Actually Pretty Good: Ghost Pains
On Jessi Jezewska Stevens's short story collection of expats and digital nomads
“The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” So says William Faulkner, though he probably wasn’t thinking of an ill-gotten nipple piercing when he wrote it; that particular mixture of the intellectual and the embarrassingly ordinary is at the center of Jessi Jezewska Stevens’s excellent short story collection Ghost Pains, which sees its characters going far and worldwide to escape their pasts before turning a corner and knocking right back into them, the same as always but also somehow brand new. Eschewing the traditional structure of flashingback towards a final epiphany, Jezewska Stevens’s stories are sinuous portraits of contemporary life in its disappointed promise, wicked and humorous irony, and long dislocating unfolding.
The stories take place all across the world, from New York to Berlin to Southeastern Pennsylvania to Tuscany to Krakow to a sort of dystopic future Midwestern City, most often featuring American ex-pats living in the long drained dregs of the Lost Generation, ‘digital nomads’ as it were. While that American-ness is part of the past that these characters are trying to shake off – “And perhaps I owe this rootless mood to the country my passport says I’m from, a nation forever staring into other people’s pantries, reaching in an arm” ends one of the “Dispatches from Berlin” – there is also the the looming shadow of the past self, the lineage, all the previous indignities of life that one thinks time and distance can erase, that continue to creep up on the characters, real life shot like a slasher film: The past is right there in the corner!! Take the piercing from the collection’s title story:
The nipple bar never really healed, by the way. That’s what you get for choosing the only place open at 3 a.m. On the subway, she struck a protective stance. The pain was faint, but when it arrived, it yanked her back into the past, and always at unexpected moments. She took these as cosmic signs. Time to leave the city was what they said. And so, five years later, she did.
In that story, that slight burning – salved by a saline bath – is overlaid with other kinds of residual pains; in Krakow, the narrator, Tina, runs into former fling (not sure there’s a better single word to describe someone with whom you unsuccessfully throupled years ago) Dave, who is in Poland to try and get restitution money from the government for his grandfather’s former apartment. This would all be a rather too-neat layering of aches both (very) personal and historical if not for these inquiries’ juxtaposition next to the continued awkward come-ons of one of Tina’s coworkers, the banality of her tech job’s conference in the city, and the Polish government’s stalwart bureaucrats who lay ready for paperwork battle behind “reluctant wooden doors.” The wedding of high-concept examination with low particulars make for elegant depictions of The Way We Live Now without the moral didacticism and staginess that those capital letters often imply.
I have a habit of dog-earing pages with passages I want to go back to or quote – sorry, book fetishists, I just prefer it to marking up the pages – which I had to give up while reading Ghost Pains, given that Jezewska Stevens puts down a sharp line or pristine passage on nearly every page. In “Honeymoon,” a woman traverses Tuscany and thinks that “To be both a newlywed and a tourist – it’s the most undignified position of all” and later that “One cannot gawk one’s way into personal transformation.” In “Siberia,” as a pair of ex-lovers wile away locked-down days on the phone as a questionably liberatory army approaches; the narrator asides that
Maybe all drama reduces to a siren’s call: there’s something in a person that craves catastrophe. The little ticket-taker in everyone longs for hiatus, release, the distant crash of buildings tumbling down, perhaps even not so distant, just far enough away to still keep safe while last century’s rubble is pulped. The slow disaster unfolding outside whets the appetite for more. Six of one, half dozen. (Between two tyrants, it’s tempting to choose the one who’s not yet let you down.)
In a story that uses Nabokov as a bit of a punchline, there is still a shadow of his attention to rhythm, those tripping Ts throughout ratatat like distant reports of gunfire. There are few are on Jezewska Stevens’s level on a sentence-to-sentence basis: she’s a master of the parenthetical – Tina’s assignment to Poland in “Ghost Pains” seems linked “to the consonants crammed into her name. (‘Yes, both sides – Chicago and Detroit.’)”– and her dialogue has escaped the TV script flatness of most contemporary fiction into being something thrillingly alive and rife with crossed signals and accidental echoes. Her powers of description enthrall in their slantwise approaches to the ordinary, as in “Gettysburg,” where a cross-country drive becomes a cross-section of the country:
New York had the reach of cottonwood or pollen. It defined an ecosystem all its own. Only midway through Pennsylvania did you escape its sweep and a new kind of flora emerge: narrower rods; affordable real estate; tractor trailers galumphing down lane one. The Midwest loomed somewhere in Erie. You could tell by the way the land flattened and the woodlands narrowed to windbreaks between the farms, and by the layout of the convenience stores, which shared in common taupe wire shelves and the tart, musty smell of packaged bread. Onward to Ohio, where the interstates swung wide around modest skylines, giving the buildings wide berth, working up the centrifugal momentum to speed through Indiana, Illinois, on to someplace worth the hotel costs. Montana, maybe. Or Sun Valley, Idaho, where the vacation homes returned and the all-inclusive tour buses glided through bruised and violent landscapes as alien as advertised…
The other space that Jezewska Stevens can preternaturally describe is the digital space, which is not a surprise if you’ve read her great 2022 novel The Visitors. The internet at once allows for a kind of worldwide community – one can now work from anywhere with a wi-fi connection and enough coffee to deal with the time shift – but also represents a kind of great ledger in the sky, histories both personal and epochal available at all times and to anyone motivated enough to dig around. In “Siberia,” the two lovers look at far-off places on Google Maps, reading “hospital reviews in O– province. His laptop was an oyster open to the world. Escape was always almost possible… The tabs were open to ice storms, mountains decadent with snow, a hospital lobby, movie clips, a streaming app on which he borrowed music, incognito.” In “Rumpel,” the most outlandish of the stories, a virtual reality program called KINGDOM begins to intercede on ‘the real world,’ or at least makes it too difficult to tell what is what – “here the artifice was buried so deep, the sense of truth so overpowering, that the experience was said to approach the sublime.” The fairy tale of Rumpelstiltskin is interposed in this world (or maybe the sublime other?) on a claims adjuster who forgets the passcode to a trove of cryptocurrency. In “The Party,” the laconic narrator reflects “Email! The way all modern tragedies begin” and that “My impossible life is always more impossible when Siri will not help,” before a reply-all mistake makes for the dream-like scenario of hosting an unexpected party. We have at our fingertips a world of instant connection and communication, a world of convenience, and yet, and yet - there’s still this world, still this disorientation, still the impossibility of coherence. As soon as it all seems pinned down, that’s when it goes: “I had the terrible feeling that she was disappearing right before me, slowly becoming someone else,” says the narrator of a friend in “A New Book of Grotesques.” “Of course she was. We all were.”
Speaking of the past – aren’t we always – the short story collection is past its heyday, no more career story writers, no more Cheevers or Carvers or even George Saunderses (the masses demand another Lincoln in the Bardo); publishers treat them like an annoyance, something to put out in between buzzy new novels, the ‘real’ (read: sellable) work. But readers don’t have to follow the twisted bigger-is-better logic of profit-based publishing; between Jezewska Stevens and some other luminary contemporaries, we’ve got enough to bring back the salad days of short stories, the past can come back to us, that old familiar stranger.
You can get Ghost Pains at your local bookstore, local library, or online at Bookshop.org, where all purchases support independent booksellers across the country.
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Thank you, Evan! Sounds perfect for my morning bus and tube commute.