Certain American States: Stories by Catherine Lacey

Certain American States: Stories Reviews

• 
  Brian Want

  It takes a sharp, talented writer to sculpt these oh-so-very contemporary stories. There are admittedly some piercing lines and exquisite turns of phrase, but there's not enough to make the collection compelling for me. I'm afraid these stories are plagued by the kind of artisanal false poignancy that critically lauded writers of the moment like to deploy. The characters are drawn to exaggerate disconnection, but the despondency we see over and over again is at best tedious and worst cartoonish. I could feel my empathy drain away, which is not what I hope for when reading good fiction.
  
  
  
  
• 
  Thomas

  Another
  reviewer described this collection as “artisanal false poignancy” which resonated with me regarding Certain American States. At times I felt that Catherine Lacey could capture a singular emotion – like a character’s ennui, or disconnection from their parent, or desire to move somewhere else. However, I don’t think the characters in these collections grew much if at all, nor do I think that the stories transcended describing one particular emotion. Quality short stories generally have to make every word count, and when they do – I’m thinking Jhumpa Lahiri’s
  Unaccustomed Earth or some of Adam Haslett’s
  You Are Not a Stranger Here – they can really sink you into a character’s heart and mind. I wouldn’t say Certain American States achieved that and therefore I wouldn’t recommend it.
• 
  Scott

  "Why do all my feelings come like streets drugs, cut with something else?"
  -- from 'The Four Immeasurables and Twenty New Immeasurables'
  
  Lacey offers twelve distinct short stories, mostly focusing on modern-day relationships and families. (The 'states' of the title are more about emotions than actual physical locations, although there are various settings used throughout in the U.S.) It was good if not always compelling, but I'm glad I stuck with it because the final two in the collection - 'Family Physics' and 'The Grand Claremont Hotel' - seemed to be the best of the bunch. In the former, a free-spirited young woman enjoys being the difficult black sheep of her suburban household. In the latter, Lacey channels a bit of Rod Serling in the unconventional tale of a man slowly becoming a permanent guest of a luxury high-rise.
• 
  Rebecca

  The loneliness of certain American states is enough to kill a person if you look too closely
  
  (3.5) The characters in Catherine Lacey’s short story collection move through various states – Texas, North Dakota, Virginia, Montana – but the focus is more on their emotional states. Ten of the 12 stories are in the first person, giving readers a deep dive into the psyches of damaged or bereaved people. I particularly liked “ur heck box,” in which the narrator, troubled by the death of her brother and wary of her mother joining her in New York City, starts getting garbled messages from a deaf man. Whether a result of predictive text errors or mental illness, these notes on his phone echo her confusion at what’s become of her life.
  
  Two other favorites were “Touching People,” in which a sixty-something woman takes a honeymooning couple to see her ex-husband’s grave, and “Small Differences,” about a woman who’s cat-sitting for her on-and-off boyfriend and remembers the place faith used to have in her life. Both dramatize the divide between youth and age; in the latter the cat is named Echo, a reminder that the past still resonates. Another standout is “Learning,” about a painting teacher with a crumbling house and marriage whose deadbeat college friend has become a parenting guru. (This one reminded me of Curtis Sittenfeld’s “The Prairie Wife.”)
  
  Many of the stories question the possibility of ‘getting over’ what’s happened and posit, instead of total healing, a stoic determination to just keep going. In the title story, the narrator goes to see her godfather, Leonard, on his deathbed. She still doesn’t like him much; the trip isn’t about achieving closure but doing the right thing when you can. The same is true in “Family Physics”: Bridget had an explosive falling-out with her family when they came to see her accept her college Physics Award. Now that she’s back in touch with them everything isn’t perfect, but she sees how family life is always a mixture of entropy and rebuilding.
  
  There isn’t as much variety to the narration as I often like from a set of stories, but Lacey uses a range of storytelling techniques (or gimmicks, if one was being unkind) to keep things interesting. The first story, “Violations,” about a man whose ex-wife has published a story drawing on their life together, features run-on sentences that go over the page; “ur heck box” nests parentheses inside parentheses, up to three layers; “Because You Have To,” about a woman who’s counting her blessings even though she’s newly single and surrounded by feral pets, is in short sections separated by asterisks; and “The Four Immeasurables and Twenty New Immeasurables,” narrated by a woman who’s sleeping with a Buddhist monk, is in list form. Lacey also uses no speech marks, setting out dialogue in italics instead.
  
