NOBODY GETS OUT ALIVE :: Leigh Newman

As a proponent of the inverse correlation between the length of a work and its difficulty (poetry to short stories and on up), I have a high appreciation of the short form and try to read it as often and diversely as I can. Leigh Newman's recent collection won me over with the cover, followed by its description as a set of "dazzling, courageous stories about women struggling to survive not just grizzly bears and charging moose but the raw, exhausting legacy of their marriages and families." 

The first story, Howl Palace, was brilliant, and I went hunting for everything else Newman has written before I was half through with it. I was unsurprised to learn it won The Paris Review’s Terry Southern Prize, and was a Best American Short Story and Pushcart Prize selection.

Howl opens the night before a sixty-seven-year-old widow's real estate agent holds an open house at her property, which is listed as an "attractively priced teardown." To Dutch, however, "every good thing that had ever happened to me happened in Howl Palace. And every bad thing too. Forty-three years. Five husbands. Two floatplanes. A lifetime. It felt as if I should honor my home, that strangers shouldn't come around poking through the kitchen or kicking the baseboards, seeing only the mold in the hot tub and the gnaw marks on the cabinets from the dogs I'd had over the years, maybe even laughing at the name."

Dutch expounds on her history, with laugh-out-loud diatribes about life, her husbands (re Skip, number 5, "Shipping him off to a facility in Washington near his daughter wasn't exactly something I struggled with"), her dogs, her efforts ("If you are looking for a reason to split five cords of wood by hand each year for forty-odd years, consider my biceps at age sixty-seven"), and her surroundings (consider the oft-mentioned and somewhat secretive "wolf room"). 

Just as she's setting up for the open house cookout, the real love of Dutch's life, Carl ("the beautiful deviling heartbreak of my life"), comes to ask if she will watch his dog while he's away. It's something he knows she doesn't want to do, and "somehow" the dog gets loose, wreaking havoc and sending Dutch's pre-event anxiety through the roof. It also lends to her reminiscing, Carl's imprint on so many parts of her life and the realization of why he has come to that day.

Howl Palace is a bittersweet, raucous revisiting of a life as Dutch prepares to let go of the only thing she has left. Beautifully paced and painting a picture you could look at forever, Newman shows herself a master of her craft. I didn't want it to end.

The remainder of the collection is replete with the same gorgeous phraseology, stories full of intriguing, multi-layered characters in various surroundings. The sense of place is different in each, many evoking what one envisions when they think of the wild, bicep-building life in Alaska  (and yet some feeling they could take place anywhere). Not many stories feature a mastodon tusk as deftly and meaningfully as Newman does. Her writing is unique and clever, she is a wordsmith of the highest order. 

 My only "complaint" is that Howl Palace blew me so high out of the water I kept searching for its equal. An unfair ask, really, and beginning the set with that story is both a blessing and a curse. It's one of the best short stories I've ever read and it will keep me reading Newman's work well into the future.