GUEST REVIEW: THINGS KEPT, THINGS LEFT BEHIND

Things Kept, Things Left Behind
By Jim Tomlinson
University of Iowa Press
153 pp., paperback
$15.95

GUEST REVIEW BY DANIEL OLIVAS

There's much to be said for those who pen their first books at an age when many working folks are winding down their careers. Such writers can draw upon decades of experience, giving their writing the kind of nuance and ambiguity that comes with mature hindsight.

For these reasons, one may rejoice in Jim Tomlinson's debut short-story collection, Things Kept, Things Left Behind, for which Tomlinson won the prestigious Iowa Short Fiction Award.

Born in 1941 three weeks after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Tomlinson grew up in a small Illinois town and now lives in rural Kentucky. Perhaps not surprisingly, most of the 11 short stories in this collection have the Bluegrass State as their backdrop and have struggling, working-class folks at their center.

An example is LeAnn McCray, who appears in the two title stories, "Things Kept" and "Things Left Behind." In the first, we learn that LeAnn sometimes "felt restless, strange to her own skin. It was a troublesome feeling, one that would come on her without warning, as it did one Tuesday afternoon in late October."

That day, LeAnn's sister, Cass, needs to talk about helping their stubborn and widowed mother, Georgia, out of debt. Cass suggests that LeAnn ask a mutual friend, Dexter Chalk, for help. The married LeAnn agrees, never letting on that she and Dexter are having an affair. The plan to aid Georgia spirals into an unintended climax, in which LeAnn learns that it's not just the living who have secrets.

In "Things Left Behind," LeAnn's secret affair with Dexter is unwittingly divulged to her husband, Lonnie, by a well-intentioned hotel maid. Because Lonnie is far from a perfect husband and father, Tomlinson allows ambiguity to seep into LeAnn's infidelity.

In "Prologue (two lives in letters)," we are introduced to two young, idealistic teenagers, Davis Menifee Jr. and Claire Lyons, through a sampling of their correspondence spanning 34 years. Thrown together as delegates to the 1963 Congressional Youth Leadership Conference for one week in Washington, D.C., Davis and Claire become close friends in the wake of Kennedy's assassination and political uncertainty. But they take radically different paths. Claire becomes an activist lawyer and eventually a member of Congress. Davis protests the Vietnam War and flees to Canada to evade the draft. Both start families, question their choices, wonder where their youth has gone, and hope for better times. For many readers who have spent a few decades on this good earth, the words of these two Americans may be painfully familiar.

There are other gems in this collection: In "Stainless," Warren and Annie have one last dinner together as they divide up their belongings at the end of their marriage. In "Squirrels," a man is bedeviled by his ex-wife because she is bedeviled by squirrels that invaded her attic. And there are the two brothers in "Lake Charles" who share a bond forged in a horrendous, life-altering childhood accident. In such stories, Tomlinson keeps his observations and humor sharp, his prose lean as a marathon runner.

Sometimes in a Tomlinson tale, it's difficult to tell the winners from the losers, the resilient from the fragile. But his magic lies in the shadows of people's lives, those dark recesses where uncertainty reigns. It's as if Tomlinson holds a mirror up to us and says: It's all a confusing mess, but we will survive because the other option is just too damn scary.

This is unadorned wisdom earned through experience. And it takes a skilled, mature writer such as Tomlinson to bring it to life.

This review first appeared in the El Paso Times. Daniel A. Olivas is the author of four books and is a frequent reviewer for the El Paso Times and the Multicultural Review. He shares blogging duties at La Bloga .

Comments

[Dan Wickett]

Excellent review for an excellent collection!