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Executive Times |
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2005 Book Reviews |
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Seriously
by Lucia Nevai |
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Rating: ••• (Recommended) |
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Click on
title or picture to buy from amazon.com |
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Community Seriously
is the debut novel of a fine short story writer, Lucia Nevai.
Through taut writing well-honed from her stories, Nevai
develops protagonist Tamara Johanssen in a way that
reveals the pain of her past life, especially the death of her parents, and
gradually reveals the future promise of life in a small town community. Nevai expresses powerful emotion through each compact
chapter, titled for a character in the town. Here’s
an excerpt, all of the chapter titled, “Shirley Girt of Girt Real Estate,” pp. 60-67: She
was a little too old to
dye her hair so even an auburn or to wear the girlish clothing she favored.
Her yellow sundress was starched to the limit, which only served to emphasize
the soft, wrinkled, aging shoulders beneath the straps. She carried a large
white purse with a loud clasp and drove a loud white Oldsmobile, which she
floored at the slightest provocation, sometimes, I began to suspect, simply
because her large right foot twitched. Her eyes were shiny, round, and flat;
they looked sewn to her soft, white face like buttons. I sat before Shirley Girt
of Girt Real Estate with my hair in a recently tangled swirl about my
shoulders, wearing a stolen blue sheath and smelling faintly of aftershave
from the nape of my neck to the hollows of my knees. To Shirley, it was the
scent of art. It was as if she knew my future before I did. I was not a trusting
person then, yet I put my trust in Shirley Girt. She was like the old, soft
plain doll I had superstitiously loved the most in childhood, assuming the
ice-cold, beautiful dolls arranged so rigidly on my pillow could not or would
not love me back. I asked to see rentals.
Shirley flicked through the listing book, making small noises of
discovery—bargain noises, they might have been called. “This should be fun,”
she said as we both listened to the printer printing out listing sheets. She
saved her disclaimer for the Olds, saying as we drove, “Some of these I
haven’t seen.” She hooked a left at a
DEAD END sign and drove to the dead part. “This is for rent,” she said. It
was a long, low dairy barn built of cinder blocks, with three small evenly
spaced windows on each side and a ventilator on the roof. We got out of the
car. I followed her into the dank, echoing building. “These would have to come
out,” she said, wrestling with a stanchion with a concrete base where a cow
was once milked. There were fifty-nine more just like it. I was speechless. “No?” she said, helping me
out. We drove to “Do you have your calendar
with you?” she asked, whisking out hers at the end of the day. The sheer
potential she’d exposed me to had refreshed and
rejuvenated her. I had no calendar. I had no strength. I could have run a
small galaxy with the creative energy I had expended, dredging up a workable
enthusiasm for each unacceptable listing, discarding it well beyond the
unthinkable stage, long after I’d warped my brain in the effort to forge a
new identity to match the rental. “Any day is good,” I said. I wore my own jeans the
next time I went out with Shirley. I wore my Nikon, too. I needed to anchor
myself in reality so my reaction time would be quicker. It seemed to
work—the properties we looked at were lovely. I went floating from room to
room, dreaming of a graceful life amid imported bath tile with whirlpool
overlooking small stream while Shirley happily examined the private
incriminating trove of medications lining the medicine cabinet or read the
owner’s personal papers stored inside a closed Chippendale. Once, with no
qualms whatsoever, she carried an antique wrought-iron shelf out to her car
and put it in the trunk. “What a shame to throw this out,” she said. “Can you
believe it was in the garbage?” I wasn’t so sure that it was. Each time I asked Shirley
the monthly rent of a property, she named an amount that broke my budget by a
factor of ten. It seemed odd that not one of the owners was home. Looking
back, I realized these high-end, luxury domiciles weren’t for rent at
all—they were second homes and were for sale. My tour with Shirley counted as
a showing. “Dustin is the up-and-coming
arts town,” Shirley said our third time out. The Olds rolled to a stop. It
didn’t look like a town. It looked like an accidental intersection of two
roads that led emphatically somewhere else. The fronts of some buildings
faced the sides and backs of others. It looked unprepared and undressed, as
if it were permanently surprised from behind. There was nowhere to turn for
privacy. The rust-colored antiques store was closed and apparently had been
for decades. NO LUNCH read a hand-lettered sign in the window of the yellow
luncheonette. Across the highway, a defiant green house bent toward the road,
bearing up under twin bell curves of road dust, a high parabola for trucks, a
lower one for cars. It appeared to be rebuffed by the ugly, multifamily
building across the road: KEEP OUT, PRIVATE PROPERTY, KEEP
OUT read the signs along the fence. “First, the arts tour,”
she said. She drove up Highway 6, pointed at a big white house, and said,
“This is a very artistic woman.” She drove back down the
highway, through the crossroads, past the ice cream stand that had become the
Shurberrys’ insurance agency, and halfway into a
cul-de-sac, at the end of which was a dark red bungalow. “She makes crafts at
Christmastime,” Shirley said. “Which crafts?” I asked. “Centerpieces. She has all
the Styrofoam balls and cubes. She has every color of ribbon, every color of
sequin, every color candle. I’m not handy myself.” Shirley backed out of the
cul-de-sac, swung a left, then a right. We drove up a hill to
a native stone Arts and Crafts bungalow nestled in a meadow
overlooking miles of rolling fields. “Saving the best for last,” she said.
