In Christine Sneed’s third story collection, “Direct Sunlight,” we see an assortment of vibrant, flawed characters working earnestly to preserve, expand, salvage and understand relationships that are often messy, inconvenient or unhealthy, but always important.
In “The Monkey’s Uncle Louis,” Anne declares that her new pet monkey—clearly a mistake of grand scale, to her husband, brother and sister-in-law—is “the light of my life” whom she will keep “no matter what.” It’s a piece, like others in this twelve-story collection, in which love and desperation blur indistinguishably, and in which the author elicits laughs without turning the comic premise into shtick.
Love, in this collection, includes but is hardly limited to the romantic variety. The opening story, “The Swami Buchu Trungpa,” is a triangle of sorts between a young woman, her live-in older boyfriend, and her alcoholic mother. The conflict, for Nora, arises in the intersection of relationships that show little interest in blending. The title story, likewise, dives into a moral gray area in accepting a late father’s secret second family. Time and again, we’re confronted with human relationships outside a conventional framework. These relationships cover a spectrum that includes the many people thrust upon each other, or inherited, along with the chosen.
“The Wedding Party” stands as a Sneed masterclass in shattering prototypes. This nine-part story brings together an amalgamation of characters—a wedding planner, a psychic, a kleptomaniac, an infertile groom and gambler addict bride, and more—for a Lake Michigan-side wedding. Told from multiple points of view, the story delves into the history of these zany characters as they merge into an extended extended family, or just make cameos that will have an impact on everybody’s futures. Through each of the nine parts, we witness this baggage being tossed onto a pile that presumably will take a lifetime to sort. The marriage seems ill-fated, but then again, this event holds all manner of magical possibilities.
Sneed’s authorial power resides in her ability to survey the ridiculous from within and without, to explore her characters and their situations with empathy and grace. Somehow, she manages to craft wickedly funny scenes and throw off great lines without ever diminishing the human beings she’s created. Kim, the wedding planner, perfectly embodies this dynamic; she’s a woman fully inserted into the action while ostensibly maintaining her distance.
“Mega Millions” and other stories mold drama out of topical stories. But rather than a ripped-from-the-headlines situation, the premises are more launchpads to investigate the emotional undercurrents beneath the news. Factory worker Glen, at fifty-seven long into a grind-it-out existence, instantly finds himself a man of tremendous wealth. We’ve seen these stories before—the nouveau riche, with no experience in managing large-scale finances, fritter away their fortune on lavish, unwise purchases and handouts to an opportunistic mob of friends, charities, relatives and grifters. That’s what happens here, but Sneed uses the foundation to build an entirely different structure: Bernadette, Glen’s compulsive gambler wife, instigates the frittering. She gives money to every conceivable charity, buys herself ridiculously expensive whatnot, and offers family members houses, college funds, cars and more. A horrified Glen, counting the extravagant line items in his head, down to the cost of fancy haircuts, experiences his newfound wealth as crisis rather than boon. The ideological chasm all but dissolves a heretofore stable, loving marriage.
“House of Paine” represents another story in which the third-party interloper in a relationship comes in a non-human form. It is a troubled new old home, replete with a leaky roof and squirrels in the wall, that threatens Jim and Kathryn’s marriage. There is no straight line between love and happiness here. Domesticity, in Sneed’s hands, is a much more complicated matter. On the surface, squatter squirrels seem an amusing inconvenience, but those rodents, along with spiders, bad wiring, and botched oversight, carry a price, literal and figurative.
Some of the stories feature women incapable of relegating their love objects to past tense. Lauren, of “In the Park,” struggles to accept that her husband Mark will not work toward a reconciliation. Dana, of “The Petting Zoo,” obsesses over a long-ago, short-lived affair, despite being firmly ensconced in a stable marriage. Trish, of “The Common Cold,” obsesses over her married lover, Dawoud, and takes solace in the confidences of her unhappily married best friend Greeley. These situations less explore unrequited love and more ruminate on the idea that the past remains part of the present. The sense that these broken affairs lead to loneliness, or lack of fulfillment, is really a red herring that distracts these heroines from looking inward. The question being posed is, “How do we make ourselves whole?” The answer seems to be that life doesn’t work that way.
A halo of sorrow hovers above this collection. It’s related to the critical part friends, family and romantic partners play in our own sense of our selves. In “Direct Sunlight,” Kent, a father who died in the 9/11 terrorist attacks, is resurrected when the discovery of his second family reconfigures everything his children thought they knew about him, and by extension their selves. In “Ma’am?” a father unable to overcome the decades-ago loss of his wife, purchases a broken-down horse named Peanut Sundae Pie as he tries to claim any semblance of identity on his own. Erica, in “Where Do You Last Remember Holding It?” resents putting her own life on pause in order to be her demented mother’s full-time caregiver.
These stories travel around, including to Paris, and at those times the author expertly depicts the landscapes. Mostly, though, these stories are situated in suburban Chicago, where Sneed spent much of her formative years, and Chicago, where Sneed lived and worked much of her adult life. Sneed’s understanding of Chicago and its environs comes across expertly, even when the setting is mostly backdrop. My favorite story is “Dear Kelly Bloom,” where Colin seizes an opportunity to anonymously write an advice column, and in so doing shed his lackluster, mistake-filled past. In this story, Colin finds confidence as well as a vehicle to confront personal problems he’s never managed to do live, in person.
These infinitely entertaining stories scour the pop cultural landscape not for the sensational but for the sublime. In this addition to her oeuvre, Sneed develops quirky yet highly-charged stories, any of which could be expanded to full-length features, but leave us at just the right moments. Combined with “Portraits of a Few of the People I’ve Made Cry” (2010) and “The Virginity of Famous Men” (2016), “Direct Sunlight” cements Sneed’s place as one of our best, most interesting contemporary short story writers.
“Direct Sunlight: Stories” By Christine Sneed TriQuarterly/Northwestern University Press, 248 pages
Donald G. Evans is the author of a novel and story collection, as well as the editor of two anthologies of Chicago literature, most recently “Wherever I’m At: An Anthology of Chicago Poetry.” He is the Founding Executive Director of the Chicago Literary Hall of Fame.
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Just Another Obstacle: A Review of "The Fell" British author Sarah Moss has written another quiet yet deeply moving short novel that takes place during the pandemic over the course of about twenty-four hours.
No Names: A Review of "Mrs. S" by K. Patrick A coming-of-age story about an outsider Aussie, an outsider lesbian, transported in her early twenties to the confining hothouse world of a girls’ boarding school in England, with its claustrophobic atmosphere of rules and restrictions, informed by embarrassing, time-bound traditions, heightened by rural isolation.
