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Stories full of secrets and doubts
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The enigmatic women in Laura van den Berg’s strange and lovely new story collection, “The Isle of Youth,” yearn for secure, uncomplicated lives. Luckily for us, instead of clarity and predictability they end up with secrets and doubts. These characters — magician’s assistants, gumshoes, gangsters, twin sisters, abandoned wives and light-fingered daughters — all hope to understand the mysterious world, but they find it hard enough just to understand themselves.
The book (van den Berg’s second, after “What the World Will Look Like When All the Water Leaves Us”) begins with honeymooners crash landing in Patagonia. As their plane plummets, the nameless wife imagines rescue workers relying on passports and toiletries to determine who they were. Everyone survives, and the wife, suffering only a broken nose, wanders through the rest of the story guarding her tenderness, wondering about her husband and love, and the infectious nature of her doubt: “Afterward, we lay in bed for a long time without speaking; I would have liked to believe it was the blissful quiet that can follow a spectacular day, but it felt like a different kind of silence.” The enchanting world of Patagonia, with its burrowing parrots, cascading waterfalls and moonlit sea, provides an excellent foil to her increasingly disenchanted experience.
All the women in this collection are uncertain observers, hyper aware yet unable to divine meaning until it’s too late. The sisters in “Opa-Locka” are ineffectual detectives snarled up in other people’s lives, causing needless complications. At their stakeouts they leave behind heaps of food wrappers, plastic cups, beer cans and NoDoz packets while discovering nothing. Ultimately they are dragged back into their criminal father’s mysterious past.
The magician’s daughter in “The Greatest Escape” knows exactly what she wants: to leave her mother’s third-rate act and head for Hollywood. But lack of money keeps her around, as do the romantic lies her mother tells about the girl’s missing father. When the truth surfaces, she asks why her mother didn’t keep lying. “People have to be realistic about their options,” her mother replies, leaving the girl to wonder, wryly, how realistic it was to buy a fake guillotine.
Thankfully, the realistic doesn’t carry much cachet in these stories. Wonder and mystery are recurring motifs. The women here are one step ahead of disaster or one step behind it. As one puts it, mourning her brother among the frozen cinders of the accident that killed him (and knowing that the secret she kept could have saved him): “I did not know certain things because I had chosen to turn away from the knowledge. In Antarctica, I decided that was the worst thing I’d ever done, that refusal.” Van den Berg never lets us turn away.
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