Maggie Brown & Others

The characters in Peter Orner's story collection, Maggie Brown and Others, oftentimes feel disconnected from the roles they seem to be stuck in. The stories take place from 1950 to the 1990s, with the distinct sensibility of a pre-technology era. Many of the stories are about family who are cast out from their expected roles due to poor luck, addiction, and mental illness. Orner's prose pulls on threads of loneliness and exhaustion, and within the collection's thematic sections, the brief stories connect to one another.

There are two sections of this book that feature one narrator. In short glimpses, this unnamed man, who is a writer, explores the plights of people in his family, aunts and uncles, town criminals. Later, we see him look back at his education, then his life with a wife. These micro-stories, which are not conventionally formed, are vivid and poignant. And the narrator uses language that feels conversational. He says of an aunt, "[she] was in her late forties when she moved back home. The word was that she was "a little off." Nobody by my father went as far to say she was crazy. He'd tell anybody who listened what a loon his sister was." In a sense, the writer's whole childhood and young adulthood come alive on the page. The way he tells his stories confer an understanding of our common humanity, a love, even for the castaways of modern life. This is the collection's most ardent theme.

In addition to affection for the disaffected, religion, commerce, and sexual connections are important, too. These themes come up often in the novella "Walt Kaplan is Broke." Relying on some history from earlier stories, the novella takes place in Fall River, Massachusetts in 1977. Walter Kaplan has bypassed death by cardiac arrest, leaving him to evaluate his whole life, marriage, friendships, and the history of the town itself. Walt has been a business failure, and was depressed before he nearly died. When he wakes up, he has to find his place among the living.

Orner has the ability to give a skeleton of details about a character's life and trust that the reader can fill in the gaps and leap from story to story to understand an overarching message about our pasts. It's a rare talent and these stories are its evidence.

Oh, what a splendid premise this constellation of stories is built on! Peter Orner isolates those turning point moments in our lives--and, time after time, story after story--nails the tragedies and triumphs of those trigger points. A luminous, smart, insightful collection--not to be missed.

Maggie Brown and Other Stories manages to be a constant force of stimulation. Readers can expect to orient themselves not only in the stories presented, but also in consideration to how the length of the stories affect our capacity for retaining the seemingly minuscule, yet meaningful, flash of experiences in our own lives. Some stories range from flash fiction to short fiction and to, eventually, a novella packed into the book. While there is a narrative thread that lingers as the reader progresses through the book, Orner ultimately reinforces an emphasis on timing and spacing and how, almost, accidental life all seems. Thanks to the quick-witted dialogue between characters, they manage to be the backbone of the brief glimpses of the world Orner is crafting for the reader to notice. The choice between focusing on the ambiance of the work or the characters practically begs for the reader to consider a reread of this in the future, which I know for certain I will be doing.

'Amazing what our bodies are designed to take.'

Amazing what our hearts and souls are designed to take too. This is a hell of a collection of connected stories by Peter Orner. I was blown away by all of the characters because they resembled reality too much, the pain of being alive, our insecurities, our curiosity about family members closest to us, our assumptions about others that diminish them as people. There are stories about the fire of youth and the desires that flow beneath our skin, how hungry our hormones make us, how did we survive all that want? Later in life, the ache of it all, the self-pity. You can’t feel too sorry for the characters because when you do, you are snapped back into reality by lines such as this “He’d grown up poor, he said. That’s novel? The mass of humanity lives a world away from a hot bath.” I am always hungry for short stories that throw the reader right into a town, a house, a family, any situation where I can immediately understand the score because the writing is saturated with insight and emotions, the atmosphere rich, going between light and heavy. This line “He’d written, he told her, about flower children because they made him laugh. Spent my life trying to get clean and these kids can’t get dirty enough.” That is gold, it sums up so much with a few choices words. Writing at its best. Truly, I was hooked.

My heart could break, my breath catch with a line describing our narrator’s mother, about her hands while she played the piano because he humanized her so tenderly in The Case against Bobbie. We dance through time, through our own hearts, first memories, beginnings, endings and all the decisions we face each day simply because we exist. How we live with what remains when death decides to court us. Wealth to poverty, love to the absence of it, youth to old age, and the curiousness of the parts we all play in between. Why do some images stick while some are diluted or fade away entirely? How strange to be a human being, what imperfect creatures we are.

Yes, yes add this collection to the top of your TBR list! These short stories swallowed me as much as a full length novel.

Publication Date: July 2, 2019

Little, Brown and Company