Now You See It (reviews)

Chicago Tribune named Now You See It...Stories from Cokesville, PA a best book of 2006

STRONG DEBUT SETS FICTIONAL TOWN, ITS PEOPLE IN OUR IMAGINATION
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By Carlo Rotella

May 28, 2006

Now You See It ...: Stories From Cokesville, Pa.

By Bathsheba Monk

Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 228 pages, $22

Annie Kusiak has had her share of disappointments, including failures in marriage, journalism, screenwriting, life in Boston and California, conversion to Judaism and suicide. Even her successes are mixed. Having remarried, this time to an oilman from Texas, and turned herself into a faux Lone Star cowgirl with big hair, pointy boots and a side career as a writer of bodice-rippers, she suffers a pretender's secret anxiety that her new husband's ex-wife will turn up at her door and rightfully dispossess her. But, for consolation, there's always this:

"When I look into the mirror, I know who I am: somebody who doesn't live in Cokesville, Pennsylvania."

Annie's best friend from high school, an ambitious beauty named Theresa Gojuk, escapes their dead-end hometown too. Theresa heads west to Hollywood, where she turns into the glamorous Tess Randall and makes it in soap operas and lousy movies. When the logic of B-list celebrity and Hollywood's bizarre ideas about female aging catch up with her, she stays in the game by remaking herself offscreen as a producer and onscreen as a sexy "grandma." Cokesvillers, especially women, know something about riding the curling forward edge of forces they can't resist.

In Bathsheba Monk's first book, "Now You See It ... : Stories From Cokesville, Pa.," a series of linked short stories about Cokesvillers that spans the period from 1949 to 1994, the mills and mines stand for everything bigger and stronger than the characters. Those who leave Cokesville as well as those who stay are yanked this way and that by economics, class dynamics, fate, luck and the ironic consequences of their own desires. The decline and fall of American heavy industry forms the narrative backdrop against which the individual stories unfold, a great transformation that alternately pounds down her characters and sets them bewilderingly adrift.

Cokesville, in the Catawissa River valley, is an imaginary place found in the same literary atlas that contains Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio, and Richard Russo's Mohawk, N.Y. Monk assembles Cokesville out of elements of the industrial cities and towns of eastern Pennsylvania. The principal source is Bethlehem, in the Lehigh Valley (where Monk grew up, and to which she has returned to live and write after wandering far afield), a place dominated once upon a time by Big Steel and now by the ghosts of Big Steel, but there are also echoes of Hazelton, the mining town where Monk's parents were born, and Centralia, the mining town turned into a science-fiction wasteland by a long-burning underground fire.

Those who don't flee Cokesville go down with the ship. Consider Bruno Gojuk, Theresa's father, who dies an emblematic workplace death when he falls "into a vat of hot metal, becoming one with the molten steel he was cooking." The company delivers a 175-pound ingot of steel to the family for burial, since Bruno listed 175 pounds as his weight on his job application 30-odd years before. He was bigger than that when he died, so the Gojuks feel cheated: they should get a 200-pound ingot. No such luck, but nobody is surprised by Bruno's fate:

"Not only had the people of Cokesville waked steel ingots, but over the years they had stood reverently in front of hunks of coal when mines collapsed on miners and the mines were sealed before they could retrieve the bodies. And sometimes all they had to look at was the American flag when their boys vanished in battles overseas. The people of Cokesville were used to their men leaving home in one form and coming back in another, like a cosmic sleight of hand."

Now you see them, then--poof.

The same kind of lethal hocus-pocus happens to Cokesville itself, a vast forge that suddenly loses its function in a changing world. Driving into the Catawissa River valley on a visit home from Boston in 1972, Annie passes through a gantlet of "monstrous smokestacks and brick buildings whose windows flash with sudden blasts of burning light" and she has to turn up her car radio to "drown out the moaning of cooling steel." By 1975, when Theresa surveys Cokesville from a descending airplane, it looks "as if some giant, with a swipe of his hand, had knocked it over. The Japanese were buying it up piecemeal and sending the usable equipment to a mill in the Philippines. Theresa could see the small section that was still open. She pictured her father--the immolated Bruno--"running from one rusting building to another, a step ahead of the bulldozers, until he was finally cornered above his cauldron." By 1980, Cokesville's furnaces have become part of a historical theme park where Japanese tourists buy licorice I-beams and contemplate the passing of American industrial life.

By 1994, Cokesville itself is gone, blown to hell when a coal seam fire that had burned for years under the town reaches the gas main. Now you see it, then--poof. In the end, everyone from Cokesville can look in the mirror and see somebody who doesn't live there anymore, but they have all been marked by it in ways they cannot escape.