  It can be tough to assess a story collection as a whole because the parts can range from hard-hitting to instantly forgettable. I didn’t always feel that each of the parts was necessary here; perhaps I would have been better off just sampling a few of the best stories? The problem, of course, is that you never know which those would be for you before you open up the book. There were quite a number of lines that rang true for me in Lacey’s work, but no more than a few stories that I can imagine myself recalling or ever going back to in the future. The book feels very much of the moment, though. If you’ve enjoyed recent work by Julie Buntin, R. O. Kwon, Sally Rooney or Sittenfeld, you might want to spend time in Certain American States.
  
  Favorite lines:
  
  “I don’t know what to do now, a state I am so familiar with it feels like my only true home.” (from “Because You Have To”)
  
  “Anyone can visit a graveyard, no matter what they think, and every graveyard has been seen so many times there is nothing left in them for anyone to see and that is why we all must go and look, to see again what’s been seen again” (from “Touching People”)
  
  “I no longer understand the state I was in back then (heartsick over the idea of Jesus the way that other girls were heartsick over the idea of River Phoenix)” (from “Small Differences”)
  
  
  (I prefer the U.S. cover. How about you?)
  
  Originally published, with images and some personal reflection, on my blog,
  Bookish Beck.
• 
  Doug

  3.5, rounded up.
  
  Standard disclaimer on short story collections: those are not my particular reading forte, so I am always a bit disgruntled, as I always find them lacking and leaving me wanting more, and they are by default, uneven, with some stories working more successfully than others. That said, Lacey's debut collection of twelve such has more gems than duds. It starts off unpromising and the first two stories are the weakest: the first, 'Violations', suffering from the pretentious usage of paragraph-long run-on sentences; and the second, 'ur heck box', undone by the equally twee usage of parentheses within parentheses within parentheses (a gimmick stolen perhaps from David Hayden?).
  
  She wisely saves the best for last, as the two final stories are both unusual and strong. But I can't help feeling that she seems an amalgam of other, better writers - a dash of Moshfegh here, a soupçon of Rooney there. From other comments on here, apparently her novels are even better, so at some point I'd like to investigate those.
• 
  Paris (parisperusing)

  I’ve yet to come across a writer with such seamless control over the millennial language as Catherine Lacey exhibits in just twelve stories. In New York, a grieving Texan is unable to escape the vestiges of her brother’s death; elsewhere, a sheltered art professor starves his students of technology as his relationship crumbles in the interim; an orphan’s life gets interrupted when she’s called to North Dakota to see her godfather off to the other side — in Certain American States, humility and humanity are conjoined in their effort to sweep state lines, to save a nation. From cover to cover, it becomes evident that we may never possess the command or fucked-up charm of the creatures Lacey summons in her forthcoming story collection.
  
  
  Best Books We Read in May 2018, Paperback Paris
  
  Thanks Brian x Norma @ FSG for allowing me to read ahead.
• 
  Brooke

  Catherine Lacey is one of the most talented writers I have ever read, my favorite recent discovery. Her lush writing inspires me to write and scream and cry despite feeling like I will die with my words stuck in my throat. Certain American States is a short story collection that yes, follows a variety of characters across state lines, but primarily emphasizes the uncertainty and loneliness and grief we feel inside of them. How we can “vanish into the map of how a life should go'' without even noticing it. How we can so easily feel like “a map that has been refolded the wrong way.” How nonsensical the world is. How people are just out here living, but “I can’t see how anything is organized.” How people live and how people die and these are just parts of living and dying and it doesn’t make sense, but why bother thinking about it when they just happen once. How we consume information to learn things, but then forget the things and I’m certain I’ve never known a single thing for sure in my entire life, but surely I know things and that can’t be right. How love is worth it. How the risk of it is worth it. How despite the pain it is still worth it. How choosing life is worth it. How we are all so full of so many emotions that are at war with each other, so much “emotional spit-swapping” that we can’t possibly know everything about a person or how they feel. That this is what life is. Take it. Please take. So yes, my words feel stuck, but wow, how lucky I am to have Lacey to give me perspective and the words for what it means to live in this state. “I don’t know what to do now, a state I’m so familiar with it feels like my only true home.”
• 
  bookmateriality

