Book Review: They Could Live with Themselves by Jodi Paloni. 2016. Press 53. Winston-Salem, NC.

These eleven short stories give us a year in the life of Stark Run, a fictional Vermont town. Common themes and recurring characters link the stories together, as the lives of the characters are linked in the intimacy of this very small town.

Sometimes the intimacy is a comfort; sometimes it is stifling. Indeed, in the first story we meet Molly, who wants to run away from her finally almost-empty nest, who wonders “is it too late to exchange one kind of life for something altogether new?” In the last story, Molly’s son Sky, a year out of high school, wrenches himself out of the life he loves in Stark Run and runs away to pursue his art in Philadelphia, first wandering through the village before dawn, taking pictures.

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Wren, the owner of the general store, is “surprised at the kind of drama that play[s] itself out in this quiet town.” This book has no explosions, brutal fights, murderous villains, no bleak dystopia resisted by sexy heroes. Instead, Paloni makes us care deeply about her characters because they seem real in their virtues, flaws, and yearnings. She knows them so well she might almost be Wren. “Over the years she’d served up hot coffee and listened to a host of woes.” 

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Paloni creates suspense, sometimes with sexual tension, sometimes with a situation more heart-breaking or ominous. What kind of trouble will the three high school girls cause for Jack? Will Charlotte’s mother come home from rehab for her twelfth birthday? Charlotte is sure she will; we’re sure she won’t. Who is the stranger who pounds on the door of Wren’s store late at night, insisting she let him in?

The characters are ordinary heroes. Meredith, who makes assemblages in wire and clay, came home two years ago to nurse her dying mother, and persists in her art though she now teaches full-time at the high school. After almost fifty years as a brilliant English teacher, Maeve stands up to the ignorant, treacherous principal she despises, to make her own decision about her future. Wren drives hours through a blizzard to help a man and his dying wife, both strangers.

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Paloni treats the big themes: death and loss, family love, sex, identity. Meredith mourns for her mother as the anniversary of her death approaches. One story begins with a girl witnessing her little brother’s drowning. The accident is related so abruptly and casually that it hardly feels like a death, and the story is really about the girl longing for her mother, who is lost in grief. Molly’s husband Jack is bereft when she goes away for a ten-week retreat; “[s]he was as gone as a person can get outside of death, as far as he was concerned.” Claudia misses her divorced father, who no longer visits.

In such a small town, adults and youth are not isolated from each other. It takes a village, and the adults look out for the kids as best they can. Sometimes they judge them harshly, sometimes they are tolerant, recalling their own youth. The young are rapt with sexual desire, whether it’s 14-year-old Rory yearning after an older girl, or Sky engrossed in his girlfriend Emily, loving every inch of her, yet tearing himself away to become his most important self.

We see marriages from both sides. While Molly is exhausted by years of marriage and raising five children, and eventually goes on a long retreat, Jack doesn’t know what to do without her. He’d retired and thought they’d spend more time together, and now she’s left. “…Molly had said that her journey had nothing to do with him, which was supposed to make him feel better. It made him feel worse. When did she start saying things like her journey? And how could her journey have nothing to do with him? They were in this life together.”

Addison’s wife Ruby leaves him suddenly after twenty years of trying to change him. She returns roaring in on a motorcycle, dressed in leathers, hoping to resume their life together. But he has become comfortable with himself, has even begun to find a more suitable partner, and realizes that the central question is “Who is it that you want to be?”

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We see the characters working out the answer to that central question; the title of the collection is apt. Some can live with themselves in the town which formed them, and some have to leave to follow the dream they first dreamed there. Leaving is hard, because their ties to Stark Run are strong. Staying is not always easy either, as they must find their true selves in a place which has already created a space for them, a space with a particular shape which may no longer fit.

These stories are beautifully-written. Paloni’s writing is clear and lyrical, and her observations, whether of scenes, experiences, or feelings, are entirely accurate. I love good writing, and can’t read far in a book when the writing is clumsy or clichéd. But more than her style, I admire Paloni’s gift of creating engaging characters, each a fully-realized individual. She has given us a whole living town in deeply satisfying stories.

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