Book Review

The Suburban Swindle
by Jackie Corley
So New, 2008
www.sonewpublishing.com.
ISBN: 978-0-9778151-5-3

There are some books written by and about 20-somethings that fill you with nostalgia (or anticipation), a longing for new adulthood, a time full of potential and beginnings and pure independence. But Jackie Corley’s The Suburban Swindle isn't one of those books. This short story collection is full of what the narrator in "Blood in Jersey" calls "oiled sadness," meant to be read as you smoke a carton of cigarettes and a guzzle a bottle of booze.

In the title story, the anonymous female narrator returns home from college after "the mother" tells her that "the father" got drunk and danced in his boxers in the backyard and was found by "the kid," the narrator’s 11-year-old brother. The narrator worries that her brother, who she calls her "split twin," will grow up, grow weary, and be lost to her. She feels guilty and torn, because while she has managed to escape her home and her town, her brother remains stuck, as do many of the boys she has known.

What I can do, what I can do for me, I can run roughshod through my past and connect the dots with all the broken boys I've seen crawl. The bored, drippy-eyed potheads in basements, anesthetizing their gods' minds. The drunk fighters, cut through and burning, licking livewire wounds and then pretending they're numb. The walking egos, all assholes for mouths, holding cigarettes for Goth chicks and whores, for users who'll fuck them. Or minor men...who walk through life straight, and kill themselves when they turn invisible.

Depictions of various "broken boys," boys that are lost and numb and tired and bored, connect the stories. Boys like Shaun in "Catfish Boys," who has to drop out of college and return home while his wealthy girlfriend Kate, who has eyes "like a dead person's," stays in school and stabs Shaun in the hand when he won't forgive her for her lack of sympathy. Boys like Jack in "Fine Creature" who proposes to his stripper girlfriend after she whips him with a belt because that was "the only time the world got small enough for him to feel safe in it."

But a majority of the eight stories are told by young women, often anonymous, who often work as reporters by day and wannabe saviors (or at least observers) of broken boys by night. These women are filled with a restless fog that the narrator in "The Smoker in Winter" fumbles to describe: "I don’t know if it's maturity or if it's just a new confusion I haven't put a name to yet." These women are violent, but sickened by violence, and are reckless just to feel something.

Corley’s writing is concise yet provocative. She crafts her characters and images with precision and delicacy. Her writing is insightful and ultimately empathetic. Beneath these damaged people are souls craving redemption and grace, and occasionally they find them, if only through distorted memories.—Catherine Harrison