rev. of City of Boys by Beth Nugent

Junkies, says the runaway girl who narrates the title story in
City of Boys, "exit right out of every situation before it's even become a situation." The same might be said for many of the chillingly detached characters in Beth Nugent's perceptive and unsettling first collection. Through ten spare, haunting stories, Nugent captures the overwhelming sense her characters share of being trapped inside dull, cyclical, insect-like lives.

In "Locusts," a family is compared to seven-year locusts that "seem capable of little other than eating." The boys in "City of Boys" are "nervous as insects, always some part of their body in useless, agitated motion. . ." A disturbed and outcast boy in another story finds solace watching "the beetles and ants fight it out over a territory smaller even than his own."

Whether the setting is the flat Midwest where "the leaves of the trees seemed somehow locked into place" or Northeast city apartments crawling with "more roaches than there are moments of love in the world," Nugent creates a bleak emotional landscape that feels strange and yet strangely familiar.

Sally, the observant young narrator of "Cocktail Hour," moves from state to state with alcoholic parents who have the "same conversation on average of twice a week." When asked by teachers to tell about her travels, Sally reflects that "the America I have seen is exactly like itself. . . .The houses and the neighbors and the streets are all just exactly alike, without difference enough even to help me make something up."

Nugent's more hopeful characters seek release from their oppressively uneventful lives through sex — looking for "someone to whom touching is all the reality of being," and yet finding this to be a different sort of trap. In the title story, the narrator who has run away from her mother becomes locked in an obsessive affair with an older woman. "That first time with her, I felt as though my mother was curled up inside my own body giving birth to me; each time she let me go, I made my way back inside her."

In "Abattoir," a woman senses that her first lover has gone through the same motions many times before. "He closes his eyes to kiss me, but I know he is thinking of his mother, and as his hand crosses my skin, what it touches disappears: my mouth, my eyes, my bones, they all disappear. . ."

Many of Nugent's characters experience the sensation of disappearing. Some resort to drastic means to convince themselves that they are indeed present. Annie, another of Nugent's lonely young girls, burns the hair off a doll belonging to her only friend, feeling disappointed when "there is no flame, only a crackle, as each hair sort of fizzles crisply down to the plastic head and goes out."

Though disappointment and boredom pervade the lives she portrays, Nugent manages to infuse her stories with a keen poetic charge. She can uncover startling imagery in the simplest domestic acts, such as tuning in a ballgame on TV ("he twists the color knob, turning the faces of the players bright red, then down to shades of black and white") or chopping vegetables ("I concentrate on the play of my fingers and the blade, my hand moving steadily back along the spine of a carrot, the knife relentlessly pursuing").

She is particularly original when rendering familiar places. In an elementary school, "children stare at figures on a dark board." In a college dormitory, "girls lie in the darkness just a few feet from the strangers who are their roommates."

Families, especially, live together as strangers. One girl wakes to "the world rushing by in a cluttered blur of objects," then remembers she is on a train trip with her embittered parents. "There was a time when her parents, having quarrelled, would turn to her with sad, shocked looks for all that they asked her to witness, but now it goes on as if she is not even there." By the end of the story, the girl looks into a mirror and finds, in fact, "no one there."

With her quietly nightmarish imagery, her dark deadpan humor, and her cold-eyed compassion, Beth Nugent vividly dramatizes her characters' profound detachment and disorientation. Her portrayals of everyday life have — in a larger sense — much the same effect as the cassette tapes made by a man in "Locusts," recording the incessant sounds of locusts outside his window: "There was something terrible about hearing it like that," his daughter thinks when he plays back the tapes. "For the first time, I realized what it was that we were listening to every minute of every day with no change in pitch or intensity, and for a few hours I could hear nothing else."

Elizabeth Searle's collection of short stories, My Body to You,
won the 1992 Iowa Short Fiction Prize and is forthcoming in 1993 from the University of Iowa Press.