  4.5!
• 
  Turkey Hash

  So effortlessly clever and intricate. A deceptive looseness to the prose, a lot of slow burners that reward re-reading, so many brilliant lines. I haven’t tried with the novels but maybe it’s time.
• 
  fatma

  3.5 stars
  
  still debating whether to rate this up or down 🤔
• 
  Alan

  Terrific. Involving stories of death and other kinds of loss, told with humour (much sarcasm) and often with a light touch despite the first story - so wonderful it gave me a warm glow - being constructed of lengthy sentences and parenthesis inside parenthesis inside parenthesis, ending often ))). Very sharp, sometimes painful, funny: all great pieces. Rebellious teenagers and the adults they turn into, disastrous relationships and their fall out. Goes out with a great story too, a man who stays in a hotel past the time he's booked but keeps getting upgraded by mistake until he's in the penthouse suite.
• 
  Jessica Sullivan

  I’m a huge fan of Catherine Lacey’s novels, but this short story collection left something to be desired.
  
  The characters and themes are indeed compelling—confronting the absurdity, loneliness and urgency of being a person in this world—and the writing is consistently solid. But one of the main things I hope for in a short story is that it feels complete and satisfying by the end, and most of these didn’t.
  
  I’ll still be the first in line for Lacey’s next novel, but I’ll probably skip the short stories. Some writers are just better at one than the other.
• 
  Darryl Suite

  In the past, I have publicly declared that Catherine Lacey was one of the best contemporary writers out there (maybe even the best). After reading this story collection, that still stands, but with a caveat: I prefer her in long form, where she has more room to breathe life into her characters, “plots,” themes, and “zany” ideas.
  
  I’m in two minds here. Although I think every story has merit and provided interesting takeaways, the shorter stories were essentially skip-worthy; over before they left any sort of impression or impact.
  
  I’ll be blunt: there are only three truly outstanding stories out of twelve. But they’re great enough to bump this collection up to four stars.
  
  “Please Take” is about a wife mourning her husband, but also follows her encounter with a stranger who she finds wearing one of the donated shirts of her husband’s. This story goes into wild directions. This is the first moment in the collection that had me reeling.
  
  “Small Differences” is about a woman, who impulsively accepts to housesits for a friend, and is secretly thrilled that her friend is “broken.”
  
  “Family Physics” follows an extended timeline of a woman who can’t help driving her family crazy. It kind of spins the outsider-loners tropes on its head, and is a worthy addition to dysfunctional family fiction. But the kicker is that there’s nothing really all that “dysfunctional” with family, it’s all really her. I think this was my fave of the bunch (the second of the last story in the collection). And truth be told, I found myself cracking up.
  
  I’d say the common thread between all twelve stories is loneliness and alienation. All the main characters feel emotionally distant from what life and love has served them; they’re all finding ways to play hide-n-seek from their real lives. Everyone is anxiously looking for the Emergency exit, even if it happens to be temporary.
  
  Now all I have left to read is THE ANSWERS and I will have completed Lacey’s fiction. What an exciting talent.
• 
  Bart Van Overmeire

  Dat ze sublieme geweldig lange zinnen kan schrijven, wist ik al sinds 'Nobody Is Ever Missing', maar nu bewijst Catherine Lacey dat ze het ook kan in kortverhaalvorm. 'Certain American States' zijn twaalf schitterende verhalen over zoekende, eenzame mensen, moeilijke familierelaties, …
  
  Er zijn opnieuw fenomenaal lange zinnen, met keiveel bijzinnen tussen haakjes, maar nog meer geweldige korte zinnen en ik heb zelfs verschillende keren luidop gelachen, met als uitsmijter het Kafkaiaanse verblijf in 'The Grand Claremont Hotel'.
  
  Maar ik laat het aan haar zelf over om u te overtuigen:
  
  'Something my grandmother, who was a fascist, used to say was You have to count your blessings. Once I asked here why you have to count your blessings and she gave me a great smack to the ear. Because you have to. She was the most beloved fascist in my family, all of whom were flag-waving fascists.
  Do I sometimes think fondly of her? Do I have a choice?'
  
  'I don't know what to do now, a state I am so familiar with it feels like my only true home.'
  
