Glory Days by Melissa Fraterrigo (review)

There’s a relentless brutality that runs cover-to-cover in Glory Days, Melissa Fraterrigo’s novel-in-stories or linked collection— however one wants to call it. The intense grittiness is reminiscent of Bonnie Jo Campbell, Cormac McCarthy, and Donald Ray Pollack, among other writers who explore the not-so-polite aspects of blue-rural America. In the chapter “Bait,” a daughter intentionally lures stray dogs to prey on her father’s livestock; in “Fredonia the Great,” an elderly woman, a seer, is tossed into a hole and threatened to be buried alive; in “First Body, Then Mind,” a calf is skinned and hanged from a tree, and an elderly man, generally hated in the community, is robbed.

All throughout, natural disasters strike, kids are taken from parents, people are manipulated, abused, and riddled with addictions, and just when one thought death might be a quiet resignation to the sad underbelly of the Great Plains of Nebraska, they return (as ghosts) tortured and too aware of everything around them— a kind of eternal misery all on its own. And perhaps this is what stands out most in Glory Days— the way Fraterrigo employs supernatural elements to show yearning and loss, and to discuss those aspects of a character’s life that he/she simply can’t find words for. In fact, the book opens with a chapter called “Ghosts” and is narrated by one of the book’s main characters, Luann. The intimacy in the first chapter— between father and daughter— sets up the heartbreak later. Partly because the opening chapter is told in the first person, which allows us to “hear” Luann’s childhood voice, while subsequent chapters take on a third-person role. In “Ghosts” Luann’s adopted father, Teensy, is despondent in the wake of losing his wife (though it’s been three years), and follows her ghost out into a pasture, while Luann follows close behind. Throughout the chapter, he’s dizzy with uncertainty and despair: “He refused to eat; he said nothing tasted right.” This, in a culture where three-squares are as important as wind direction, rain, and all things weather-related; that, if a person isn’t eating, they aren’t living; if a person isn’t paying attention to the land, they’ll lose crops, cattle, or maybe even their kids.

In addition, the first chapter deftly sets up the relationship between Luann, a person of color adopted into this family of two white parents, and her surviving father, who is laid-off, ill, and almost gets arrested. But Luann is with him and supportive. When he’s not feeling well, she “sit[s] behind him in a chair. Hold[s] cool cloths to his forehead. Read[s] aloud . . .” all the while, she claims, “sadness seeps out of him.”

And I would say that a kind of sadness seeps out of the entire book. The other stories, or chapters, are narrated by a host of struggling third-person narrators who find themselves confused and estranged from loved ones, this includes Teensy and Luann; along with Gardner, the neighbor who has a complicated relationship with the former two; Footer, a drug and booze crazed conman and river rat; and “Fredonia the Great,” the seer who is cursed with the ability to visualize people’s deaths and commune with the deceased. In each story, the other characters/narrators play integral roles. And each chapter stands alone, as several of these chapters were originally published as short stories, and they all possess the qualities of a good short story: heightened characterizations, beautiful language, striking details, and conclusions that end on the verge of something. All marketing aside (novel versus story collection), given Fraterrigo’s skill as short story writer, I could appreciate these chapters as individual stories, perhaps maybe more so than a novel or linked collection, as I thought them powerful and moving all on their own.

Still, this acknowledgement does not take away from the book’s power as a whole and the intensity of each...