Page 16 American Book Review Meat Eaters & Plant Eaters Jessica Treat BOA Editions http://boaeditions.org 160 pages; paper, $14.00 One refreshing aspect of Jessica Treat’s new story collection Meat Eaters & Plant Eaters is the way she circles this question: what is a short story? Her answer, at least in part, is situational: a story may be a moment in time, a character-defining situation involving human and non-human animals, as psychologically necessary as fairy tales, a characterdefining situation involving humans and other humans . A story can be a short short, a medium-short, or somewhat longer. It can also be very long, as I know Treat also knows, though she doesn’t include any very long stories in this collection. I’m gleaning these descriptions from the structure of Meat Eaters & Plant Eaters, which is organized into four sections: the short shorts are in the front, then there are stories involving animals, then fairy tales (or the functional equivalent), then humans with other humans, especially women. It’s a smart way to organize what could have easily been a random collection of stories, written over the past fifteen-plus years and published along the way (e.g., “Hans and His Daughter” originally appeared in American Literary Review, 1992). The book’s structure also avoids what I call the “tedium-problem” of most short story collections, i.e., no matter how excellent the writer, after reading several of any one writer’s stories in a row, a reader can’t help but notice that writer’s particular patterns and tricks. I say patterns and tricks, but what I mean is that more elusive thing-ness a writer decides is a short story. Flannery O’Connor wrote moments of grace, oftentimes missed, oftentimes emanating from the least desirable among us. The intensity of her stories comes from her brilliant use of the compressed form (space + words working that much harder), plus the high stakes content of a soul’s final fate. Still, to read one O’Connor story after another dilutes their intensity, not ontologically, but experientially. Kept up long enough, even the most intense situation becomes a new norm. Treat’s collection doesn’t have this problem, largely because of the way she plays with form. The short shorts in the book’s first section focus on either random objects (a teacup, a grocery list, a covered bridge) linking one subject’s world with another’s, or those seemingly random moments when everything changes (the inciting incident, for example, of picking up a hitchhiker, or going outside to investigate a strange noise). Treat often leaves the what-happensnext to the reader’s imagination, just as she allows a certain fungibility in her characters—unnamed he’s and she’s as blank (white) screens ready for a reader’s projection. After all, it’s really the reader who completes a story, which means, of course, that any one story has very many different meanings. Treat understands this, just as she understands how many stock-like situations and random happenings a reader can handle. For right before we’re lulled by so much mysterious and coincidental stuff, the book shifts into section two: stories of animals. Especially domestics. Especially cats. Here, the stories are a bit longer with more conventional narrative arcs and a more relaxed pace. For example, in the title story, “Meat Eaters & Plant Eaters,” Treat weaves the narrative of a cat’s nightly hunts with that of a young boy’s growing recognition of his own mortality. The cat leaves bit of mouse about the house, while the boy decides he’s “just going to drink water” because “if you drink water, you won’t die.” Never mind that we never actually see the gross mouse parts, or that the boy never once becomes hungry or crabby—because the point here is co-existence with the familiar yet strange. Cat and boy become “two warm bodies fitted into one another: one purring, one stroking, soon twitching and dreaming.” Hence, another way of looking at stories: like dreams, they happen in the deep inside, in private associations as unknown as the psyche of your blood-thirsty tabby. Yet stories of each...
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Jun 10, 2011
Holger Dette + 1
Open Access
