Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, 2023, 256 pp.
The sixteen stories in Kate Doyle’s debut collection probe the cusp between young and full-blown adulthood, where characters elevate the importance of cloying family dynamic annoyances and superficial wounds of early heartbreaks to the level of epic tragedy. Ennui introduces itself, possibly for the first time, to recently graduated overachievers who are used to the rigors and demands of college life and stunned by the unprecedented time-on-your-hands lifescape that yawns open, threatening them with the twin novelties of boredom and accountability for their own entertainment. Whether in off-kilter-cute romantic dramadies of lost love or vignettes of the stifling oppression of ordinary family friction, Doyle’s characters suffer through this nanosecond of adult development, during which every relationship—familial, friend, sexual—undergoes irreversible advancement and reorientation.
To be of the current generation and hold this incremental shift as the largest problem—as opposed to looming climate apocalypse, the erosion of civil rights, or rampant gun violence—is a gift. How lucky these characters are: a truth that exacerbates their discomfort, as in the aptly named “Aren’t We Lucky,” where Emma returns to her childhood home indefinitely after failing at her first foray into independence. Her mother jumps at the fresh opportunity to shame her and her twin Nora for their luckiness: “Their mother has long held the opinion that Emma and Nora overemphasize their personal wants and feelings: I didn’t have luxury at your age, she’ll often say.” While their mother’s hypocrisy seems to liberate sister Nora, who responds with the quippish, “Okay, but now you live in a beach house, so I guess it all worked out,” their mother’s disapproval stymies Emma, such that “she feels disappointing, like she has done so little with what she’s been given.” This exchange encapsulates the story’s tension and captures a dominant flavor of the collection as well. Characters’ feelings are treated as insignificant by someone significant to them in the overall context of material abundance.
A boyfriend’s breakup tactic pulls this same trivializing trick in “That Is Shocking,” when said boyfriend carries it out on Valentine’s Day while bearing a plate of homemade, heart-shaped scones. It is not the loss so much as the method that bothers Margaret. “Maybe if the scones had not been heart-shaped? I would not feel so, I don’t know,” she muses, summing up her heartbreak and ambivalence in one go and illustrating another hallmark of the collection—the characters’ almost proud denial of direct engagement with their own vulnerability. Later, when friends comment on her emotional state, Margaret insists, “I’m not sad, these are tears of indignation and rage, not tears of sadness. I am, sad-wise, unaffected.”
Doyle’s characters share this sweeping avoidance of real feeling. In “What Else Happened,” Hannah is failing out of pre-med and stuck in a weird love triangle, paralyzed by the momentum of her tailspin seemingly because, “I didn’t want to be someone who would make an avoidable mistake.” Which is the kicker, really. Show me a mistake that isn’t avoidable or a person who never makes one. How much easier these characters’ lives would be if they allowed themselves to fail and learn and grow.
“I Figured We Were Doomed” features another narrator whose fizzling relationship saturates her with ambivalence. Her lover “was endlessly kind, generous, self-effacing. It was one of the reasons I figured we were doomed,” foiling his goodness and tolerance with her own indecisiveness. Not knowing what she wants spurs her toward inaction: “As for the future, it was difficult for me to be explicit.” Again, it’s as if the most egregious error is to act, in the absence of absolute assurance that what you’re doing is the exact right thing. Doyle deftly plumbs this quagmire of vague perfectionism that hampers her characters’ chances at forward motion.
With wry wit and meticulous precision, Doyle immerses us in the bittersweet aching of that last sliver of young adulthood before we realize the world is much, much larger than ourselves, with fears and losses to come that are exponentially more profound than we are yet capable of imagining.
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Jody Hobbs Hesler is the author of the story collection What Makes You Think You’re Supposed to Feel Better and the novel Without You Here. Her writing appears in Necessary Fiction, Gargoyle, Valparaiso Fiction Review, Atticus Review, Pithead Chapel, CRAFT, Arts & Letters, and many other journals. She teaches at WriterHouse; writes and copyedits for Virginia Wine & Country and Charlottesville Family Magazine; and reads for the Los Angeles Review.
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