Caught in the Fog

The women in Wendy Rawlings's third book act in a fog, and men occasionally appear through it. This is not to say that John Berger's axiom about gender roles is wholly reversed in Rawlings's work. All initiative and priority are not handed off wholesale to the female point of view. But the characters populating these thirteen stories, which range from military men, plus-size women, illegal immigrants from Ireland and the women who love them, have somehow forgotten how to conduct themselves. Their world has been upended by violence—mass shootings, the 9/11 terrorist attacks—and the resulting wounds have been coated over with consumerism. With their simplest implements of communication dulled, they stumble through relationships and careers, only to find themselves wherever they last left off: most of the time alone or with responsibilities they can't quite fathom. If they manage to connect, and only connect, their bonds, however temporary, rank as miracles or religious events.

This theme, though loosely assembled, is sometimes stated directly, sometimes implicitly. The first story, "Coffins for Kids," is heartbreakingly upfront about the loss a mother experiences when her daughter is killed in a Sandy Hook-style shooting. But the damage done to the culture—indeed, the language—by capitalism, terrorism, and Second Amendment-ism also is vividly portrayed in other pieces, such as "Outlandish Plot":

an American woman and an Irishman are having a thing. A what? A thing. He's married—that makes it a thing. If he weren't married, it might be a romance; it might be the most fulfilling blah-blah either of them has known … something blooms between them. A thing.

What words cannot describe is dealt with through self-punishing behaviors, psychologically and, eventually, physically. It would be bleak, if it weren't sometimes funny and insightful.

Rawlings is as deft chronicler of her characters' inner monologues as she is of their exterior circumstances. While she does not excuse their bad behavior, she does put their foibles into context. Such is the case in "Tics," which succinctly demonstrates the new normal. A pair of stepsiblings in a recently blended family embarks on an affair that could be scandalous, even ruinous. But their affair is no stranger than the recent conversion of one sibling to the Church of Ladder Day Saints and another sibling's to Scientology. That the mother of one set of siblings is with a woman, rather than another man, barely seems worth mentioning.

Rawlings accomplishes several tasks in this story, within the tale itself and for the collection as a whole. She bravely makes one of the affair's participants someone with Tourette's syndrome: "There's something a little bit wrong with Glen," the narrator dares to think to herself. "At regular intervals, he twitches, and there's an accompanying click in his throat he doesn't seem to be able to control. … I would ask my father, but I'm threequarters sure he hasn't noticed anything unusual about Glen." Glen, it turns out, doesn't notice his tics either, though he acknowledges they might drive other people "crazy." Yet he has adapted, as too many people have, no matter how horrifying their circumstances. The narrator also adapts, as will her two families when necessary. What were once tics, disturbing blips, or warnings that society has begun to circle the drain, have become minor conveniences. Sometimes, they are endearing. On other occasions, they're dispiriting.

Glen is one of two young men in the collection who specialize in wearing oxford cloth shirts. The other is Ron, a college student in "Love During Wartime." This may seem a mundane, even throwaway detail, but it speaks to what people have left to steady their vision when wartime looks and feels much like peacetime, except when it doesn't. Something inexorably changed after 9/11 for the Alabama professors and students in this tale, but no one can quite say what it is. "It was a ritual by...