Lives that Are Dealt

Nostalgia mutates into malt liquor and Boston’s back roads in Kate Wisel’s debut collection, Driving in Cars With Homeless Men. This linked collection of stories is delicately tied together by Serena, Frankie, Raffa, and Nat, all women whose lives collapse onto each other like a bridged deck of playing cards. The primary focus of this collection is the relationship these women find themselves in with men — abusive men in varying degrees, some plainly violent, some emotionally, some gentle but not healing to the extent the protagonists need, their scar tissues fissuring around the corners of each page. Set in both the early 2000s and contemporary Boston, the four women are lower-middle class workers, students, daughters, lovers, addicts, survivors, and criminals at times — their true natures impossible to grasp like a sly fish in the shallows, their stories eager to sound simultaneously farfetched and undeniable. In the story “Mick’s Street,” Raffa’s husband kicks her out of the house, forcing her to break into their summer home on the Cape where she does heroin with a squatter. In “Stage Four,” Frankie moves in with a conman named Villy who convinces her to use up the last of her student loans to pay for rent and his need to shop at a fancy grocery store where he steals blocks of butter and toilet paper. These stories are esoteric and familiar all at once, Wisel’s lens sharpened in on what’s interesting about her world.

Bleeding on the page are these women’s stories, their survival perched tenuously on the tip of Wisel’s pen, which fills the bindings with stark honesty and razor-sharp detail. One way she aptly defines her characters are through the things that make up their world — a mish-mash of the benignly childish and the R-rated: Sesame Street toothbrushes, Colt 45 wrappers, crushed Altoids, India ink tattoos, “gang-rape” collars, a Bruce Lee poster over a teenager’s bed, the stories are filled with gems that bring authenticity to each character and each setting. These women may be malt-liquor drinking, spitting-inside-of-mini-malls, wearing black to a wedding chaos, but their child artifacts, so delicately placed on each page, remind the reader these are coming of age stories, that for now these are only just girls.

Despite the sense of hopelessness evoked through the collection, vital to its ability to bring about catharsis is the agency endowed onto Serena, Frankie, Raffa, and Nat: choices to abuse — to be abused — by substance, by love, by loss, by having but not doing. Each story hones in on the conflict between circumstance and intervention (or lack-there-of). Wisel cares about the lives each one of us are dealt, fair and unfair advantages, and how this can shape who we become later on: who our parents are, what part of the city do we live in, how many student loans did we have to take out? As the collection passes, the protagonists steadily age into women who carry with them the grievances of their adolescents. Despite the walls closing in on them, there is still the sense these women have power and control, which is vital to the reader meeting them at eye level. By the end of “When I Call, You Answer,” the few words, “I quit” free Serena from an emotionally abusive boss. In the collection’s final story, “Run For Your Life,” Raffa chases down a bike thief on foot with the exertion that despite the thief’s speed, she has purpose, making her infinitely more dangerous than him. Wisel illustrates how courage and cowardice are not black and white, but traits which can be exerted simultaneously. These women have weakness, but are strong. They get hit, but in the same instance they can hit back. When they are defeated there is always the sense they will survive, and ultimately this collection is about just that: matters of life and death. Wisel is...