Drowned Boy, and: Mattaponi Queen: Stories (review)

Some short-story writers seek the breadth and meaning of a novel yet refuse to sacrifice the thunderclap of the short-story form. These writers create what some call "linked collections," others "novels in stories," and still others just "stories." In two debut collections, Jerry Gabriel and Belle Boggs connect stories by place, focusing on inhabitants of isolated rural towns. They explore their chosen regions through the fantasies, regrets, and actions of the people who live there. At the same time, through a careful ordering of stories and some overlapping characters, both Gabriel's Drowned Boy and Boggs's Mattaponi Queen: Stories acquire some of the scope of novels.

In Drowned Boy, winner of the 2008 Mary McCarthy Prize in Short Fiction, Gabriel introduces readers to Moraine, Ohio. Men and boys move through falling-down farmhouses and Levittown-like neighborhoods with patchy lawns and cement patios. However, the collection's cohesion comes not just from the shared scenery of rain-darkened hills but more so through the reappearance of Nate. We meet him in the first story as a tagalong sibling. By the last story, he has grown into a young man searching for his estranged older brother, Donnie. Twining sensitive, bibliophilic Nate with an unforgiving landscape of cold streams and razor-wire fences, Gabriel dramatizes the question: How does one escape from a hometown?

The title of Drowned Boy itself encourages readers to anticipate some calamity. In the first story, "Boys Industrial School," eight-year-old Nate and twelve-year-old Donnie set off for a deserted village in search of a reform school escapee, a "mean boy" a local sheriff warned them about. With their father in the hospital and their mother sitting in front of the television, the boys walk outside, where they pretend that nothing scares them. When the "convict" approaches to ask if he could " 'bum a 'rette?' " hyperactive Donnie responds with unusual coolness: "[he] looked up now, calmly, as if looking up at a sunset someone was calling attention to. He nodded and, when the boy was closer, threw him the pack and the lighter." Nate watches his brother's transformation into someone at ease with a criminal. Through brief interactions like these, Gabriel shows the rifts that open between brothers, creating a rich thematic space for other stories to enter and survey.

In two stories, Gabriel thrusts Nate into the confusing and disturbing world of family reunions. "Falling Water" covers the span of a few hours at Nate's grandfather's farmhouse, where his grandpa swills Pabst Blue Ribbon, offers a gap-toothed smile, and introduces Nate to his girlfriend, as if he had seen Nate more than once before. In the midst of the chaos of the gathering, Gabriel's prose effectively captures the perspective of a lonely child. Nate observes the men shooting cans as they drink: "Every third or fourth shot, a can would fall from a post into the creek and would bob in the water until it disappeared behind an old shed and high grass." In contrast, "Atlas" reveals how families share pride as well as embarrassment. Nate sits in the backseat while his uncle drives into the center of a municipal park to pluck Nate's cousin from a hippie encampment. For Nate, and for the reader, these events showcase the way humiliation can push adults to react in ways that unwittingly define them. Gabriel's powerful writing builds momentum in the first half of Drowned Boy as he depicts the way perceptive souls often get pushed, even when acting only as witnesses.

A stunning multiperspective novella, from which the collection draws its name, works as the climax to the collection. "Drowned Boy" features Nate as a recent high school graduate working at the A&P. No longer passive, Nate chases a teenage girl named Samantha, who flees the store after stealing Slim Jims. As Nate follows her on the streets of Moraine, he feels giddy: "It was like stealing something himself." Sections of the novella alternate between Nate and...