Collective Gravities by Chloe N. Clark, word west, $15 paperback, 2020
Reviewed by Ian MacAllen
Few people would have predicted a global pandemic would plunge the world into a collective isolation with the specter of death threatening at every moment. Yet Chloe N. Clark’s debut story collection, Collective Gravities, offers a prescient examination of these anxieties. Several of Clark’s stories even go as far as manifesting the sense that she somehow anticipated the current global health crisis. The stories largely share a common examination of characters enduring solitude, haunted by loneliness and facing threat of death, imminent and existential. Clark tells these stories with a fleeting sense of time, generating an urgency to their predicaments.
Many of the stories share a common narrative structure. These begin with a brief section set in the present or future before the narrative snaps back in time to build the story towards the opening moment. Clark shifts narrative time abruptly, and the effect is to create tension in the narrative by establishing a known point for the story to move towards. The foreknowledge compels the reader forward by constructing mystery. Knowing the outcome generates an interest in the cause. It is a successful technique Clark has deployed to add pressure, and provoke anxiety.
For instance, in the “The Collective Gravity of Stars,” the story opens with a foreboding prediction: “It was an ordinary spring day when Callie died.” The reader immediately wonders why and how her death came about. We are driven to learn the details. The story then shifts back in time to before Callie is dead. The foreknowledge of Callie’s eventual demise heightens the events that follow because we are waiting for her imminent death. Telling the story in a strictly linear direction diminishes the impact of the death, and Clark’s plot twist. Although Clark employs this narrative structure repeatedly throughout the collection, the recurrent use benefits the stories by creating expectations with the reader that Clark chooses to fulfill or not; Clark also uses the repetition to great effect by flipping the result on the expectant reader. For instance, sometimes the timeline isn’t merely a flashback but rather a braided narrative between multiple periods in the characters’ lives. In “Like The Desert Dark,” the first-person narrator reflects back on his daughter’s childhood in the opening paragraph before picking up with collecting her body. The timeline shifts between the present and past. The narrator ultimately is collecting his daughter’s body in the present, and in the past, the narrator needs to institutionalize his wife. Switching between these two timelines builds tension in both by creating distance between the reader and the events in each distinct timeline. We know the events in one period affect the other, but by twisting them together adds potency.
Clark dabbles in speculative and science fiction to the benefit of the collection. In the story “They Are Coming For You, So You Better Run, You Better Run, So You Can Hide,” Clark disrupts the zombie narrative trope with a new twist. Unlike traditional zombie narratives set just as civilization has begun to collapse because of an infection, Clark instead picks up in the post-infection world, when the characters are rebuilding, and the zombie disease is treatable with “time and medicine and money.” The narrative offers a critique of our own health systems where the wealthy and powerful have access to better medicines. The zombie threat had been quick and startling, but ultimately civilization survived: “The world almost ended and then didn’t so quickly that some people don’t even think it should be in the history books.” The story is a prescient look at our current situation with the coronavirus outbreak. Like the zombie infection, the virus has invaded our world; it now seems likely the best way to survive coronavirus is to have money and time. But like the characters in this story, we’ll be scarred. The narrator remains emotionally traumatized with anxiety years after the outbreak, worrying she’ll turn into one. There are characters too who end up killing zombie-fied people out of fear, despite knowing treatment to revert a zombie back to a person is possible. Unexpectedly, Clark has created a timely metaphor for our era. We’re willingly killing people with coronavirus even though we know we could save them. Our own post-traumatic stress disorders will linger with anxieties about illness and hand washing, and we’ll have to confront the body count left behind by the front-line essential workers, the nurses, doctors, and grocery store stockers who we’ve killed in protecting ourselves, and the elderly and vulnerable we killed needlessly so some people could have haircuts and play slot machines. Clark has managed to write a story grappling with the most pressing issue of the day long before the outbreak, and the story is a testament to her ability to interpret our own actions before they happen.
