Familiar Landscapes, Fresh Vistas

«ncrim Familiar Landscapes, Fresh Vistas Renee Dodd Necessary Lies Kerry Neville Bakken BkMk Press http://www.umkc.edu/bkmk 200 pages; paper, $15.95 In her debut short story collection, Necessary Lies, Kerry Neville Bakken skillfully navigates familiar ground—divorce, infertility, broken homes, death, adultery—without guiding us down the old, familiar paths. In "Renter's Guide to the Hamptons," it is less a husband's infidelity and more a wife's newfound love of solitude that ends a marriage. In "Vigil," rather than admit to a reality that would bring them closer, a mother and daughter choose to preserve the space between them, knowing that sometimes distance is easier than closeness. In "The Body/Love Problem," a wife has an affair, not because she believes in a romantic illusion, but because she wants to appreciate the beauty of that illusion before its colors fade away. We may have seen the landscapes ofthese stories before, but we haven't yet viewed them through Bakken's lens. In the collection's title story, Mike wishes his pregnant wife were having a boy instead of a girl, because a boy he "could know without feeling foolish and inept." He is surrounded by females who seem designed to shield him from their world and to keep him outside of their most intimate processes, which makes him as much an emotional outsider as a physical one, '"stuck on the outside'" of his wife's pregnancy. By the end of the story, Bakken leads us to wonder if it might not be preferable for Mike to remain outside the secret arena of the feminine. Perhaps it is better for him to remember Disney's "benign Technicolor of The Little Mermaid' and forget the brutality of Hans Christian Anderson's original, tragic tale. When he claims he'll want to unravel the mystery of his daughter's troubles, his wife counters that he won't, '"Because once you know, you can never be sure of her happiness again.'" At times, however, the mysteries Bakken presents seem more like insufficiency. "Vigil" is a study ofa girl who has appointed herselfguardian of her mother and sister, keeping watch as if vigilance were in itself a means of protection. Throughout the story, we catch glimpses of a deeper truth at work, glimpses that hint that the end ofthe story will reveal more about our narrator Gina than the women she watches over, but these glimpses nevercoalesce into revelation. The ending feels unfinished, leaving us waiting just like Gina waits, longing for something that will finally voice what needs to be said. I admire Bakken's choice to let Gina's mother and sister keep their comforting lies, but I want something different for Gina. When Bakken succeeds, however, she succeeds brilliantly and on every level, as she does with "The Effects of Light," the crown jewel of her collection. Fiction is flush with examples of Americans traveling abroad to heal old wounds and find new love. It's a seductive motif, one that equates a change of setting with a change of being. In "The Effects of Light," Bakken exposes the specious nature of this motif by taking us to Greece and showing us a gorgeous landscape that is merely a gorgeous landscape. Greece alone does not have the power to repair what has been broken or to restore what has been lost. A loving brother follows in his sister's footsteps, witnessing a stunning countryside that did nothing to lift his sister's curse of sadness, or to prevent her from deciding to stop her "heart and brain, dreams and breath." And yet, the wonder of "The Effects of Light" is mat it is tragic without being a tragedy. The artfulness that Bakken layers throughout the story comes to fruition in the final two paragraphs, which deliver a breathtaking concatenation of life, death, and renewal, giving us hope without predicting anything more than that life will continue to be life, and, sometimes, that will be enough. Neville Bakkenforces us to look, to accept the worms curled in apples that are no less sweetfrom infestation. "Eggs" explores a couple's struggle to conceive without giving in to the sentimental...