A Compassionate Portrait: Leesa Cross-Smith's This Close to Okay

“Shattered energy seemed to pulse from him like sonar. Tight blips of loneliness. Tallie translated the echolocation easily. She was lonesome and blipping too.”

Leesa Cross-Smith is known for her beautiful imagery, lush and aromatic sentences that leave you breathless and pondering for days. Her two short story collections, Every Kiss, A War and So That We Can Glow and her debut novel, Whiskey and Ribbons have earned notable accolades from the literary establishment and praise from Roxane Gay. Her second novel, This Close To Okay, is less poetic, more straightforward, more accessible. It has all of the charm and anticipatory fizz of a rom-com but underlying all the quippy dialogue, shopping montages and rescuing of cats, Cross-Smith submits for our consideration a tableau of human frailty, the far reaching grasp of grief and mental illness, rendering a compassionate portrait of the sufferers and the caretakers.

The backdrop is Louisville, Kentucky. In the waning days of October, in a cold, driving rain, two broken people meet on a bridge, Emmett on the river side, “the suicide side” of the cold steel railing, Tallie on the other side, the safe side. Emmett staring down at the turbulent Ohio River. Tallie, the only person driving by, amidst a noisy shimmer of vehicles, to stop and inquire, to aid a stranger in need. With little more than words of care and musical offerings of Andrew Bird and Wilco playing on her cellphone, Tallie encourages Emmett to climb back over to safety. She takes him for a coffee and then offers him a place, her place, to stay for a few days. Over the course of a weekend, Emmett and Tallie construct a metaphorical bridge from the depths of despair to close to okay.  

This is a quiet novel. Cross-Smith acknowledges but doesn’t dwell in the unbearable. Most of the bad stuff has already happened off the page. Infertility, failed relationships, racial bigotry, mental illness, depression, PTSD. Suicidal ideation. Tallie and Emmett confront their demons through talk therapy. Conversation provides the driving force, propelling the plot forward. The details the characters choose to withhold from one another deliver the dramatic tension. Tallie confides her longing for children, her failed IVF treatments, her ex-husband’s affair but conceals that she is a professional therapist. Emmett confesses that he too used to be married although his true identity and source of pain remain a mystery throughout most of the book. He snoops around in her computer, her Facebook page. He secretly emails her ex. In his mind, he obsessively catalogues his surroundings. He never gives up the possibility of the bridge.

Told in alternating points of view, Tallie’s narrative offers a clinical assessment of Emmett’s emotional health noting his inability to regulate his body temperature, dimming, detached feelings, dizziness. She wonders if he’s confusing his exhaustion for hopelessness. Emmett’s narrative reveals that there is no straight path to wellness. His healing accordions in and out. Tears arrive without warning. At one point, he assesses, in detail, the damage his body will suffer should he jump off the bridge.

And yet, the relationship that blooms between Emmett and Tallie, from strangers to confidants, to friends to possibly more is both believable and aspirational. For the reader, their story serves as an emotional support manual. How to recognize the signs of emotional distress. How to help someone in need. How to reach out in very small but persistent ways.           

Talk, talk, talk, talking. Always talking and listening. Cups of tea, mugs of coffee. Food, eating, nibbling, snacking, cooking meals together, grabbing a bite at a diner. Sharing the intimacy and distraction of music, movies and baseball during The World Series. Discussions of the “big things, not little things.” Art, pop culture, literature, faith. Playing gin rummy. Reading Harry Potter out loud. Strolling through a shopping plaza. The gift of a fuzzy blue snow hat with flaps. A red one to match. Shopping for Halloween costumes. Choosing Mulder and Scully. Sharing a smoke. The ritual burning of emotional artifacts. Doing for one another, like fetching a glass of water or cleaning leaves out of a gutter. 

And then there’s hand-knitted chunky afghans and scented candles and the sound of rain thrumming on the roof. Clean fresh smells: soap and shampoo and lotions. The comfort of home. Hygge.

“Making things as comfy as possible…it’s what I do,” says Tallie to Emmett in response to his appreciation for the charms of her cultivated domesticity noting how her home quiets his anxiety.

Hygge (pronounced HOO-gah) is the Danish word for cozy, a contentment achieved by enjoying the simple things in life. Highlighted in The New York Times a few years back amidst a spate of books, websites and online venders, Hygge celebrates homespun pleasures: fuzzy wool socks, raglan sweaters, a wooden mixing spoon with a burnt handle, handmade quilts and fresh baked pies. Hygge captures the essence of a crackling fire and a mug of hot cocoa — the kind made with milk and miniature marshmallows foaming on top.

In This Close to Okay, what could be more hygge than sharing a late autumn weekend, pumpkin spiced latte, old fashioned donuts, kids bobbing for apples, mums — bursts of yellow, and orange and purple. Rain giving way to crisp clear skies, the promise of a Halloween party.

In addition to promoting the healing powers of hygge, Cross-Smith champions a new feminism with her elevation of home life and the purposeful cultivation of a nurturing space. Domesticity, long seen as a negative, demoralizing tug with demands that diminish women slavish to their homes and broods, toiling in the kitchen and the laundry room, mop and dust rag. Unless of course these chores are monetized into celebrity empires a la Martha Stewart, Rachel Ray or Marie Kondo or the latest HGTV renovation stars. 

