Reviewed by Kate Gorton
Devastating and hopeful. Sexy yet funny. Gritty but tender. Immediately relevant with a nineties vibe. Claire Rudy Foster's new short story collection, Shine of the Ever, is a study of life and love where the lines blur. In this age of shattering binaries, a nuanced voice like Foster's is vital and timely, and Shine establishes them as an author who understands what it means to be queer, and what it means to belong to ourselves and others, at this particular moment in time.
The opener, "Pixies," sets the bassline for this richly sensory collection (which itself is named for a line in a Pixies song):
The sound pushes on the walls, ceiling, floor, growling into something massive and golden.
When we're together, we forget that we are hopeless.
We are something else and we are part of each other.
We will never fit. Why would we want to be like you?
This sonic microburst of a story is a manifesto of sorts, a battle cry for an entire generation. In but a page and a half, Foster immerses us in the world of the stories that lie ahead.
The stories in Shine might not interact with one another à la Elizabeth Strout's Olive Kitteridge (save for a few little nods, like the reappearance of a certain Portland witch named Jenna, who totally rules), but the collection is bound by Portland's city limits and the thematic threads that Foster weaves with ease. One such theme is alienation. Many of the protagonists in Shine feel like strangers in their own skin, observers in their own lives. They want so badly to assimilate, but are programmed to be different, and thus difficult, no matter how hard they try. In "Domestic Shorthair," the narrator Amit struggles to hide their queerness and gender dysphoria from the world, all while seeking connection with women in secret—including their extremely hetero roommate. In "Littermates," the protagonist refers to themselves as "from another planet" in comparison to a group of overly peppy Christians in the park.
Talk of Christians brings us to another powerful theme in Shine: Foster's protagonists often come to us as exiles, suspended in a kind of purgatory on earth between the life they once had and the one they seek to live. It feels as if eternal salvation, or damnation, lies just around the next city block. We see this in stories like "Stay Cool," where a mother is starting over, again, with her terminally ill child, after losing yet another partner due to failed attempts to hide her queerness. She struggles under the weight of living an authentic life despite everything begging her to favor the path of least resistance:
Eden only had room for two people: a mating pair of humans. So that was the price you paid for living there: You couldn't tell men that you didn't love them like that. But you had to leave, after a while, even though they loved you and would do anything to make you change your mind . . . you had to leave, because something in you was broken and no matter how sorry you were, you just didn't belong in paradise.
Shine truly soars in moments when this existential angst pays off in surprising ways. It is a rare, enviable talent to deftly render joy and hope in prose without tipping into the maudlin, and Foster does it well. For instance, in "Redhead," we learn about a woman who has given up a promising acting career to look after her brother, who struggles with addiction and has left a treatment program early. What could easily be portrayed as a tragedy is spun in the other direction. The wolves of inadequacy and addiction go quiet at the door, and the real story emerges: a brother and sister who love and care for each other. There is a similar turning point in "How to Be a Better Metamour," where communication among women triumphs over insecurity and shitty boyfriends, and in "Venus Conjunct Saturn," where a Scorpio isn't what she seems in the most wonderful way. Foster keeps us on our toes by painting warm pockets of optimism where we expect to find despair, and into that vacuum of surprise rush empathy and compassion.
There is an obsession today with literature that tries to guess what life will be like after the world ends. But Foster has spun together a collection that I can only describe as pre-apocalyptic: narratives that examine the struggle to lay claim to one's identity, set in a city that is fighting— and losing—the same battle today. Gentrification of Portland is a central point that most of the stories in this collection examine in some way, whether it's the sinister, shiny condos that no one can afford or the invasion of Californians who complain about avocado prices. Reading these stories feels like one is poised on the edge of a cliff that is just starting to crumble, or inside a glacier as it recedes. In no place is this more poignant than in the title story, where we watch both Jay and the Portland she knows fall apart across a matter of months.
But where you would expect nihilism is a rebellious desire to live and love harder than ever, because none of this will be here much longer. Jay's resurgence of hope toward the end of the story embodies the heart-rending hopefulness that limns so much of this work:
She is the you I am falling in love with all over again, and maybe it will last this time. . . . Maybe there's a chance. Maybe I could be sober, this time, if I didn't have to pretend anymore.
In this moment, even I found myself rooting for that self-proclaimed dirtbag.
Among all this are moments that seem to divide the readers of Shine, slice-of-life stories where perhaps nothing revolutionary happens. But it's revolutionary that queer and trans characters are main characters here, the heroes of their own stories for a change: flawed and unsure and imperfect, but never tragic. It is refreshing to see queer love and sex, especially sex among trans people, painted so matter-of-factly and without voyeurism, from cover to cover. There are times, of course, when a piece wanders into mundanity for a moment or could use a little extra substance to resonate more completely; that's the risk one takes in crafting slice-of-life narratives. All in all, it was a delight to be immersed in the exceedingly normal lives of queer people for an entire collection, without the framing of victimhood or the lens of a cis hetero writer for a change.
A final recommendation: when you finish Shine, read the very first story once more. Foster's narrative "we" takes on new meaning. It feels as if all of the characters encountered in the collection have somehow ended up at this Pixies show on the same night, the most old-Portland kind of serendipity, with the city itself raging alongside them. Even as the world burns, there is hope and love in the room and we know that these souls, at least, will be all right.