Grade: A-

A sense of spiritual existentialism hovers throughout Jamie Quatro’s short story collection I Want to Show you More. The characters all feel an enormous amount of loneliness, stemming from things like guilt and fear but always coming back to being alone. An old woman goes to mail a letter protesting the war to President Bush, a girl attends a party with her newly paraplegic mother, and a teenage boy attempts to connect with a sick girl at a Christian camp. These stories are mostly about people seeking, and usually failing in some capacity, to forge some kind of connection to other human beings. Throughout the collection, we keep returning to a woman who has been unfaithful to her husband via a long distance relationship and her struggle to understand her feelings. These recurring stories, to be honest, I wasn’t as enthralled with as the others, but they are necessary in that they produce a thread of continuity and connectivity that ties the independent story lines into one cohesive theme.

In college creative writing courses I remember an exercise. It was simple, have a character walking somewhere, and make a story unfold around them as they go. It could be anything, walking down a driveway, down a street, the destination wasn’t important as much as keeping that forward momentum going. Quatro gives us the best example of this exercise I’ve read in “1.7 to Tennessee.” Eighty-nine year old Eva Brock has written George Bush a letter, informing him that she disagrees with sending young people to war, and is determined that she will walk the 1.7 miles to the post office and mail it herself. As she goes along we get a sense of the town and the people in it, without having to tell us too much about either. More importantly, during her journey, we learn everything we need to know about Eva. She gets confused and disoriented, losing her sense of time and direction, her memories both consume her and fail her, but all along she keeps plugging forward even though her destination becomes increasingly abstract. The story ends tragically, though in very much a non-melodramatic way, and the form letter from the white house received by the post office reminds me of About Schmidt and Jack Nicholson’s realization that none of it matters and connections aren’t real.

In “Better to Lose an Eye,” Quatro masterfully dances on the line of sentimentality. Lindsey’s mother was shot by her boyfriend and is now paralyzed. With her religious grandmother, Lindsey and her mother attend a birthday pool party. Lindsey is embarrassed of her mother and terrified of all the situations where she has to explain her condition. By the end, so upset over everyone’s tendency to ignore her mother, she accepts it herself in a beautiful moment. There is nothing necessarily groundbreaking about this story, just that it’s perfectly constructed. It serves as a reminder just how good a simple, well told story can be and how much it can resonate with a reader.

Quatro crafts her stories with style and all the mystical aspects of southern Christianity. There is tragedy around every corner but she never leaves the reader, or her characters, hopeless. It’s great to drag these people through the gutters and do terrible things to them, but equally important not to abandon all things good, give us some reason to continue on. In this, the stories of I Want to Show you More are completely successful. She gets in a bit of trouble when she starts going too much into the quirky, fantastic worlds she creates. This collection is exponentially stronger when it tells simple, toned down and great stories. Some books of short stories tend to be a bit top-heavy, but this one is actually the opposite, it starts out a bit slow but by the fourth or fifth story you’re hooked. Once the stories get into their groove every one of them is firing on all cylinders and do all the amazing things short stories are capable of.

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Note: Jamie Quatro will be at Changing Hands bookstore in Tempe, Arizona this Thursday, March 28th. Come meet her and get a book signed. Support literary authors and independent bookstores.