Now, the battle of the stay-at-home moms in mom jeans vs the suit wearing professionals, where one set of duties cancelled the value of the others, have come full circle. Tallie is a professional who owns her own house, makes her own way in the world. And yet aspires, and finds comfort in knitting, making her home cozy and beautiful and doing things for others. A woman showcased as both healer and provider while allowing for the possibilities of good men, men and women working together as a team.

Ultimately, This Close to Okay is a buoyant instructive for living in a loud, loud world. It maps a course of action for reaching out to those in need. A guide for navigating social and emotional isolation. A reminder that in the midst of hopelessness and heartache, it’s the simple things that can life raft optimism and revive the weary.

Make Yourself Heard, Howl: A Review of Benjamin Percy's Red Moon

I think it is only fair before I start talking about Red Moon by Benjamin Percy to say that I don’t normally much care for werewolves. I’m not as sick of them as I am vampires by any means, but I still don’t dig them. I think too readily of the role playing game Werewolf: The Apocalypse, which makes me think too much of the affiliated role playing game Vampire: The Masquerade, which in turn makes me think about vampires. I am utterly sick of vampires (zombies kind of bore me at this point as well). However, against all expectations, I really got into Red Moon.

I’ve heard people discuss Red Moon as literary horror, but I’m not too comfortable with that. I don’t know a lot about horror fiction, but I wasn’t really terrified as I read. I was enthralled, and I was certainly on the edge of my seat sometimes:

He unbuckles his seat belt and opens his mouth — ready to finally excuse himself, to stand — when a ragged snarl comes from the back of the cabin. It is hard to place, with the shout of the engines, the chatter of so many voices. Patrick wonders if there is something wrong with the plane. He remembers seeing a news report about how so many places are behind on their maintenance schedules and shouldn’t be in the air at all. Maybe the turbulence has shaken loose the screws holding the tail in place.

There is a growl, a long, drawn-out guttural rumbling, and though it is hard to place, it seems more animal than machine. The cabin is now hushed except for the creaking of seats as people turn around with anxious expressions.

Then the bathroom door crashes open.

A bald man in a Rose Bowl sweatshirt is the first in line for the restroom — and so he is the first to die. The door jars him back. He would have fallen except for the narrow hallway where he stands, the wall catching him and preventing any further retreat as the thing emerges from the restroom, rushing forward like a gray wraith, a blurred mass of hair and muscle and claws. It swings an arm. The bald man’s scream is cut short, his throat excised and replaced by a second red mouth that be brings his hands to, as if he could hold the blood in place. But it sprays between his fingers. As if to make up for his sudden silence, the rest of the passengers begin to scream, all of their voices coming together like a siren that rises and falls.

The thing begins to move up the aisle.

However, as I said, I was not scared.

Mind you, I think my reaction might have been different if I’d listened to the audio version instead of reading print. I attended a reading Benjamin Percy gave for this book and I don’t know if it was his baritone-movie-trailer-announcer voice or simply the intense emotion with which he read, but I responded to the same scenes differently than when I read myself. I think the audio version of this book might scare the crap out of me.

Regardless, the aspect that did unsettle me as I read the print version was how easily I could see something like this happening in this country. Not werewolves of course, but something else could easily be substituted (terrorists, to make an example explicit) and it all could become real.

To give some background, a disease related to a misfolded protein crosses over from wolves to humans that (in brief) can cause people to transform into enraged werewolves. Most control themselves, but some do attack. Approximately five percent of the population is infected, and many of the uninfected live in fear. People want protection. In response, the government tracks the infected, mandatorily drugging them, and restricts their rights. Many of the infected bristle against their oppression, but many of the uninfected demand the oppression go further. The situation is dark and precariously balanced, the human need to be safe pitted against how much humanity may need to be given up in order to be safe. As one can imagine, this is a situation that can only explode:

He explains what this means. With the new year, all IDs will note lycan status. The lycan no-fly will remain in effect indefinitely. A database, accessible to anyone online, will list every registered lycan, along with their addresses and photos. Anti-discrimination laws will be lifted: it will be legal for a business to deny service and employment to a lycan, because the government has determined that, in light of recent and repeated attacks, lobos is now a level-one public and safety threat.

This is the gateway, Reprobus says, to impoverishment, to ridicule, to attacks. The gateway to vaccinations proposed by the idiotic cowboy running for president.

“I refuse to bear it. That might mean a fine or that might mean imprisonment. That might mean my job. I don’t know. I don’t care. When I was your age, I made a lot of noise. I have noticed your generation doesn’t make much noise. I find you disgustingly polite. I would encourage you to take to the streets. I would encourage you to be rude and obnoxious. Make yourself heard. Howl.”

People motivated by a cause who believe so strongly that any means are justified and other people who think public safety is worth going to any extreme (Notice how similar those are?). Meanwhile, the struggle between the poles shatters the whole . . . including all those in the middle.

Is Red Moon an allegory wrapped up in wolf’s clothing? Is it werewolf fiction with sociopolitical implications? Frankly, I’m not entirely sure how to separate these aspects and classify it all. However, the book entertained me at the same time that it disturbed me. There was fancy, but there was gravity to the words that went beyond mere entertainment. Then again, maybe the two shouldn’t be separated. Perhaps Red Moonhas the same sort of dual and indivisible nature as the human/wolves that live within its pages.