The Grass Labyrinth by Charlotte Holmes (review)

In Charlotte Holmes’s short story “Taken,” one of the nine linked stories that comprise her collection The Grass Labyrinth, one of the characters remarks to a fellow artist, “There’s a difference between recording something as it is and making art out of it.” By the time the reader encounters this observation it is clear that Holmes herself understands this distinction quite well. In her latest award-winning collection of short stories, which was recognized for its excellence both by the Independent Publisher Awards (IPPY) with the Gold Medal for short story fiction and by the ForeWord Reviews with the Indie Book of the Year Award in short stories, Holmes follows several artists and poets whose lives are tangled together—sometimes loosely, sometimes more directly—through their shared loves, failures, ambitions, and flaws. She begins with the story of Henry Tillman, the closest to a unifying or central character, and in the stories that follow, we read the tales of his lovers, children, and others standing on the periphery of this delicately woven web.

In the title story, we learn that one differentiator between a maze and a labyrinth is that one’s purpose when in a maze is often merely to escape, whereas in a labyrinth, one wanders inward toward the center where a statue or shrine can often be found. These stories themselves form a labyrinth, with Henry Tillman (and the sometimes irrational, but always authentic and relatable, desires that drive the characters) at the center.

One of the remarkable feats of this collection is that reading the stories in order and together adds layers of depth, as the reader learns the connective tissue between all of the characters as well as their past baggage in a way that further illuminates and creates empathy for their internal struggles. At the same time, however, each story is able to stand alone and still carry a full emotional weight in its own right.

In a literary world that often values post-modern elements such as irony, Holmes’s sincerity is a refreshing reminder of the wisdom that can be found in the genuine. Although her stories deal with the ordinary aspects of life, she consistently goes beyond (as her character says) “recording something as it is” and succeeds in taking the daily events of life and “making art out of [them].” One way in which she does this is through the poetics of her language. In Holmes’s hands, language is more than just a utility vehicle to move plot along; it is a luxury to savor. These stories do not fall into the trap of valuing plot at the expense of the details. My copy of the book is now riddled with sentences I’ve underlined because their insights resonated with me (for example, “Sometimes I wonder if the human tendency is to freeze in place at whatever age we are when we meet”) or because the lyrical nature was something I wanted to return to and linger in later (such as “For thirty-five years, Henry’s had his own room in my imagination, a quiet place where the lights have gradually grown dim”).

The poetic language isn’t the only way in which Holmes turns the observations on love and life away from cliché and into art; she also plays with perspective in a manner that breathes creative life into the events of this book. This shifting perspective happens on a larger scale, as each story is told from a different character’s point of view—Henry, his daughter, his son, his lover, his wife—as well as with shifting narrative distance, as some stories are told in first person and some in third. However, it can also be seen on a smaller scale within each story.

Perhaps the story where this creativity within perspective can be seen best is “Agnes Landowska: Her Life and Art.” In this story, which profiles one of Henry’s lovers from earlier in his life, we learn more of this woman in each section of the piece from a...