I wanted to like all the stories here more than I actually did – in other words, while Nick Healy has definite talent in his short fiction, he doesn’t always employ it to the best use. Two of his ten stories here – “The Baroness” and “Uncle Ed’s Packard” – are first-rate, while others, laden with vulgar words and gratuitous lambering (people using the toilet, for example), describe “natural” behavior one assumes but would rather not read about. So why do this – or use vulgar euphemisms? Healy tosses it all in and lets it brew up – not always to an edible portion. He also uses clichés (“bust my chops”) and even split infinitives. Healy belongs to the school of writing who seem to believe getting the essence of human experience in short fiction can be done any old way. I’m trying to remember if Dorothy Parker or Virginia Woolf or Thomas Hardy or Helen Simpson ever wrote with such carefree abandon. (Of course, Simpson is the only one now living – born in 1959. So far, she hasn’t – and is one of the U. K’s most significant short-story writers.) As for Healy, from his photograph I’d say he’s near 40 or so and since this is his first book, perhaps we should “cut him some slack” – to use one of Barack Obama’s favorite trite phrases. (Don’t misunderstand; I voted for him!)
So now that I’ve complained a bit about Healy’s excrescences, there is “The Baroness” – gleaned from his six-year stint in St. Paul covering the state legislature for a now-defunct publication. Unlike one critic who did not read this book carefully (i.e., Anthony Bukoski, reviewing for the Minneapolis Star Tribune), I saw that the female character dubbed The Baroness is not a lawmaker but rather one of the protagonist’s reporter colleagues. The speaker also has a possessive girlfriend named Kayla, who discovers the Baroness in his apartment, although they haven’t reached intimacy yet. The Baroness is really Liz, unaware of her other moniker until the very end of the story. Here is the point-of-view, presumably the author’s, in response to being found out:
I’ve never been so screwed in my life, never been
served such a shit sandwich as this, and I could think
of no excuse or apology worth the breath. I stood there.
I said nothing. When Liz pulled on her jacket and strode
between Kayla and me, I didn’t try to stop her. I looked
at Kayla. Her reddened, tense-jawed face showed a
different beauty than I’d seen before. I looked at that face
and saw hostility and heartbreak – nothing masking them,
all wide open and honest. I looked at that face, and felt
happy Kayla still hadn’t walked away. Not yet, not yet.
As I said, my dislike of vulgar language comes from a lifetime reading authors such as Woolf and Parker. So when a contemporary writer indulges in “shit sandwich,” there is only resigned distaste. Still, Healy knows how to tell a story – and the general critical responses, aside from Bukoski’s error-laden notice, have been fairly positive. The M.F.A. program in Mankato (south central Minnesota) is where Healy got his “credentials” as a creative writer after leaving St. Paul. He and his family decided to stay in Mankato after he took his degree, finding solace and camaraderie in the small community of writers there. “Healy writes with enormous sympathy for his characters,” wrote Amy Goetzman in Minn Post (21 November 2012), “mindful that one’s 20’s are full of natural missteps – and sometimes the following decades, too. These are real people, sometimes kind and virtuous and often clumsy and unfocused and accidentally funny.” I’d say she’s right – and she didn’t complain about banal phrases or usage errors, as this one-time grammar and composition teacher is prone to do.
In sum, Nick Healy’s It Takes You Over has some fairly decent work – ten stories, 190 pages – and for a writer with St. Paul roots transplanted a bit south but still in Minnesota, his “poetry” emerges from his portrayals, as Ms. Goetzman said in her piece, reminding the reader of the unfinished and imperfect mortal within each of us.
New Rivers Press, 2012. $14.95, paper. Moorhead, Minnesota, USA. Order your copy here or, for e-reader, here.