Hometown Anonymity

At the beginning of "Shadow Flag," one of the final stories in Jim Tomlinson's Nothing Like an Ocean, narrator John Fain says that he feels "strangely anonymous here in [his] old hometown," having just returned for a single afternoon after twenty-five years away. It's a sentiment that many of Tomlinson's characters might think to express about Spivey, Kentucky, the setting of many of this collection's stories (as well as those in his previous book, Things Kept, Things Left Behind [2006]). Still, it's not quite true, not for John Fain and not for any of the other richly drawn characters who populate this fine collection. As Tomlinson expertly shows in each of these stories, it's not anonymity that Spivey offers its people, but a rich system of communal histories and interconnected relationships that effect each member of Spivey, no matter how long they've been gone, no matter how far they might travel from its rural confines.

In the title story, Alton Wood, a thirty-eight-year-old teacher with a drowned son and a separated wife, receives two tickets in the mail to the over-forty singles mixer at Spivey Independent Christian Church. Unsure of himself in the wake of his family tragedy and his unofficially ended marriage, he considers whether or not to go, revealing as he does the loss of his son and the first hints that he is unable to comprehend what that loss did to those around him:

People baffled Alton Wood. He took great pride in mastering the basics of complex processes in nature, of subatomic phenomena and interstellar dark matter, of the relativistic implications of post-Newtonian time-space. But the seeming randomness of human behavior perplexed him. Lori, for example, the inscrutable woman who was his wife until one day she decided not to be that anymore. After what they'd weathered together, the pain of losing Logan, the son they'd both loved, after surviving that, when the worst was past, then the woman decides to leave. Truly baffling.

As the events that caused the drowning death of Alton's son come to light in the story, what baffles Alton about Lori's anger and subsequent leaving stems from one obvious source—it was Alton's sister Fran who was watching the boy when he accidentally drowned outside—but also a second, more subtle source more likely to be at the root of her leaving. While Alton failed to see the depths of his wife's pain, he sees Fran's clearly—she's gained weight, evidenced by a thickening torso, and gathers more and more possessions to herself in a "kind of manic hoarding," able to bear her life only "if she crusted her days in certainty, confined herself to trivial matters, to acts of little consequence." It's Fran that Alton has focused on helping, leaving Lori to fend for herself.

Elsewhere, other families are just as fraught, just as endangered, just as likely to be saved or doomed by themselves and the communities that surround them. In "A Male Influence in the House," Tomlinson uses the viewpoints of both a teenage son and his single mother to illustrate a single night spent apart, even though they should be together, doing anything but what they are doing—the son is huffing carburetor cleaner in an abandoned garage, the fumes like "mainlined sunshine," while the mother sleeps with her flirtatious supervisor for the first time. Rather than allowing their storylines to cross, Tomlinson keeps these characters apart, unable to help each other, unable to recognize for themselves the ways in which each is endangered by their isolated family of two, by their own actions and those of the outsiders they've allowed to threaten their already tenuous relationship.

"Overburden," one of the collection's strongest stories, follows a middle-aged couple's return to Spivey from Arizona to visit friends and participate in an arts and crafts fair, with the secondary purpose of visiting the oak tree where they...