This is Jersey. This is Good Writing.

The Suburban Swindle by Jackie Corley

So New Books, 2008

99 pages

I haven't been reading enough contemporary female writers. My bad. It's not intentional. I won't bother with the lame excuses -- women speak to an experience and a perspective I'm just not interested in, I can't think of the phrase "contemporary women writers" without picturing Curtis Sittenfeld, J.K. Rowling, and that Mormon chick who wrote Twilight. Puke. Even though that's partially true, there are some badass ladies whose work I eat up whenever I get the chance, two of those writers being Lydia Davis and Anne Carson. Anyways, the point I'm trying to make is that books like Jackie Corley's 2008 short story collection "The Suburban Swindle" remind me that there are a lot of younger women writers out there putting out raw material with teeth (and not fangs). 

Corley kicks the reader out of her beat-up Nissan and immediately skids off, leaving him in the wrong part of town. A battle-scarred suburban wasteland, that circus of human dregs otherwise known as New Jersey. Everyone knows that the Turnpike is gross, but the book suggests that what lurks off the exit ramps might be a little more harrowing -- a white-boy gangster who carries a butterfly knife and takes pleasure in kicking the shit out of punks at the local diner, a drop-out drifter who engages in a sexually abusive relationship with her cousin, a filthy alcoholic that only gets off on being speared by a used-up stripper's high heel. These are fractured souls, wonderfully splintered post-school waste-cases who have been molded as much by who they've been hanging out with as by the landscape they inhabit, a place they grudgingly know they'll never leave. The wild-eyed boy held back from the prospect of adventure by the violent shards of a masochistic high school romance. The Manhattan reporter who wakes up on the bathroom floor of her ex-boyfriend's apartment as he's absentmindedly pissing on her. The Jersey tractor beam, Death-Star-strong, always pulls them back.

But what ultimately makes the stories so addictive is not in the misery they project, but in their inherent holiness. There is religion here, maybe not sainthood or even catharsis, but certainly a form of transcendence through martyrdom. A secret joy in clinging to the beaten (and beaten down) path. As much as the characters gripe and grimace at their everyday circumstances, you get the feeling that the unbearable ball of energy that governs the minutiae of their lives is also what sustains them, lets them shine with a light that, if nothing else, is their own. It's what makes the characters, as the narrator of one story puts it, "not attractive, but compelling."

Regardless of the stories' geographical setting, the plight of the early 20s small-town burnout, of being too young and too old and caught in the intertia, is universal. Maybe you're the coke-bruised and booze-weary native son whose face is melting into the same cup of coffee at the back of the diner. Maybe you're his now-prim ex-girlfriend who's broken the tractor beam -- degree, job in the City, banker fiance -- but has come home for the weekend and decided to walk into the diner to revisit the ghosts of a life you forfeited. We all know soldiers in both camps. What Corley's suggesting is that the wreckage of home is far more interesting and vital than the gem-like sheen of "out there." That the wreckage is the gem.