The Secret of Cartwheels. - book reviews

Studies in Short Fiction, Spring, 1994 by Charlotte M. Wright

Patricia Henley made waves with her first book of stories, Friday Night at Silver Star (Graywolf, 1986). It was chosen as a Notable Book of the year by the American Library Association and featured as an Editor's Choice for both the New York Times Book Review and Publishers Weekly. At the same time Esquire called Henley an "up-and-coming" author, and Western American Literature's reviewer found the book a "quiet but forceful" evocation of characters "who came of age in the sixties and early seventies [and are] trying to bring the past and present into perspective." Henley has a professional flair to her writing that will continue to attract kudos from critics.

Yet I have some reservation. Yes, a Booklist's reviewer notes, Henley is capable of "convincing us utterly of the flesh and the feelings of her characters." What bothers me is the sameness of those characters, who seem recycled from story to story. Nearly all are wanderers, with "sixties" attitudes towards drugs, sex, and health foods. I am of the right age to appreciate such attributes, but I found that after a few stories, I wanted to see the author's lively, polished, and accessible style applied to different types of characters.

Another complaint I have is less a problem with Henley's writing than with how it is billed. Graywolf Press, her publisher, seems determined to cash in on the current interest in the western "sense of place." Their press release states that she "vividly captures the lives and landscapes of the American West," and that her stories contain a "brilliant evocation of place." The cover copy reiterates this theme: "Patricia Henley's new stories are set in the American West [where] we meet marginal westerners . . . whose lives lead them to a certain type of longing." I read a lot of fiction by western authors, and much of it does depend on setting, on details of landscape, on western dialect and lore. Such is not the case with these stories, which seem less dependent on a sense of place than a sense of time. The characters could just as easily be living in rural New England, in a southern college town, or in a cabin in the Appalachians - but they could only be products of the 1960s.

Ironically, the best stories in the collection are the two which depend the least on setting. In the title story and in "Labrador," Henley achieves a startling level of emotional verity. Both stories center on the experiences of a young girl forced too early from childhood by the mental breakdown of her mother and the simultaneous disappearance of her father. In each case, the child tries in vain to find in the language and signals of the adults who surround her a clue to interpreting the threatening events. Roxanne's mother in "The Secret of Cartwheels" is committed to a mental institution right after telling her "there are signs in life . . . that tell you what you have to do." Her Aunt Opal, in explaining her mother's absence, adds to Roxanne's sense of guilt for not "reading the signs" by telling her: "She's sick. Surely you must have known?" In fact, the only "truth" Roxanne hears throughout the whole ordeal is from another girl at the Orphan's Home, who tells her that "the secret of cartwheels ... [is to] catch yourself before you kill yourself." It is this that Roxanne applies to her life thereafter.

In "Labrador," adolescent Kate has a similar problem. Her mother, too, slips into an early madness, forcing Kate "out of childhood" and into an adult sense of guilt and responsibility for family tragedies. She says, "I thought by the weight of ... my energy, I could make it all better . . . that if I worked hard enough and loved her enough she would change." And she does work hard to keep her own sanity and to keep you her younger siblings happy, but when her mother comes home, Kate sees that nothing she has done has made a difference:

But I felt none of what I'd expected to feel when she returned home. The welcome; the affection; the relief; the praise. The praise. More than anything, I'd expected her to tell me what a fine job I'd done, how selfless I'd been. . . . [But] she treated me like any other child.

Patricia Henley's writing explores her characters' search for connections between themselves and others. Occasionally, they find a link; more often than not, they lose what few connections they already have. I admire her writing, and can only hope that she will expand her considerable skills by experimenting with a variety of character types.