Death is a persistent theme throughout the stories, and Clark explores a variety of emotions generated by it. Death is dangled as a hook to lure us into the story, a trick to create pressure on the reader to inquire further. With “This Is The Color of Your Eyes In The Dark,” the narrator reflects on the death of Mindy Cosgrove, but mainly her death serves as an introduction to the friendship the two shared. Like many of Clark’s stories, the narrative is a glimpse into a brief, fleeting moment. Mindy’s death serves as the doorway through which we enter and leave, but does not play any role in the plot or where the story is taking us. A similar technique is used in “So This,” about a couple adopting a dog after the loss of a child. When Liev and the narrator adopt Catnip, a dog, they are filling a hole in their lives — “there was a baby once, but then there wasn’t and sometimes we accidentally remember.” The narrative dances around this loss without ever giving the reader specifics. We feel their pain. We know the baby is gone, but never are told why or whether it is a natural accident or a conscious decision. In this gap of knowledge, we can fill in our own narrative, building a more intimate relationship with the story. The characters hope Catnip will replace this loss. Yet even after the adoption, they relocate their lives trying to escape the pain, as if running away from the dead baby will provide them comfort. We are only briefly entering the lives of these characters, but experience their pain and sense their recovery. In this story, like many in the collection, Clark has created with just hints of information a series of ephemeral moments concentrating emotional weight.
At the heart of this collection is the exploration of the interpersonal relationships of couples. Most of these couples are or were romantic, but not always. Sometimes the couplings include siblings and parent and child relationships. Under examination is how two different people relate to each other. Clark is exploring how we understand, or often how we misunderstand, another person, particularly someone we should otherwise have an intimate link with. There are couples moving out, couples who endure abuse, couples who endure death. Clark is sometimes quite direct with the subject, such as in “Other Names” when Lance ventures into online dating. He is trying to connect with another person emotionally, but constantly failing. Finding and keeping a connection between two people is difficult, sometimes painful, Clark is saying, but the value of occasional success is worth the effort. In this sense, Clark has given us an uplifting look at the world, even one that is marred by death, pain, and suffering.
One of the stand-out stories of the collection is “Bound,” and it encompasses all of the themes Clark is grappling with while also speaking to the fears and anxieties created by the coronavirus pandemic. In this story we follow the love affairs of a group of scientists during an outbreak of plague. The narrative eerily mirrors the current crisis as an unknown pathogen infects the world. The spreading plague is first contained to a quarantined community, and much like the collective sigh America took when China locked down Wuhan, “the word ‘contained’ made us feel safe.” Of course, the unidentified plague was far from contained, and as the infection spreads, the world goes to hell. No doubt one reason connecting with this story comes so easily is our current situation, but Clark has also crafted a suspenseful mystery. The plague creeps through the narrative stalking the characters who don’t have the answers they require. They speculate it comes from the chemical plant, or maybe the algae has caused the outbreak. That none of them knows the source is particularly alarming as they are the scientists responsible for a cure. They echo our own feelings of helplessness during the pandemic where we have little recourse, untrustworthy information, and a lack of leadership. When the cause of the outbreak is finally revealed, we learn humanity’s own hubris has created it.
Like so many of the characters in Clark’s collection, the characters in “Bound” struggle to connect with each other. Rahul and Anna are a married couple, but Anna tells Rissa she hasn’t loved her husband for months. One couple breaks apart, but another forms. Rissa falls in love with Rahul. Their happiness is short-lived, however. Rahul disappears, ostensibly searching for a mythical science lab after his own is destroyed. For Clark’s characters, the greatest challenge they face is in building relationships and maintaining them. This theme too is another reflection of the crisis of coronavirus, a disease so virulent, those suffering from it often die alone in isolation. At one point, after Rahul has left, Rissa comes across a man who tells her: “Everyone’s looking for someone.” That’s just the thing Clark wants us to realize. We’re all searching for that intimacy.
Clark’s collection is aptly perceptive of our immediate present. Collective Gravities presents stories deliberate in structure to maximize their impact while exploring the miscommunications of intimate relations. With ephemeral flashes into the lives of disparate characters, Clark unearths the toils and challenges faced with communing with other people and the loneliness when we fail.
