A Catalogue of Everything in the World: Nebraska Stories by Yelizaveta P. Renfro (review)

colorado review 168 A Catalogue of Everything in the World: Nebraska Stories, by Yelizaveta P. Renfro Black Lawrence Press, 2010 reviewed by Jennifer Wisner Kelly In a captivating debut collection, A Catalogue of Everything in the World: Nebraska Stories, Yelizaveta P. Renfro peels back the skin of a seemingly familiar midwestern landscape to expose the lonely and searching people beneath. Renfro has lived in Nebraska but was born in the former Soviet Union and has also called the East and West Coasts of the United States home. Not surprisingly, she brings this outsider’s perspective to her stories , juxtaposing plain-vanilla images of the Midwest—American Foursquares, general stores, tornado sirens, and, of course, Willa Cather—with characters who are anything but typecast. There’s an old woman obsessed with a gruesome murder, a bus driver feuding with a neighbor over trees, and a fourth-grade girl repeatedly kidnapping her neighbor’s cat, to name only a few. Renfro’s stories beautifully capture these unique, painfilled lives that are playing out behind closed doors in a safe neighborhood in Lincoln, Nebraska. Renfro’s characters live in isolation, unable to bond with their spouses, parents, friends, or neighbors. In “The Memory of Water ,” Sarah, an overachieving mother of a nine-month-old baby, is close to burnout. Her need to excel at parenting renders her utterly incapable of connection with other people. Sarah critiques one of her few friends because the woman is overweight and her baby is entirely average. She later sums up her need for superiority this way: “I want icing on my cake. Cake without icing is for other people.” Exhausted to the point of paranoia, Sarah begins to suspect her husband of infidelity and child abuse. She considers how long he has been harming her baby: I park in our driveway and walk up to the front porch. Long, sharp icicles hang from the eaves. I imagine them falling and shattering. I imagine them falling and piercing flesh. For how many days have they slowly, treacherously collected their moisture? Four? They hang there like memories, accruing to themselves. But water has no memory. It is merely itself. 169 Book Notes Once her suspicion hatches, Sarah can no longer exist in her simple, comfortable world. Renfro reinforces her isolation theme by employing unusual narrative forms that enliven the voices of otherwise silenced characters: postcards never sent, monologue e-mails without reply , diary entries, and a letter intended to be read only after the writer’s death. None of these written communications manage to communicate with anyone. These are desperate voices that would go unheard were the reader not spying on this private correspondence. In the title story, a drifting twenty-something woman, fatherless and estranged from her mother, becomes obsessed with loss: “It really bothers me that stuff gets lost, that paintings and other stuff and even people can be missing.” To counteract the anxiety such losses create, she makes lists of the ordinary objects in her world: empty Red Bull cans, cigarette packs, and smudged eyeglasses. These lists are interspersed throughout a traditional narrative in which the same young woman confronts an unwanted pregnancy. She sees her listmaking as admirable, ambitious, and soothing, and so she broadens its scope. She begins to list not just objects, but people, ideas, and intangible dreams: “Now I’m writing not just things that do exist, but things that don’t or might not or at least that we haven’t found yet. But maybe by putting them on the list I’m making them real.” The narrator uses lists to make herself into an innocent spectator, not a victim, in her own stalled life. The central character, Brian, in “Splendid, Silent Sun” also tries to alleviate his pain by writing it all down. He pens postcards to an ex-girlfriend back in l.a., but as the messages become more emotionally revealing, he writes that he has never intended to mail them, hasn’t even left room for an address or stamp. If only he could deliver his postcards—wrap them up as a gift, as he considers doing near the story’s end—maybe he would find solace. Then...