For anyone who has grown up in a less-than-ideal environment — whether due to instability, poverty, or abuse — the role that adversity plays in one’s growth and development is a definitive and urgent one. Is it possible to break the cycle of abuse, or are children who grow up at the mercy of abusive parents doomed to repeat the terrible situations thrust upon them? Are children who grow up without a sense of their self-worth able to find that as adults?
University of Pittsburgh Press ($23)
In her Drue Heinz Literature Prize-winning debut short story collection, “Driving in Cars With Homeless Men,” author Kate Wisel creates snapshots of four friends yearning to escape from painful situations yet unable to resist them. Unflinching in its portrayal of the violence visited upon her protagonists, Ms. Wisel’s stories move back and forth in time to examine the difficulty of transcending one’s history, while reminding readers that the work of becoming one’s best self can only be achieved with love and support — not just from others, but from oneself.
Frankie, Serena, Raffa and Natalya become friends as teenagers in Boston. Each comes from a uniquely unhappy home, and their friendship becomes a lifeline as they navigate adolescence. Though the 20 stories are grouped into sections that focus on one woman at a time, all four are woven through the narratives, illuminating how intertwined their lives are even as they take very different paths to adulthood.
Domestic violence looms over many of the stories. Serena, for example, is caught in the middle of her parents’ contentious marriage as a child. Her mother and father are too busy negotiating their own unpleasant lives to protect her from being repeatedly sexually assaulted by a family friend.
As an adult, she becomes a victim of physical abuse at the hands of her boyfriend, Niko. In the story “Trouble,” Niko gives her a dog as an apology for giving her a black eye, and to Serena, the dog represents both the unconditional love she longs for and the wordless desperation that longing looks like. Her love and disdain for the dog echo Niko’s swings between love and violence, laying bare the dynamic of many abusive relationships — the hope that things will get better and the despair that they never do.
Drug addiction — another form of violence, though directed inward — is also a recurring theme in many of the stories, particularly those featuring Raffa. In “Benny’s Bed,” she recounts her relationship with a high school boyfriend who died of a heroin overdose in a laundromat bathroom.
Though Benny is dead before she finishes high school, their relationship is omnipresent in Raffa’s narratives. She dates, marries and divorces his best friend, Mickey, and Benny’s death continues to weigh on her. Addiction, for Ms. Wisel’s characters, is not just self-inflicted violence, but a pain that festers even after the addict is gone.
The book is structured to be disorienting and alienating, much like the interior lives of the protagonists. The stories are snapshots of time periods in their lives, bouncing back and forth between adolescence and adulthood, and peripheral characters come and go. As a result, the book requires more effort than most literary fiction — the reader will need to piece the stories together both chronologically and narratively — but for the dedicated bibliophile, the effort is rewarded by Ms. Wisel’s preternatural understanding of the complicated nature of her heroines.
Wendeline O. Wright is a member of the National Book Critics Circle (wendywright@gmail.com).
First Published: October 8, 2019, 12:00 p.m.