  Staken er boven uit: 'ur heck box', 'Because You Have To', 'Learning', 'Family Physics' en 'The Grand Claremont Hotel'.
• 
  Alison Hardtmann

  When we were younger my affection for him came so easily and I could listen to his endless opinions for hours and I suppose that meant I loved him in a way that only nineteen-year-olds can love, and though I don't exactly feel that way anymore I do feel some baffling and unexplainable grace, some exhausted affection, though he didn't deserve it any more than a jar of expired mustard deserves its spot in a refrigerator just by being there for so long without someone having the nerve to throw it away.
  
  Catherine Lacey's collection of short stories concerns itself largely with women who are at the end of relationships or are having trouble negotiating life in general. Lacey's writing reminds me of Halle Butler, Kevin Wilson and even Ottessa Moshfegh, and I do like that kind of protagonist, who is constantly getting in her own way and behaving badly. The best story in the collection was Family Physics, about a woman determined to escape her own family.
• 
  Mark

  There has been a mother-lode of short fiction of late and good stuff too. This one does not disappoint.
• 
  Jaclyn

  Lacey’s style is much better suited to longform writing.
• 
  Ylenia

  [ 3.5 stars ]
  
  I liked Lacey’s debut novel so I was really intrigued to read her short stories.
  She experimented with her long sentences (love love love her super long sentences) and some of these stories were little gems.
• 
  mads

  ‘god is just a sound made of a g and an o and a d. its good sound. that’s part of the reason its so popular. everyone loves a nice noise. that and people don’t want to die. they will believe anything on the off chance that it will help them not be dead.’
  
  4.5 rounded down ! i read this one v fast. compulsively readable, relatable and lacey has theeeee most pleasing way w/ words
• 
  Jaci Millette Cooper

  Highly recommended. These stories seem to have a thematic focus on ennui, loneliness, expectations, and miscommunications, which makes the collection very current and culturally relevant. Can’t we all relate to that right about now?! Lacey is no one trick pony: she pulls off an array of playful, perceptive, and wry characters and distinct stories well, and it is refreshing to see a writer maintain their own voice while branching out to successfully and confidently write what could be considered “experimental” stories. The opener, “Violations,” commences with a whopper of a two-page sentence. I’m certainly no Hemingway. I can appreciate brevity but it’s not my style and I prefer sprawling, stylistic syntax over those short, incomplete sentences that seem to be en vogue in gritty fiction, but this was initially off putting, especially for a first impression— that is, until the narrator reveals his now ex-wife, a writer, has a penchant for long winded sentences : “It was a long sentence— really, way too long and for no apparent reason— and then he remembered she’d once confessed to him that even though they’d been approved by her agent and other writers and editors and critics, she sometimes wondered if they weren’t a crutch or a limitation, though they did create a sort of momentum that she likes and perhaps there was something pleasantly flamboyant about how sprawling and nearly baroque they could become....” That very moment, the stylistic choice was revealed as intentional and so cheeky and meta, I couldn’t help but grin and appreciate it.
  
  Many of these stories are memorable and unique, and I savored each of them, though I would say Because You Have to was the least engrossing. Stunners include: Ur heck box, Learner, and Family Physics.
• 
  Kevin

  Wow. This collection is so sharp, odd, sad, and morally flawed (in a funny haha way). It somehow perfectly executes a style that is messy but also displays a Gary Lutz-ian precision of surprising words and flow.
  I'm the kind of reader who LOVES short stories but often can't tell you what certain stories are "about" when I'm finished. Stories can be super entertaining for me as a reader but also fleeting sometimes. Lacey's stories seem to have a solid "about-ness" to them that really stuck with me and felt refreshing. There's the story about the woman's dead (?) husband's clothes being worn by homeless people in the neighborhood, the story about the woman who writes "fiction" about her ex, the story about the art teacher struggling with his law school students, the one about the woman who finds herself living for free in a fancy hotel room, and the one about the woman who cat-sits for a former fuck buddy.
  The narrators in each story are all so interesting in their world view and motivations. I laughed out loud a bunch and wanted each story to be its own novel. Also, as noted in other reviews: her long sentences and parenthetical digressions are like magic. You can bet I'll be reading her novels now.
  One of the best books of the year.
• 
  Kelly (UnshelvedEdition)

  This book is a collection of short stories which is new territory for me. None of the stories are very long and all are very different. Across all of the stories there is a common theme or feeling of a second chance or starting over, but that message is conveyed very differently. The direction of the stories often times got a little strange for me and hard to follow, but the ones closer to the end definitely got better
  
  This wasn’t necessarily a book for me. The writing was good and you can tell the author put a lot of consideration into her stories, but they were hard for me to relate to
  
  More reviews on instagram @UnshelvedEdition
• 
  Drew

  A fantastic collection, nearly perfect. Nearly every story features the kinds of sentences that made both of Catherine's novels so compelling -- but then you also get to see her starting to branch out, to try some new things (be they tenses, voices, or even genres), and there's a sense of thrilling possibility as the collection concludes: what will she do next?
  
