Camping With Strangers: And Other Stories
by Sarah Nawrocki
Boaz Publishing, $20 hard
If there were a separate DSM-IV for characters in contemporary short fiction, the primary diagnostic categories would be Whimsical and Depressive, and of course, many writers’ favorite, the Whimsical-Depressive. These characters float through their lives, bumping into the other characters tangentially, emerging from their malaise only long enough to erupt in Whimsical Gestures. The Whimsical Gesture is usually some idiosyncratic behavior, by which the writer intends to trumpet the character’s distinctiveness and originality. In other words, the characters behave in ways real people are too mundane, too busy, too uninspired, and generally too tired to behave. San Antonio writer Sarah Nawrocki’s debut short story collection, Camping With Strangers, is overrun with Whimsical-Depressives of all ages and genders; her characters engage in the Whimsical Gesture with as much abandon as their muted personalities allow.
In “Locusts,” a woman is inspired by the spitting locusts in her yard to start spitting surreptitiously at strangers in the supermarket and finally at her sister. The mother of the 13-year-old in “Star Seed” abandons her family and moves to New Mexico to find her “pod people.” There are whole families of Whimsical-Depressives in some of these stories: children who are alienated from their parents who are alienated from one another. In “Boys,” the parents drift around without interacting — the father consumed with raising earthworms and the mother obsessively reading biographies — and their daughter perpetrates sophisticated psychological hoaxes on local boys. At the end of the story, as she does homework and listens to her parents finally begin to fight with each other, her disquiet is expressed through another Whimsical Gesture: “I sit at my desk drawing triangle after triangle, obtuse, acute, right. They pile up on each other but I keep drawing them. The black from my pencil smears all over the paper and the sides of my hands, and I don’t care.” This moment tries hard to substitute for the epiphanies writers are taught to reach for; however, it feels both contrived and opaque, failing to illuminate the narrator or the situation.
The trouble with this ending, and with many of the stories in this collection, is that the Whimsical Gesture is literary sleight-of-hand; it’s cheating, the substitution of prettily lacquered peculiarity for substance and complexity. And the stories in Camping With Strangers are inventive and decorative on the surface — filled with appealing images and quirky characters — but the author seems reluctant to get her hands dirty, to dig beneath their quirkiness to expose the roots. The characters, alone in their foggy detachment and sleepwalking through their lives, remain as distant to the reader as they are to one another. All we see is a series of Whimsical Gestures, left like a trail of bread crumbs, revealing nothing.
This article appears in September 3 • 1999.