A Rare Book

I've got a book for you, friend.

It's that rarest of books found today in the late hours of mankind: a collection of short stories that will break your heart, not with profound truths (though you'll find them here, over and over again like little stones in a brook) but with a precise and brutal kind of honesty almost unheard of in our fiction. It is even rarer still because it is a first book, and such honesty is hardly ever found in young writers.

The book, Girl Trouble, by author Holly Goddard Jones is one of the finest collections I have ever read, and one of the bravest. Brave, first, because writing short stories today is in itself an act of defiant bravery. Our culture no longer reads them, no longer accepts them, and the short story is winding down a narrow and stoney path that may end with it tumbling over the edge into oblivion. At the bottom it may meet up with epic poetry and iambic pentameter. Anything is possible.

Brave, more so, because Holly Jones lays out, story by story, emotional honesties that cut deep, that draw blood. There is the wounded mother of the story Parts, who finds herself unable to move past the brutal murder of her only daughter. She hates her husband because he is able to do what she cannot, put his life back together. But even after their divorce and his remarriage, Jones shows us an even more bitter and human truth: the mother cannot, in spite of her hate, deny that her husband is a good and decent man.

Such contradictions are wadings out into murky water, a place where few writers dare to go. Most of us want tidy answers, simple truths, with no complications. If a character hates, they hate completely. If they love, their love is absolute.

But being human is a contradiction. And the best of our writers hold the oppositions together.

What may be most stunning of all is Jones's ability to take tabloid scenarios and turn them on their head, finding the emotional core of stories we would otherwise dismiss as juicy gossip. She brings us into the world of the high school girls basketball coach who is having an affair with his star player, the life of a tired, worn down father who's only son is accused of raping a fifteen-year-old girl, the young man who must come to terms with the fact that he's fallen in love with his best friend, another young man, and his own first sexual experience, which turns tragic.

Painted broadly, they are the usual plots of smutty stories. In Jones's hands, they break you. They haunt you. They make you understand just why it is we read at all.

If the short story is to survive, we will need more writers like Holly Jones. More writers this brave, this honest.

Treat yourself and hunt down this debut, because I have a feeling you're going to be hearing Miss Jones's name quite a bit in the future.