A Better Kind of Flood: A Review of Stefanie Freele's Surrounded By Water

I’m a firm believer in karma, which means keeping up with the daily transactions of goodwill that proper karma maintenance dictates. So when I received a free copy of Stefanie Freele’s short fiction collection Surrounded by Water in the mail from publisher Press 53, my prize from a contest I’d won, I knew I was supposed to do something with it. You know, new item marked “pending” on the karma ledger. I just didn’t know what that thing would be. Place it in a time capsule, to be found in a near-future devoid of physical books? Or pass it on to someone, perhaps a teenage girl who needed to know that there are other Stefanie’s writing besides Meyer?

I wasn’t a total stranger to Freele’s writing — I’d read the title story in Glimmer Train, and I knew she was Fiction Editor at The Los Angeles Review, so my expectations were already tending toward the high side. But I procrastinated. It may have been last Thanksgiving break when I finally sat down and read this gift of a book and decided that I’d write a review. And since I don’t know her personally, I couldn’t think of a better way to thank Stefanie Freele for several hours of literary enjoyment. Further, if a review could help a few more readers find this book, then so much the better. Pending ledger item closed out.

So, the review. Facts first: forty-one stories of assorted lengths, from micro to full-length short story. Many are prior-published, whether in respected print journals like Glimmer Train (twice!) or Mid-American Review, or online in such fine venues as Pank, Mudluscious, elimae and Night Train. She switches up point-of-view. She can bring the humor (“Feisty Rojo”) and the pathos (“Scantily Clad Submissive Women”) equally well. She wanders from domestic realism (“Kicky Feet”) to absurdism (“Cessation”) to straight-up literary goodness (“Us Hungarians” and “While Surrounded by Water”). She’s a master at that great magician’s trick of storytelling: hooking our interest with a wild notion we think the story will follow, then proceeding to slowly reveal the story beneath the story (“The Father of Modern Chemistry”).Topically, she’s all over the map, but there is a nucleus of flash fiction pieces that together explore the darker underbelly of motherhood, the honest feelings of the sleep-deprived, the lonely-coping, the last-frayed-nerve kind of confessions that a straining woman might only tell her closest friend. Best of all, though, is how Freele wields her words, at the sentence level. “In the Basement”, for instance, delivers a gritty and discomforting portrayal of a young bulimic woman:

You lock the door and assume the hated position. Left hand holds the stomach and right hand is for purging. Your pointer finger is cut up from rubbing on your teeth, it stands aside, healing. Middle finger for this one. At the sight of the toilet, you begin to cry and retch. How did I end up here again? It started ages ago on a quest for gorgeousness, for thinness. Tears blur the pieces of donut and caramel corn. The peanut butter squares catch as expected, too bad, they taste so good, so forbidden. As you choke on a hunk of peanut butter, the tears drain and you press against your stomach to help the vomit flow. Gagging, then a big chunk comes up, of course smaller than it felt in your throat. The roughness of it scratches the esophagus. Whisper and beg to stop. Please let it all come out, I’ll never do it again.

A mere ten pages later, Freele’s lyrical prose is simply mesmerizing in “Blown”:

In that smile, the look takes her beyond the driveway, bringing Jelly into the storm and across the hills to the red-orange paths of fall, toward the rain-slick madrones and the dry streams beginning to fill and spill. That’s occasionally how I see you. She’s listening to the crunch of a hesitating deer, to the dipdip of the quickening rain, to the first mushrooms erupting through the soil like moles coming up for fresh air.

While I enjoyed most everything she accomplished in this book, I was initially troubled by Freele’s tendency toward unresolved endings. Weeks ago I started to write a mixed review, maybe 70/30 favorable, but after stewing on her collection while simultaneously struggling to write an ending for one of my own stories, I stopped. I realized that the breakdown in interpretation was mine. My own predilection towards definitive endings (often my downfall, it seems) was clouding my judgment and tainting my reading of Freele’s prose. I was shortchanging this flood of hers; oblivious to the less-visible positives. After all, didn’t the ancient Egyptians used to welcome floods, because they replenished much-needed nutrients in the soil of the Nile Valley?

So I started over from the beginning, by deleting what I’d written and re-reading her book cover to cover, and that is when I finally felt I might understand her intent. Stefanie Freele, I’ve decided, above all else, is a writer that respects her readers — respects us too much to do all the cooking for us. She’d rather buy the ingredients and leave them in the fridge for us to find, and wonder what we’ll do with them. I believe many of her stories are open-ended because there’s more out there, just off the page-edges of her stories, and it’s our job to seek that out. That level of restraint — it’s something I need to learn from her.

