In the first three stories of Jack Driscoll's collection, "The Goat Fish and the Lover's Knot," set in northern Michigan, mothers vanish. In the fourth, a mother's boyfriend disappears. The title of a later story is "A Woman Gone Missing." A recurring theme in a writer's work can be mesmerizing — memory in Modiano, shame in Knausgaard. But aside from Driscoll's compelling title story, what he likely intended as literary repetition or variations on a theme the reader may view as too much of the same.
"Goat Fish" depicts a small-town world crowded with domestic complications. By the time we meet the characters, their relationships have deteriorated. Marriages have lost their glimmer; mothers are divorced or abandoned; a couple of the fathers are in prison, and there's usually a kid or two trying to grow up in the ensuing mess.
A consequence of these similar circumstances, however, is a lack of distinction among the characters. All but a few of the stories are narrated by a teenage boy with a mother interchangeable with other mothers. In "A Woman Gone Missing" Vanessa "is thirty-three. Already twice divorced." The unnamed mother in "Here's How it Works" "is only thirty-two, slender and attractive." Laila, in "That Story," is "thirty-eight, strawberry-blonde and narrow-hipped." The homogenous voice, point of view and descriptions make it difficult to tell these characters apart. Moreover, the typecasting of the women is irksome.
The stories also sound alike. Take this opening line from "The Alchemist's Apprentice": "My mom says she hasn't the foggiest and that wherever Jimmy Creedy, her stay-over boyfriend, heisted all those tracheotomy tubes is anybody's guess." And this one from "That Story": "Wherever my mom finds the articles I haven't a clue." "All the Time in the World" begins, "My father's name is Bradley Chickey"; "The Good Father" starts with: "My dad's name is Philly Penwaydon." As such, the stories run together like tributaries into a river, and the river is all one recalls.
There is one clear exception. The title story follows Wayne, the 14-year-old narrator, during his monthlong stay at the LaVanns' lake house. Darwin LaVann is Wayne's best friend, but Darwin and Wayne have different interests — one of Wayne's being Darwin's mother. Wayne often takes the rowboat out alone at night, and Mrs. LaVann says nothing to him about it except, "maybe one of those times you'll take me with you." Which he does, on their last night. And despite the unnecessary flash forward into his future, this story — like the constellations in its title — shines.
Heather A. Slomski is a fiction writer in Moorhead, Minn.