“This is the Doctor.” The house made a face at us, the stone steps gritting
like bared teeth, the windows on either side of the door as blank as eye
sockets in a skull, the veranda shading the front elevation like a single
swarthy eyebrow. We drove back down the
hill to the crossroads. “This is mine,” Shirley said, parking the Olds in
front of the feed store. Looking back, I was sold the very second I saw the
word FEED, high and historic, right where I needed it to be, in fading
capitals, along the storefront’s turn-of-the-century ziggurat facade. The
siding was bleached gray by time and weather. Inside, the store was long
and narrow, high and dim, with pressed tin ceilings and wide-plank oak
floors. The fixtures were gone, but I could still smell the clean,
condensed-nutrient smell of grain dust. I walked the length of the floor
twice. I could feel my fate coming to meet me. In the rear of the store
there was a little room curtained off with a bit of worn tapestry sagging
from a rope. Here the former owner had lived, Shirley said, without adding and
died. I was emotionally drawn to his little white cot, his little white
stove, though Shirley Girt literally pulled me in the opposite direction. “All new!” she said,
opening the hollow-core door to the bathroom. She meant used. There
was a rusting metal stall shower, a dented Masonite
vanity, a half-silvered mirror. The toilet was green and it cringed in place,
held hostage by jumpy, discount red plaid wallpaper. “I did it myself,” Shirley
said. I offered her the only disappointment of our long acquaintance by
showing no measure of surprise. She presented a lease. My signature wobbled
with joy on the line. “Now for a treat!” she
said. Back in the Olds, she
floored it, driving north up Highway 6 to a field filled with old white
bathtubs. JOHN THE JUNKOMOLOGIST read the ragged painted plywood sandwich
board in the ditch. Shirley drove through the tubs, which took some
doing—they were lying about in high grass in a chaotic pattern, as if dropped
there by a Red Cross plane. There were sinks, stoves, and refrigerators. A
flock of chickens waddled about, clucking and pecking, competing for
invisible things in the dirt that fascinated them, shitting in the sinks. Shirley parked beside a
barn painted entirely with words: HELLO. I’M “JOHN THE JUNKOMOLOGIST.” 35 MM PROJECTOR. CHILDRENS USED BIKE. CUSTOM WOODWORKING. ODDS AND ENDS. COMPLETE PRINTING AGENT. CARDS & STATIONERY. FREE GIFT WHEN
YOU BUY. NO CHECKS. NOT RESPONSIBLE FOR
ACCIDENT. GOD BLESS THE “They have everything
here,” Shirley said. John himself sat near the
door in a lawn chair, legs crossed daintily at the knee, reading pornography.
He was a fifty-plus man with uncombed hair and half-inch-thick glasses. His
mother, an old woman with two shiny warts, one just to the side of her mouth,
the other along the jaw, stayed in place behind the cash register. Wares on display included
irregular U.S. Army—issue long underwear, new stainless-steel shoehorns, ioo% linen handkerchiefs, paper towels, coasters from the
19505, used garden tools on
special at fifty cents each. Shirley and I both bought shovels. After we
paid, John’s mother followed me out to the Olds. She got up close to me, her
warts almost touching my face. “Would you marry my son?” she said. “No, she won’t,” Shirley
said. In the Olds she winked, saying, “Welcome to Dustin.” The feed store had become
an art gallery with two unsuccessful shows behind it when Shirley Girt began
to send me photography customers. In addition to the cannery in That fall a rumor began to
circulate throughout Dustin: Tom and Jean Jaeger were thinking of giving up
farming. There was a lot of discussion in the hamlet about what should be
done with the Jaegers’ six hundred acres on the hill west of Dustin. A
school, a nature preserve, a baseball diamond—those were the three uses that
people fought about. A couple of times I thought I saw Shirley’s white Olds
parked at the Jaegers’ farmhouse. Before anyone knew it, a deal was struck
with a developer from The Doctor’s handsome
native stone house went on the market. Realtors from several counties had prospectives lined up to see it, but the house went
quickly to Dave and Ray, two middle-aged guys from By summer there were eight
new middle-class families planting petunias and installing swing sets in the
town houses on the hill. A steady stream of house hunters toured the model
home. The French restaurant fed them lunch. Then came
the blow from which Dustin’s three Presbyterians were not to recover. Their
church was sold by special arrangement with the synod. A sports outfitter
took out the pews and filled up the church with red and green A couple from A year later there were
ten of us on Shirley Girt’s arts tour. My gallery
was number one, though I narrowly beat out John the Junkomologist.
New Yorkers were as taken with John’s colorful white trashiness as with the
odd bargains he had for sale. Plus, every woman between sixteen and sixty got
a kick out of the offer of marriage from John’s mother. Soon enough, Shirley Girt
put my gallery on the market at a price that reflected the increase in value
directly resulting from renovations completed and financed by me. With a loan
from my sister, I had to outbid two wealthy women artists from As the three of them
predatorily stalked the gallery in its gleaming, welcoming, pristine state,
eyes twitching with dollar signs, purses itching with checks that were easy
to write and quick to bind, there was no trace of the ugly doll. Shirley Girt
looked like one of them: tough, sophisticated, and greedy, draped in overly
thought-out apparel, clanging with heavy, original, artisanal
jewelry, and generally exhibiting a self-interest
so amoral, thorough, and chilling as to be indistinguishable from the forces
of nature. Nevai’s descriptive language provides enough,
and never too much. The image of Shirley Girt in this chapter is but one of
many that Nevai accomplishes with great skill. If
you’re looking for pleasurable reading that doesn’t insult your intelligence,
pick up Seriously.
Steve Hopkins,
December 20, 2004 |
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ã 2005 Hopkins and Company, LLC The recommendation rating for
this book appeared in the January 2005
issue of Executive Times URL for this review: http://www.hopkinsandcompany.com/Books/Seriously.htm For Reprint Permission,
Contact: Hopkins & Company, LLC • E-mail: books@hopkinsandcompany.com |
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