Donahue on Graff — Quarterly West

Stray Our Pieces

by Jason Graff

Waldorf Publishing, 2019

I first encountered the alluring unpredictability of Graff’s writing in the slush pile for Quarterly West. His story “Practical Applications in Whole Form Augmentation” (Issue 95) describes the attempted militaristic domination of the new species, homo aves. In a deadpan, faux-historical account, Graff paints a deliciously imagined struggle between these newly evolved human-birds and their government captors. In stark contrast to this speculative, premise-driven short story, Graff’s new novel, Stray our Pieces, is quiet and domestic. But it isn’t quiet in a drawn-out and small way; its quietness stems from making predictable household conflicts feel fresh. Through the wry and judgmental voice of Gloria Hytner, a law school drop-out turned unhappy, suburban house wife, Graff transforms the most mundane activities into memorable and bluntly sad experiences.

The success of the novel hinges on this ability to transform tedium into piercing tragedy. The sadness in this novel is not beautiful or transformative melancholy, but rather is sharply brutal in its realism. Gloria is unhappy in her motherhood, her marriage, and her failed career aspirations. Her husband Daryl is no villain, but rather a typical, caring-enough man. Sure, he seems to always be drinking beer, but he’s rarely too drunk. He does just enough; he brings in almost enough money to provide for his family, goes to the necessary family outings, and talks to his son about hygiene, but only after Gloria asks him to handle it. Gloria admits, “an anyone was all I was looking for and was all I really got.” When, partway through law school, Gloria winds up pregnant, Daryl sticks around, but their love is one of convenience, not true passion.

Just as Daryl is a passable husband, Gloria is an adequate mother, at best. She mostly does the requisite tasks like comforting her son when the neighborhood bully throws a snowball at him, and reliably preparing dinner. But her son confuses her. She doesn’t understand the appeal of the Land of Power and Dust, the high fantasy series he is always reading. His weepiness and immaturity disgust her. When David deliberately spits on his birthday cake, because he’s afraid blowing might fan the flames and ignite, she slaps him on the head, throws away the cake, and doesn’t feel guilty at all. Later, she is incapable of discussing the situation with her son. She admits, “My husband was the one with the skill, so necessary for child rearing, of being able to talk to our son as though he was a product of some distant, alien culture.” Gloria does her best for her alien-like son, but that’s often not enough.

Gloria’s unhappiness stems not from any grand failures, but from her ability to settle, to remain so static that she admits: “life had reached a point of desperation where a television show was now the fulcrum of my day.” Although she had always promised her overbearing mother she would return to law school, she has been a stay-at-home mother for over a decade. She only half-heartedly tries to secure a job and instead drinks wine, reads Virginia Woolf, and watches too much reality TV.

Through the all too real depiction of unhappy suburban life, Graff deftly handles issues of gender. Gloria is intensely a feminist, while living a life that would make her former self, and many other feminists, cringe. She hasn’t chosen a life of domesticity, not really, and she certainly isn’t fulfilled by it. Gloria is a compelling, fully realized, but not idealized woman. She is a plus-sized mother, who both is and isn’t defined by her body and her motherhood. She has insightful ideas about femininity, for instance she thinks, “some women believe that if they act like men, it will benefit them...But the goal as I understood it should not be to join the male world but change it.” Tragically, she flounders when trying to put this idea into practice.

In the hands of another writer, such a character could be frustrating. But Gloria’s self-awareness and levity captivate the reader and make us, at least a little, sympathetic. She is at once humorous and human, as she reads erotic stories on lustylawyers.net and is only aroused when a man admits another woman’s logic is “unimpeachable.” She intelligently and honestly understands herself; when remembering when she first met Daryl, she recalls: “The nineties had been the age of the slacker and of trying not to smell too much like one was making an effort at anything. How we attempted to prize our ennui, our fatalist conceits that nothing was worth the energy.” But poor Gloria has never left that attitude of the nineties. She’s stuck in a cycle of her own making and seems unable to do anything to escape it. Even when she tries, when she works diligently on a cover letter for a feminist nonprofit, she fails. She finds she doesn’t have the employment history and necessary skills to get any sort of job. The world has made her small. It’s too easy to sympathize, if only a little, with this conundrum. It’s easy to dream big, much harder to act upon these dreams. This is the hard tragedy of Stray Our Pieces, a captivating domestic novel that captures the contradictory apathy and passion of our generation.