Sharon Erby’s linked short fiction collection Parallel, from Harvard Square Editions, weaves together the lives of men and women who struggle to make ends meet in the mountains of south-central Pennsylvania. The characters of Parallel come from various backgrounds, but all of them are tied to the land, tied to the mountain, and tied to the real estate of the human heart. Erby makes good use of setting to illustrate the spiritual connection between the characters who make up the human landscape of these stories. The men and women are combat veterans, academic transplants, poor working class mothers, the Amish, and children dealing with their parents shortcomings. The characters of Parallel possess a restless anxious energy that comes from having to scrape ends together, compromising hopes and dreams to just get by. They are looking for peace, for “the still and always,” a serenity matched and reflected by the landscape of the wilderness around them.
Erby’s work belongs to a rich tradition in American fiction, telling the broad story of a place through a myriad of voices. It’s rewarding work for the reader who can follow the protagonists as they appear throughout the stories. One of the main characters is Brenda, a hard working mother, who might as well be single since her husband is more concerned about drinking than being responsible. And Brenda doesn’t take her problems lying down, she’s a fighter, willing to do whatever it takes to survive. She even finds the love she needs on the side with fellow garbage collector Eddie, who has his own demons. From the outside the reader can see that Eddie is only a tick better than her husband, but Brenda doesn’t seem to mind, or care. She’s looking out for herself so she can be a mother to her sons, and a friend to her loved ones. Erby tells the story of people, and refuses to moralize, regardless of how easy it would be to do so. Her characters are deeply flawed and hurt, but Erby resists the urge to preach, or even present a series of characters who are perfect models. Erby’s interested in the dark, dense matter of humanity, which means pain, heartache, and characters who fuck-up over and over again.
Of particular interest to Erby is the outsider. The outsider is woven into the DNA of these stories from the outset. A Vietnam vet, Martin, struggles with the loss of his leg, and then his progressing alcoholism. His leg, and his alcoholism, are enough to make him an outsider, but its when he comes home drunk one night, ears pricked for the sound of hunting on the mountains that his otherness hits home: “I’m goin’ up,” he said randomly, then, pushing away from Grace to open the door of the old truck. “This time I’m goin’!” But he never does, and you get the sense he never will, having to rely on Grace’s to get him through the night, and life. It’s symbolic of his limitations, of his leg, of how he is stuck in the past. It’s a theme which Erby plays with, exploring the limitations of Brenda, Martin’s daughter, and Brenda’s children, and the other people who live near them. Just how far can one get when you are cut off from the world? The characters live far away from high paying jobs, new industry, or well connected schools. There’s only so much you can do, regardless if you are a disfigured veteran, a pill-head, or a single, pretty Amish woman who wishes for love. And of course, Erby’s characters aren’t just isolated from the larger world, they are isolated from themselves, from their own needs and wants. In one story, Eddie, Brenda’s garbage man lover, tells her what she’s thinking about him, and about her decisions in life, trying to ease her anxiety about their affair, and her lot in life: “ you’re full of it, Mr. Edward Diffenderfer, if you think you can figure out what’s really right—any more than the rest of us morons who are just tryin’ to get through the day. But, B, ya know—it’s all about takin’ things away and findin’ out what’s left. And what’s left is what’s right.” Like most of us, these characters have to suffer through their problems before they find direction, even if it is too late.
The characters of Parallel suffer from poverty of the heart, either from want, or from giving. Erby reminds us that it isn’t money or class that fulfills us, it’s our relationship with people. Patrick the clinical psychiatrist, and his wife Clare, are the only middle class characters in the stories, and neither one is happy in the most basic sense. Both are frustrated with their own stagnancy. Patrick eventually begins to troll the Amish farm stands, and fins a glimmer of innocence, or purity, some kind of love that goes beyond what his wife Clare, or his brother, or even his children can give him, in Anna. As an outsider, he begins flirting with Anna, a single Amish woman who is more than a little curious about Patrick and passionate love, “her heart wanted second-definition love. Second-definition love would bring pleasure, too, but it was pure....So what if she would never know this sort of love?...Besides, Anna rationalized finally, too much is made of the notion of love anyway.” Patrick, the outsider, intrudes upon Anna, but not in an exploitative soap-opera way. This isn’t Witness, and Erby shows us that all it takes is a kiss, and a simple touch to upset our inner lives. Anna is much like Martin, the Vietnam vet from the opening story. Both characters respond profoundly to simple gestures of kindness and love, a touch of a hand, or finger, an invitation to dinner. And both characters remain empty, aching for something larger than the life they are living.
Parallel is full of tension, the slow boiling kind of realism that acts as a mirror to our own consciousness. These characters and these stories are about how to live a life, how to be awake in the world, and how to be connected to it. Erby doesn’t provide any answers, and her characters leave messy endings behind them in their wake. In the end the stories here parallel our own American lives, our fragile human hearts.
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