'Widow: Stories,' by Michelle Latiolais
Published 4:00 am, Sunday, January 23, 2011
By Michelle Latiolais
(Bellevue Literary Press; 160 pages; $14.95 paperback)
In "The Long Table," one of the deceptively quiet stories in Michelle Latiolais' "Widow," an aunt crafts animals from bits of salvaged bread to entertain the children at a wedding. She suffers under the private knowledge of her own failing marriage as she builds a lion, a giraffe, a snake with rose-colored scales made of wine-soaked crumbs.
Her humble communion turns the mundane extraordinary: Flower stamens become a pair of horns, a mane is carved by fork tines. Latiolais' stories cast similar spells. Her sharply etched tableaux are snatches of a fever dream sculpted from the most humdrum bread heels of daily life.
Many of the narrators in "Widow" are widows, but even those who aren't carry a loneliness reminiscent of widowhood. Although the stories move from jungles to gynecologists' offices to strip clubs, they share a narrative voice at once intricate and breathless, dense with introspection. A woman's memory of her grandmother, for example, sparks an entire meditation on motherhood:
"[B]ody curled so tightly in upon her lungs that she could not breathe enough to climb a flight of stairs, her bones so leached of calcium by babies that she became the nautilus shape herself, that trick of fetuses of taking over the body, of leaving an X-ray of themselves in their mothers forever, of leaving a shape their mothers can return to."
Latiolais' sentences are thick like this, feathered by layers of observation. They consider the importance of minor physical details, the imprinting of corporeal experience on the soul. They unfurl braids of reflection and revision that rarely pause for breath.
Her narrators evince extraordinary emotional intelligence, but their acuity is often veined with a palpable sense of woundedness. They almost expect to be mistreated or misunderstood by the world, as if loss had brittled the muscle that once extended trust, and their stories often conform to the shape of their fears.
Colleagues and doctors deliver comments so insensitive they seem nearly unbelievable; young men and women pick up their cell phones in church and design vicious advertisements and put their big dirty boots on antique bed frames. I found myself disappointed by these moments. It's not that minor cruelties wouldn't happen - or that they wouldn't deserve attention, or that grief wouldn't naturally fixate upon them, or even that there wouldn't be a certain pathos in this fixation - but that they seem, at times, little more than exhibits lined up for display.
I like Latiolais' narrators better when they react against their own brittling. In "Place," for example, a widow goes to church on a Saturday evening to commemorate the second anniversary of her husband's death. She finds herself recoiling from the feckless rituals of a "hip" service but laments her recoiling as soon as she feels it, recognizing that she is "defined now almost completely by negation ... a toxic physiology she would transfuse into almost anything else."
She wants to see around her own pain - to transform it into sacrament, turn hardened bread crust to dragon - but when she is given a chance to do exactly this, when the congregants are asked to write their troubles on slips of paper and put them in a communal bowl, she cannot bring herself to participate.
The struggle of these stories is to do what this woman cannot, when she insists upon the privacy of her wounds - namely, to rejoin the world after a great hollowing of the spirit.
Joining the world is a difficult process, and Latiolais is beautifully honest about its particular and varied aches. One woman has been told, in her grief, that "looking up, perceiving with the head tilted back, actually entails a different part of the brain and is good for depression." I find Latiolais' stories at their most sublime when they do exactly this: look up, beyond themselves. Her characters are coaxed outward by odd wonders - tattooed sushi chefs, tiny marzipan babies in gas masks - or else they look up by way of imagination.
One woman considers her "caustic" nature in terms of nuclear waste. The French, she knows, store it in large spheres of glass under the sea. She finds this terrifying and magical at once, an extraordinary protection that reminds her of ordinary thorns, which are nothing more than "modified branches ... tiny woody spines encased in gathers of molten glass though we want to think of it as sunshine."
Mistaking glass for sunlight means believing in a world where we don't need to be encased in glass at all - where we don't need to protect ourselves from the world, or to protect the world from us. "Widow" isn't a book that makes this mistake. It understands how glass encases and also how it's broken. It manages to find something luminous in the broken shards - still sharp, still drawing blood - that remain in the wake of losing what could not feasibly be lost.