A Short Story Collection by Janice Deal, reviewed by Ellen Prentiss Campbell
STRANGE ATTRACTORS: THE EPHREM STORIES (New Door Books)

Janice Deal has said of her earlier award-winning fiction that place is often her muse. Now in Strange Attractors: The Ephrem Stories, that muse—that place—is the fictional town of Ephrem, Illinois. The town itself becomes a composite multi-voiced character. For everyone in town, whether native, new arrival, or transient stranger, loneliness is a unifying affliction, a theme introduced in “This One Is Okay,” the outstanding first story in the collection.

In “This One Is Okay,” lifelong Ephrem denizen Looie, seven months a widow, is not sure of “the statute of limitations on grief.” Looie is a reader; her books are companions. A prize possession, a compact edition of The Oxford English Dictionary, purchased at a yard sale for the extravagant sum of fifty dollars (missing its magnifying glass) sits on the shelf beside her childhood dictionary. Deal writes, “She looks at the works…and she imagines them as friends.” She uses her late husband’s old magnifying glass to read the OED, but “sometimes it’s enough to think of the world of words inside.”

Looie welcomes and feeds a squirrel who “wormed down her chimney” to nest in an armchair in her living room. Her teenage grandson Donny wonders if she thinks the squirrel is taking advantage of her. No, she tells him, “This one is okay.” Donny wants to know its name. “Hiraeth,” she says. “The squirrel’s name is Hiraeth.” 

Looie does not define the word for Donny, nor does Deal (a reference librarian) for the reader. Turn to the dictionary. Hiraeth is Celtic, meaning a longing for a place, a home, a time, you cannot return to. Hiraeth is nostalgia on the knife edge of pain, and that keen loss and irresolvable yearning threads through these lives, these stories, of Ephrem. Native or stranger, all feel like outsiders, misfits. 

Who can encounter misfits without remembering Flannery O’Connor?

Deal’s voice and people are uniquely her own, but share something of O’Connor’s eerie magnification, a hallucinatory exposure of evil within the quotidian. 

Making ends meet is hard in Ephrem. Circumstances and relationships are often harsh, sometimes cruel. But there is also kindness, longing for connection, aspiration to know more, to understand. In the title story, a storefront minister befriends a guidance counselor grappling with her own child’s violence. He comforts her with physics, not religion:

Take chaos theory…One act can change everything…But it’s not as random as it all looks…No matter how great the changes, the overall system stays stable. And from the chaos, an ordered form emerges…That form…it’s called a strange attractor.

The minister is not alone in enlisting physics as comfort. Donnie, grandson of the squirrel-loving, word-loving widow Looie:

…reads all the time and then he explains what he learns to Looie, in a way she understands. He tells her about the conflict between quantum mechanics and the general theory of relativity. “It’s an information paradox…They both seem right on their own but then they don’t fit together. You know? But they sort of live alongside each other for the time being.”

And there’s Sandrine, in “String Theory and other Animals.” Her daughter has moved to New York, her only friend is retiring to Florida. She drinks and hangs on in a rented room, writing obituaries for the local paper. Struggling to get sober, she peruses the community college course catalogue, looking for a mid-afternoon class “because if she can make it to dinner she is usually okay.” Sandrine chooses String Theory:

Learn about the theory of everything, the course description promised…Sandrine has visualized her life as a string…thick and soft during her childhood, narrowing and hardening as she ages. “Where am I on the string?” she wants to know.

Where is anyone along life’s string? Deal slips back and forth along the collective timeline of lives in Ephrem. Readers, like strangers passing through, learn piecemeal, in scattershot order, about the past and the present, the living and the dead. Ned, a janitor at the community college, is introduced through his obituary embedded in an early story. In a subsequent story, he’s alive, abused by a student at the college. Later still, the abusive student, Rex, recollects his own backstory of childhood neglect. Story by story, Deal creates and curates an album of asynchronistic snapshots: flashback, flashforward, present moment—the effective irregular sequence jerks, repeats, and animates.  Life strings twist and tangle, lives link and overlap, but remain starkly alone. 

The author has said before that she hopes her stories resonate like the blues. Here Deal surely achieves musical resonance. The cumulative effect of these mingled voices evokes another choral collection also set in Illinois: Edgar Lee Masters’ Spoon River Anthology. Deal’s choir is singing the blues, amplified, electric blues. Close the book and Strange Attractors reverberates.

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Ellen Prentiss Campbell’s new novel is Frieda’s Song. Her debut novel The Bowl with Gold Seams received the National Indie Excellence Award for Historical Fiction. Her story collection Contents Under Pressure was nominated for the National Book Award. Known by Heart: Collected Stories appeared in May 2020. She lives in Washington D.C. Learn more at her website.

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