Girl TroubleBy Holly Goddard Jones |
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Reviewed by Jill Meyers
Girl Trouble, Holly Goddard Jones's debut collection, is the work of a sensitive and mature writer. In eight expansive stories, she plumbs the souls of truckers, factory workers, gun shop owners, and single moms in Roma, Kentucky. There is nothing showy about these stories: They are solid, well-crafted, meticulous, even. That is not to say that these stories don't surprise, because they do. They move past our expectations of where the story should go into something better—which, with Jones, often means darker.
“Theory of Realty” is the story of a young girl, Ellen, who, at 13, is likely to have her first sexual experience with a grieving neighbor, a man who, after his son has died, invites the neighborhood children to swim in his pool. Jones sets up the cues—Ellen visits the neighbor one a day there are no other children at the pool and Mr. Hoffman's wife is away; he has been drinking; he serves her a wine cooler—and we wait for the inevitable to happen. Mr. Hoffman is a mess, and he behaves inappropriately, recklessly, with Ellen, but the transgression we've been anticipating is sidestepped. We watch the power subtly shift between the two of them. From here, the story goes on for another twenty pages and develops into something else entirely, something that involves teen girl BFFdom and wild mothers with red Firebirds and the burden of adult decision making. And yet this pool scene is not a narrative feint: what Mr. Hoffman says to Ellen that afternoon she takes into herself and uses as a moral compass.
In Jones's fiction, there are no martyrs, and no one, even victims of violent crime, speaks from a place of victimhood. Her characters recognize their own flaws and frailties—though they cannot supersede them—and look on others with, if not empathy, then flashes of insight. Their views are, of course, limited, as they have to be. The story “Parts” suggests that we cannot glimpse a situation, a personality, or a life in its entirety, that ultimately, as humans, we have to traffic in synecdoches, substituting the part for the whole. Art, a gynecologist, looks on women’s bodies a collection of parts, because of his medical training and because he needs to, in order to be professional and detached: for him, giving a pelvic exam is like “kneading bread dough.” Meanwhile, his wife (later ex-wife) Dana, learns too much about her daughter’s murder by reading blogs, and it ruins her; once the murder and the murderer flood her imagination, she can’t get her engine started again. She states:
I think that there are moments in a life when you have to leave a part of yourself behind to function—like molting. Felicia’s birth was the first such moment for me: in the weeks after my labor I understood that my body wasn’t the only thing that would always be different, that my soul had changed, too. Some loss there, but the gains were greater. When she died, I had to molt again, but I did it badly and never really finished the job, because I get up mornings feeling like a mother, still, and I go to bed nights mourning my daughter all over again.
Five years after her daughter’s death, Dana has not been able to put the murder behind her, because, as she puts it, Felicia is in her blood.
Jones is a patient writer who shows her characters to be intelligent people struggling with difficult moral problems: how to be the best father to a slacker son who may have raped a fifteen-year-old girl; how to handle another man taking your beating; how to bear witness and grieve a murder, a failed marriage. These stories take a while to tell, but it's to their merit, as the long length of these stories is their midwife and their promise. For Jones, the movement of the short story is able to articulate the arc of a life rather than merely the punctuation of a moment.