{"id":2571,"date":"2018-01-31T14:48:10","date_gmt":"2018-01-31T14:48:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/floridareview.cah.ucf.edu\/?post_type=article&p=2571"},"modified":"2018-01-31T14:48:10","modified_gmt":"2018-01-31T14:48:10","slug":"questions-of-emotional-truth","status":"publish","type":"article","link":"https:\/\/cah.ucf.edu\/floridareview\/article\/questions-of-emotional-truth\/","title":{"rendered":"Questions of Emotional Truth"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Grass Labyrinth: Stories<\/em>, by Charlotte Holmes
\nBkMk Press (University of Missouri-Kansas City), 2016
\n160 pages, paper, $15.95<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

The Grass Labyrinth<\/em> won the 2017 Independent Publisher Award (IPPY) gold medal for short stories and the 2017 gold medal for Indie Book of the Year in short stories from Foreword Reviews<\/em>. You can hear Holmes read from the book here<\/a>.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

In \u201cCoast,\u201d the first story in this collection of nine interconnected narratives, Henry Tillman, a painter and children\u2019s book illustrator, is staying with his wife, Lisa, somewhere on the coastline of South Carolina in a beachfront cottage that he inherited from a great aunt. We are privy to his thoughts as he ponders reading Rilke with a lover, painter Agnes Landowska; describes a spat with Lisa over making Thanksgiving dinner; and reflects on various liaisons, familial and otherwise. It\u2019s significant that Henry narrates the first story: he is the cog around which many of the ensuing stories revolve.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

The Grass Labyrinth<\/em> is about relationships, how they form and unfold, twist and intertwine, sometimes fall apart and sometimes hold fast. Holmes takes the lives of a few related individuals and shows how various forces\u2014art, love and death\u2014affect how they treat each other. This book is also about the creative act\u2014in the various forms of writing poems, painting portraits, photographing boulders\u2014and its ramifications.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

At one point in the opening story, Henry wishes Agnes were with him. \u201cMaybe what I want is just to watch her take in the details of a place I know so well,\u201d he thinks, \u201csee them filter into her consciousness, and come back changed, infused with her own quirky vision.\u201d As we read further into The Grass Labyrinth<\/em>, this statement becomes relevant to the author\u2019s vision. In some ways Holmes is describing her own narrative MO, a succession of appraisals of places and people\u2014a fine filtering leading to revelations not so much quirky as compelling.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Lisa is the speaker in the second story, \u201cSongs Without Words.\u201d She fills out the details of a reference Henry made in the first story to the abortion she had early in their relationship, the memory spurred by a recent miscarriage that makes her feel cursed. Friends try to comfort her; she, in turn, pictures \u201ca heaven populated entirely by children, floating in static like that of the TV screen when the stations go off the air.\u201d She envisions her own lost children in that limbo, \u201ceach one as long as a cocktail shrimp.\u201d<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Holmes mixes engaging descriptions of settings with equally persuasive dialogue. Her stories are clearly planned, but they develop without one\u2019s noticing the armature, even when the author pulls a flashback to fill in some bit of information. In this way, each piece in the book works on its own, yet plot and thematic strands woven through the stories serve as a kind of inter-generational DNA.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

The story \u201cTaken,\u201d the longest in the collection, exhibits convincing authenticity in its rendering of the dynamics and intrigue at a retreat called the Colony somewhere in the woods of Pennsylvania. A 34-year-old poet, Rika Pratt (Agnes\u2019s daughter), becomes involved with a painter, twenty-seven-year-old Ben Tillman (Henry\u2019s son). Both have significant others\u2014she, Ethan, a bookstore owner; he, Mattie, a photographer\u2014which doesn\u2019t stop them from testing the liaison waters.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

