Nude in Tub: Stories of Quillifarkeag, Maine
May 20th, 2003by G.K. Wuori
ISBN: 0965025441
There are eighteen single-word titled stories in this volume, weighing in at a bit under 300 pages. They are divided into six sections: Land, Love, Law, Learning, Loss, Life.
Which is to say that Wuori is a pretty organized guy, and a writer who leans a bit on gimmicks. The big gimmick here is Quillifarkeag (abbreviated with more or less affection as Quilli) itself, a teeny-tiny fictional town within spitting distance of the Canadian border. The occupants of said teeny-tiny town are, I think, supposed to take on anthropological-type interest for the reader and seem compelling for their extreme rural difference and also at the same time, shockingly, be recognizably the same as regular folk anywhere else.
I don’t mean to sound too cynical. I was born and lived in a small Maine town until I went away to college, though my hometown was on the southern/central dividing line in Maine, and not past the northern “let’s watch the bears play with trash at the dump on Saturday night” line. So I did have high expectations for a group of stories about freakish yet not freakish Mainers, expectations that on the whole weren’t met.
There are no bears picking over trash in these stories, although there is an imaginary hawk and a real skunk. There are moments that work, particularly when Wuori is writing about violence that seems somehow right even though it isn’t a good idea and the characters know it, but they don’t stop. He gets the spare and controlled way that folks can be, but in most of these stories I don’t feel like he really gets them — at least, he doesn’t write like he gets inside their heads in a way so that reading it I know he’s been inside their heads. His stories are more something I watched happen from the outside looking in.
Bottom line: odd and an interesting, but I wanted more.