  Whatever it is, I'll be reading it. With pleasure.
• 
  Samantha

  I think Catherine Lacey is one of the better fiction writers out there right now, so what you can expect me to say is, check this collection out, and if short stories aren't your jam, check out her novels. Writers often disappoint me when they cross over to different types of books (poetry to fiction, fiction to stories, etc.), but Lacey has not.
• 
  Sofie De Smyter

  I underlined passages in every single story, but especially liked Ur heck box, Family Physics, Violations and The Grand Claremont. Love Lacey's sarcasm - I normally never read a short story collection from start to finish but couldn't put this one down.
• 
  Courtney Maum

  Brilliant.
• 
  YZ

  Left me dazed in a good way. I will read anything she writes.
• 
  Roy Aguayo

  Insightful stories that showcase a variety of psychologically titillating narrative experiences.
• 
  Peter

  "The loneliness of certain American states is enough to kill a person if you look too closely - I think he said that once, Leonard did, while I was thumbing the photo albums again, trying to figure out what happened, how I got here. The loneliness of the trailer park. The loneliness of a warped Polaroid. The loneliness of the gay decade when I appeared." This paragraph appears near the beginning of the titular story in Catherine Lacey's short story collection entitled Certain American States. These stories, which take place in various undisclosed cities and towns, deal with some of Lacey's favorite themes: isolation, feeling entrapped, and struggling to make connections with others. In these stories, someone gets trapped in a hotel room, a man attempts to teach art to unwilling law students, and a woman runs away from her family, pretending to be dead.
  
  Lacey takes to the page with a sharp sense of the negative outlook with which her characters see the world. Her characters are sarcastic and self-deprecating, though while some authors choose to turn the volume up on those traits, Lacey blends them into the stories nicely, making it literally just another character trait. Never is she gimmicky, she never relies on cheap tricks to make her characters seem funnier than they are - Lacey is just genuinely a funny person and writer. A tiny paintbrush is taken to many of these stories, as if Lacey wrote them and then went back and penciled in more details, details that could have been omitted, but make the stories even brighter than they would be without.
  
  In "ur heck box," a woman grieves the loss of her brother, but runs into a strange man who shows her jumbled messages on his phone. Lacey writes an embittered narrator well, as we also saw in her breathtaking novel The Answers. In "ur heck box," when her character goes out with a more vibrant friend, she writes "Rebecca was the brightest spot on the rink by far, her electric-blue scarf and yellow peacoat making her look like a bird that forgot to migrate." Her similes are just right, never too exacerbated or drawn out. They are scattered throughout these stories like little gifts, extremely pleasant to happen upon when they do arise.
  
  Lacey also gets very contemporary here, but to a tasteful extent. At the beginning of the story "Please Take" she pokes fun at Marie Kondo's oft-quoted method of cleaning up your life, "Everyone was talking about having less - picking up everything you owned and asking, Does this bring me joy? And if it didn't you had to get rid of it. Everyone was doing this, asking themselves about joy. It felt incredibly dangerous. I was afraid for the world."
  
  Catherine Lacey has always created relatable characters, seemingly without even trying. Like Sheila Heti in her book Motherhood, Lacey has spent most of her writing career thus far trying to get as close to the inside of the human brain as she can. Her books are resonant without using cheap grabs, inspiring thought through beautifully long paragraphs, not text-speak or unnecessary, outdated slang.
  
  It's difficult to read this book and not hold it up to Lacey's novels, though to do that wouldn't be fair to the beauty of this collection as an assortment of her short stories. Lacey gives herself a good amount of time and space with these stories, none felt rushed, nor did it seem like she was attempting to jam a novel idea into a shorter format. The only disappointment I felt while reading Certain American States was that I wish I could've lived in these worlds for longer; when I complete all of Lacey's current published work, I imagine I'll feel what it's like to finally finish all the available seasons of a show you love: grateful for the journey, but sad that you can't immediately have more.