BOOK REVIEWS
The Only Thing I Have
by Rhonda Waterfall
Price: $19.95 paper
ISBN: 978-1-55152-293-7
Page count: 158 pp.
Size: 5½ x 8
Released: Sept.
In The Only Thing I Have, Rhonda Waterfall’s first collection of short stories, we’re presented with characters incapable of self-scrutiny. But not knowing what they want doesn’t stop them from acting. On the contrary, there’s plenty of action in this book – a couple of youngsters shoot a taxi driver for a small sum of cash, a woman has plastic surgery in an effort to make herself resemble her neighbour, a very young man thinks he is in love with a married woman – but what ties these stories together is how easily, and with what expertise, the characters deceive themselves, a trait that is coupled with their refusal to change their own lives.
For a reader weaned on stories in which the protagonists evolve over the course of the narrative, this can be frustrating. Nevertheless, Waterfall manages to maintain such a reader’s interest, though one does occasionally wonder what would happen if this young writer forced her characters to scrutinize themselves more closely.
The least successful stories feel underdeveloped. “The Last Note,” for example, owes more to film and television than to lived experience. “Jedidiah’s Wife” – a story about a woman who mistakes a vegetable for an infant – simply stops rather than resolves.
But when the stories do work, as with “Found,” a sweet tale about finding love, they are small wonders. At their best, these stories are engaging and surprising, and the author’s style is enjoyably precise: she favours short, to-the-point sentences.
Really good writers can do what Waterfall is attempting: write virtually plotless stories. Her characters are as delusional as they can get, which causes them nothing but pain and struggle. And they never change, which, for this reader at least, is frustrating. Change is memorable. Stasis, not so much.
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