For those who care about such things, there doesn’t seem to be an organizing framework to this collection, but I’ve decided I don’t care about that either. In the end, it makes sense. This mix of forms and lengths, voices and points of view, realism and surrealism, closed ends and open. It’s a surrounding by words, some placid, some roiling.  The mistake I’d made at first was to think I could comprehend an inundation like this from high ground, with dry boots. It has to be experienced up close, face to face with the bloated carcasses of the ill-fated, with luckier others clinging to scrap wood and life, and everywhere the silt-rich currents promising rejuvenation. A benevolent kind of flood — and like the Egyptians of old, we should welcome it.

Finding The Right Strange Details: On Stefanie Freele's Surrounded by Water

I had such a good time reading Stefanie Freele’s Surrounded By Water. I knew I would. I’d been looking forward to it with giggly anticipation you might say. Freele is a writer who does the thing I like most in literature, and that is she writes stuff that only she could write. Reading her is a chance to look into a mind very different from your own. And those differences matter. It’s not like looking into a different mind and only seeing blank white walls or flashing lights or oh look aren’t these people awful and weird and aren’t you glad you don’t really know them? No, Freele is a writer who finds the right strange details and makes them matter in an entirely sympathetic and very human way.

I knew there would be lots to open in this new book. I was a kid creeping down the stairs on the it’s-mine-all-mine holiday morning before anyone else is up, squeak slap squeak slap on the stairs with my flip-flopping slippers. It turns out there are 41 stories and each of them is a remarkable package.

Many of the stories are very short, and that got me thinking about very short fiction, and that led me back to Sudden Fiction International (recommended below). I had forgotten that Charles Baxter wrote the Introduction. This book is where I first read Dino Buzzati (also recommended below) who Baxter also discusses recently in Ecotone 13. Sometimes the coincidences of life seem totally scripted like all the world’s a stage or something. Baxter starts that Ecotone essay talking about new writers, and at one point he says, “The result is Unrealism, our new mainstream mode.”

I think that is probably right. We are back to the fantastic as our major mode but in a way that reflects our times. Some of the best stuff is a kind of interior/exterior bleeding and blending, you turn your head inside out, and Stefanie Freele is very good at this. I’m looking to be surprised when I read stories like these. I want to see details, thoughts, and situations I would never have thought of myself. Then it’s just me and this strange new story cheek-to-cheek in the candlelight.

For example, I’m reading her story “A Bunch of Cash Landed My Way” and in the background I’m hearing Barenaked Ladies singing, “If I Had a Million Dollars.” It’s what I bring to the story. The song might be longer than the story. They probably have nothing to do with one another except in my head. If I had a million dollars I’d buy a big statue of a butt and put it in front of a bank, oh wait. . . .

Or consider the story called “Quack” where the narrator is to have dinner with Lydia but has neglected to invite her. It only gets better. Dinner happens. Lydia is both there and not there. Wonderful.

There is a strange and sinister boy in the complex story “While Surrounded by Water.” There is a town and a storm and a flood, and the people who do not flee are isolated both from the outside world and from one another. I thought of Ballard’s The Drowned World. Freele’s atmosphere and intentions are entirely different from that novel, but she succeeds in setting up a fully realized world with people like islands surrounded by water.

You will have your favorite stories in this book. Mine is probably “Us Hungarians.” Freele gives us deeply imagined and richly described details that are both very strange and very human at the same time. There is a woman with a hair disorder and a sloppy but remarkably tight family bond between another woman and her two brothers. There are dump sick wobbly seagulls. And cows. And Romance. And most of the people are Hungarians.

The twist, the thing you do not expect, is the genuine family bond between Allee and her brothers, the “us” part, or part of the “us” part because there is a very tall girl with a hair disorder (her bright red hair grows forty times faster than normal) and her weird father who are also Hungarians if less admirable ones.

Allee has run off to Massachusetts from Wisconsin (apparently the homeland of the Hungarians, who knew?) to go to school, but now she is visiting her brothers in California where they have rented a cottage on the grounds of a dump. The place is always wet and it smells. There are toxin dazed or crazed seagulls everywhere. Eagles are supposed to swoop down and eat them which can’t be good for the seagulls or the eagles.

When Allee arrives she notices her brother Steyr is bigger than ever as expected, since her other brother Kurz told her on the phone, “He’s turning into Elvis.” Don’t you love that? Isn’t it perfect?

The house is in a state you would expect a house inhabited by your older brothers to be in. Messy. The details are all great. Is Allee resentful? No. Is she disgusted? No. Does she try to clean the place up? Well, a little. Everything that happens in this story is surprising but just right.

And there is something about the landlord, Werner Waffin, the father of Haenel, the girl with the ever-growing red hair. “Rule #1,” Steyr tells Allee. “Never ever open the door to Werner Waffin unless we’re here.” It wouldn’t really be a spoiler to tell you why, but it will be more fun for you to find out for yourself. In the end, you will love these people. You will wish you were on such terms with your own relatives. You will all want to be Hungarians, too.