Book Review
By Ed Meek
In her new collection of short stories, L.M. Brown quotes
Emily Dickinson for her title “it is good we are dreaming—It would hurt us—were
we awake—.” In her poem, Dickinson goes on to say “It is prudenter to dream.”
Brown refers to Dickinson to imply that reality is so painful that we need to bury
it. In her stories Brown digs beneath the surface to unearth the painful truth
we bury and hide. In writing as in life, it isn’t always easy to delve into
tales of infidelity, accidental deaths and murder, but Brown explores those
subjects with authority.
Many of the stories are written as mysteries with
information slowly revealed. Someone has been found bludgeoned to death behind
a bar. It is well known he cheated on his wife so it could be any one of a
number of people. In another story a woman driving home at night in the rain
runs over a boy who suddenly appears in front of her car. Was the boy committing
suicide? Whether he was or not, Brown goes into how we might deal with
something like this. In another story, a young woman finds out that the
relationship between her parents and her aunt is much more complex than she
thought. Most of the stories either take place in or refer back to Sligo,
Ireland, the setting of earlier books by Brown. In this collection of stories
as in Treading the Uneven Road, we are introduced to characters who
reappear in later stories where the same event is looked at through different
eyes.
In “Anniversaries” Brown has characters reflect back on the
murder of Nick Moody. When Brown does this, it has the unique effect of making
the reader think about the earlier stories and it brings a coherence to a
collection of short stories that we don’t often find. The mother of the woman
who was working at the bar that Nick Moody was found behind thinks about her
daughter Margaret who left Ireland years ago to go to Australia. “Nolllaig
wanted to imagine Margaret as the little girl who stood shyly on the sideline
of the green watching the other children play, but just as her daughter’s
smells had disappeared from the room, it was impossible to hold onto that
little girl.” Although the mother is losing touch with her daughter, the reader
is reminded of her and of the way we lose all touch with relatives and old
friends.
In the same story, Nollaig finds herself visiting a neighbor
Eilish who loves cats and takes in strays. Nollaig thinks Eilish should name
one that keeps showing up. But Eilish thinks “certain things can’t be owned,
like a cat or grief. But Nollaig owned her grief. She held it to her, and on a
certain day every year, she examined it.” A few pages later Nollaig “thought of
all the things people kept inside, like the grief for a cat, and questions
about a certain night.” Nollaig wants to
ask her daughter what happened that night and why she had to go all the way to
Australia to get away from it, but Brown knows there are certain questions in
life that we just never get the answers to.
There are also stories in Were We Awake not directly
related to Sligo. In these there is a similar sense of unease or even dread,
but I found myself wanting to get back to Sligo when reading them.
Like the characters in Were We Awake, as we get older,
we continue to think about people we knew who died young, Mike, a kid I played
basketball with in middle school who died of “a mysterious kidney ailment.” My
best friend Richard from high school who died of early Alzheimer’s. There are
no good answers to these questions but L.M. Brown gives us much to think about
in the hidden stories she brings to light.
very nice poetry.
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