Don't let the pretty cover, good title, and laudatory quotations on the back cover fool you: Lydia Peelle's Reasons for and Advantages of Breathing is little more than a really depressing, flawed--if promising--collection of almost-atmospheric short stories.
Thematically, I'm pretty wild about her stories. The best way I can think of to put it is that she captures her characters at the edge of one thing, poised to jump into the rest, and she just lets them sit there. In "Mule Killers," there are the farmers getting their first tractors and lamenting the killing of the last mules. In "Phantom Pain," a town is held in the thrawl of an urban legend, its denizens allowing themselves hope that its true--that it might change everything:
Tanya looks up at him, her pen in her mouth, and doesn't say a word. She is writing a poem about the panther. All her life, one thing has been sure: nothing ever happens in Highland City. Now this. She believes it is some sort of sign.
There's "Sweethearts of the Rodeo," perhaps my favorite of the stories, which paints a portrait of young adolescence:
It was the summer we smoked our first cigarettes, the summer you broke your arm. It was the last summer, the last one before boys.
In "This is Not a Love Story," Peelle gives us one of the a decent portrait of the South:
When people talk about the South being haunted, it's true. But it's not the places that are haunted, it's the people. They are trapped by all the stories of the past, wandering a long hallway lined with locked doors, knocking and knocking, with no one ever answering. No one ever will. That's the thing about the past. The closest you can get to it is stories, and stories don't even come close.
But despite her thematic efficacy and her gift for metaphor, these stories all fall short of their potential.
Some of it is structural: The titular story, "Reasons for and Advantages of Breathing" is paced strangely--too fast to be truly atmospheric, but with characters too weak and a pace too slow and too short to really move. "The Still Point" almost works, but it should be in third- not first-person. You get the idea.
It is her first book, and god knows I couldn't do any better. Plus, she's been published all over the damn place, so I guess I'm in the minority on this. And, if you buy her books through me, I get money.
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