The story deftly switches back and forth between the two of them as they size up each other. It\u2019s a sometimes-tense tango that culminates in Ben\u2019s studio where he unveils his work from the residency. Rika finds his realism disappointing and says so: \u201cShe\u2019s long regarded photorealism as\u2014to use her mother\u2019s term\u2014just dick-wagging. See what I can do?<\/em>\u201d Ben bridles at her critique. \u201cEmotional truth?<\/em>\u201d he asks her, \u201cWhat\u2019s that?\u201d It\u2019s a question the author asks in one form or another throughout the book.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

In \u201cErratics,\u201d Holmes switches stylistic gears, building the story from a series of thirty-three short pieces, each with a numbered title: \u201cErratic #112,\u201d \u201cErratic #35,\u201d \u201cErratic #7,\u201d etc. The format is inspired by a series of photographs that Mattie has taken of glacial erratics. These rocks left in random places by the glaciers serve as emblems for her and Ben\u2019s fragmented lives, marked by miscommunication and stressful recollections. \u201cYou didn\u2019t even know what an erratic was until I told you,\u201d Ben tells Mattie at one point, adding, \u201cAnd for a long time, you kept calling them eccentrics<\/em>.\u201d It\u2019s one of a number of moments of appealing meanness.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

The title story and its coda, \u201cProvenance,\u201d give the collection a strong one-two closing\u2014not a climax or a tying-up of loose ends exactly, but rather an opening to new possibilities. Invited by Kerry, his father\u2019s widow, to sort through his papers, Ben visits his childhood home, on Thanksgiving, to find his young stepmother planning to transform the front yard. Ben thinks The Shining<\/em>, but the spiral design Kerry has in mind is a vehicle for meditation. It turns out to be an environment an outsider artist might have assembled, wonderfully peculiar.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Finding fault in what is an altogether rewarding read comes down to nitpicks. A few similes seem a stretch, such as likening a child\u2019s round and clear syllabic calls of \u201cco<\/em>, co<\/em>, co<\/em>\u201d to \u201ccrystal beads flung across a tabletop.\u201d An occasional clich\u00e9 wrinkles the prose: at one point, Agnes says, \u201cDestiny is simply an excuse invented to explain bad choices and missed opportunities,\u201d a fitting thought for the occasion, but one that rings a bit bromidic.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Returning to the opening epigraph from poet Charles Wright after finishing the book, one is struck by the aptness of his lines: \u201cWe live in two landscapes, as Augustine might have said, \/ One that\u2019s eternal and divine, \/ and one that\u2019s just the back yard.\u201d Charlotte Holmes is a master of both kinds of landscapes and the men and women who inhabit them. She is a painter of place and passion. The Grass Labyrinth<\/em> is an exceptional collection.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This book is about the creative act …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":2574,"template":"","categories":[9,139],"tags":[509,510,511,512,513,514],"class_list":["post-2571","article","type-article","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-aquifer","category-book-review","tag-carl-little","tag-charlotte-holmes","tag-creative-act","tag-creativity","tag-personal-relationships","tag-the-grass-labyrinth"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nQuestions of Emotional Truth - The Florida Review<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/cah.ucf.edu\/floridareview\/article\/questions-of-emotional-truth\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Questions of Emotional Truth - The Florida Review\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"This book is about the creative act ...\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/cah.ucf.edu\/floridareview\/article\/questions-of-emotional-truth\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"The Florida Review\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:image\" content=\"https:\/\/cah.ucf.edu\/floridareview\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/43\/2018\/01\/Holmes-Charlotte-Glass-Labyrinth-cover-crop.jpg\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:width\" content=\"183\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:height\" content=\"106\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:type\" content=\"image\/jpeg\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:label1\" content=\"Est. reading time\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data1\" content=\"5 minutes\" \/>\n<script type=\"application\/ld+json\" class=\"yoast-schema-graph\">{\"@context\":\"https:\/\/schema.org\",\"@graph\":[{\"@type\":\"WebPage\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/cah.ucf.edu\/floridareview\/article\/questions-of-emotional-truth\/\",\"url\":\"https:\/\/cah.ucf.edu\/floridareview\/article\/questions-of-emotional-truth\/\",\"name\":\"Questions of Emotional Truth - 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