if Allison’s obsession with him lies at the heart of a major crisis in her life.
“Schematic” is a saturnine, philosophical tale about the effects abandonment has on three brothers. After their parents leave, their grandmother takes them in, but then she dies. The only stability the boys are left with is a churchwoman who stops in to wash dishes, deliver groceries, check in on the boys, and explain that their grandmother “is in heaven now.” Doug, the oldest, a factory worker, ensures that the youngest, Toby, “[gets his] ass to school,” while Sammy works at the Hathaway’s where he takes Toby to work with their horses. The boys, especially Toby, struggle with their mother’s abandonment: “He tried to keep her face packed safely away, but whenever he looked for it, he could only come up with the face of Ms. Stevens, his teacher from last year.” At the center of the story is a discarded pinball machine, which “looked like a wooden coffin, propped up on four metal legs,” highlighting the motif of death, which is further illustrated when “a girl who had been in Doug’s class died when her truck had hit a tree.” The boys may be lost without their grandmother, but the pinball machine “scheme-attic,” which “looked like a tangle of black lines and circles, with numbers scattered around, like an impossible connect-the-dots puzzle,” may just be the blueprint the boys require to escape small-time life working menial jobs.
The closer, “Prepare Her,” is metaphysical tale about a couple in turmoil and a daughter, Bianca, who suffers from severe constipation, a symbol of the couple’s marriage. After the separation, Rachel, a journalist, moved in with her mother, realizing that she fell for a “moody and immature man.” Bianca’s ailment “has become a psychological struggle” and Rachel “wishes she could take the girl’s suffering upon herself.” There are, though, some joyful moments in the story, particularly when Plunkett transports the reader to Vermont for a walk in the woods:
“Nature has no style, no predictable emotional cues. It is all beautiful and endless. If it stirs anything at all, it stirs something primitive, something beneath nostalgia, or heartache, or love. A tree made into a chair … can bring such precise, harmonious, longing, but a tree when it is just a tree demands something unbridled, rhapsodic.”
And rapture may come for Bianca in the form of a bowel movement, relieving her discomfort. However, Rachel is still left with the detritus of a marital split, displaying the fact that no one is every quite prepared for life’s painful, unexpected events.
Many other characters in Prepare Her are powerless over their lives. In “Arla Had Horses,” Arla and Renee plan to ride horses the entire tale, but Plunkett keeps them helpless to do so. In “Single” a young couple may not advance their marriage past the one month anniversary. The author also ensures that her characters yearn for unconditional love and identity, creating a mimesis of reality. And reality, as excruciating as it is at times, is what seduces the reader to read Genevieve Plunkett’s stories in Prepare Her.
[Published by Catapult Press on July 13, 2021, 240 pages, $16.95 paperback]