Stylistically, "Now You See It ..." is not so much a linguistic pleasure cruise as a sharp assessment; the word-by-word, sentence-by-sentence art of Monk's prose tends toward quiet clarity rather than incandescent beauty. Nor is the book a thickly textured sociological immersion into Pennsy manners and mores; it's well-observed but relatively sparing in its use of lived detail.

Rather, the main pleasure of reading the book resides in its steadily accruing portrait of a sensibility--how it feels to be from Cokesville, how being from Cokesville shapes thought and perception. Local mentality can be a greased pig of a literary objective, typically slathered as it is with layers of sentiment and convention, but Monk's relatively minimalist approach gets a grip on her subject with a certain businesslike lack of fuss that is itself exemplary of the regional style.

Monk chooses her details well, and she turns a good line when she needs to. For instance, Theresa Gojuk's escape into show business in the 1970s begins with pitch-perfect rightness: Having been knocked up by " `some boy' " back home, she embarks on an itinerant gig as a sports-show "chick," a progressively more obviously pregnant prop in a blue spandex gown whose job it is to hold a cigarette between her lips so that a crew of "short fat geezers in fishing gear" can flick it out with lead-weight-tipped angling lines. " `They told me I looked like a stream full of trout' " in the gown, Theresa recalls, and it's a lovely image. Just as lovely, in its understated concision, is Annie's non-description of the geezers after a show, "changing into clothes suitable for a big night in St. Paul." Leaving it to the reader's imagination works just as well as, or better, than cataloging the component plaids and polyesters of the Full Cleveland.

Monk's confident, knowing voice makes a strong debut in "Now You See It ... ," establishing Cokesville and its people in our imaginary geography.

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Now You See It . . ., by Bathsheba Monk (Farrar, Straus & Giroux; $22). Monk, who grew up in Pennsylvania coal-and-steel country, sets her stories in the fictional town of Cokesville, where gardens grow through slag heaps, women scrub their sidewalks free of soot, and men scrounge for jobs that are likely to kill or maim. Set mostly among Polish immigrants and their descendants over a forty-year period, the stories use deadpan humor to combat a sense of hopelessness and economic futility. The most compelling are narrated by an adolescent would-be writer determined to avoid the “lava show” make-out spot, where carts dump molten coke and girls her age get pregnant. Even those who escape, however, can’t seem to free themselves from the slow burn of their heritage, much like a decades-old underground coal fire, ignited “when someone dumped a load of garbage down a mine shaft.”

You can't go home again, said Thomas Wolfe in elegiac mood. Amen to that, says Bathsheba Monk, daughter of a more ironic generation, in these ``stories from Cokesville," a fictitious doppelganger to her Rust Belt hometown.

The stories in this collection -- black-humored, cynical, and deeply autobiographical -- put an original spin on a familiar 20th-century saga, the rise and fall of the American working class. The forebears of the multigenerational cast of characters -- the Kusiaks, the Slepchuks, the Gojuks -- step off the boat from the old country and go straight to work in America's mines and mills. By the time their children reach middle age, those mines and mills have folded, leaving laid-off union men scrambling for minimum-wage work at the mall while their wives grimly soldier on. The grandchildren can't wait to clear out. ``I know who I am," says Monk's alter ego, Annie Kusiak, who has lit out for California: ``somebody who doesn't live in Cokesville."

Inventive, unsentimental, Monk is a grass - roots artist who honed her craft at the school of hard knocks. Her sense of place resonates in tune with her feisty sense of self.

Amanda Heller is a critic and editor who lives in Newton.  

© Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company

Sooty memories give birth to vivid mining-town tales

Sunday, July 30, 2006

"It seems natural, American really, to move on," Bathsheba Monk wrote this year. "Aren't most of us descended from people who did just that?"

FICTION    Now You See It . . . Stories from Cokesville, Pa. by Bathsheba Monk.

Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 228 pp., $22.

Bathsheba Monk, born into a large mining family in Hazelton, Pa., lucked into an unusual ticket out of her dying hometown. When she was 18, a childless uncle asked her to lunch and pushed an envelope across the table.

It contained $25,000 in cash. Run away, he advised Monk; don't look back. Even though Uncle Mike had criminal ties, Monk took all the money and half the advice.

The instruction she ignored - not to look back - has graced us almost 20 years later with "Now You See It . . . Stories from Cokesville, Pa." These 17 interlocking stories build a bygone world that is incandescent and bitter, pared down and beautiful.

Fictional Cokesville is the central character in the way Winesburg, Ohio, worked for Sherwood Anderson and Grover's Corners suited Thornton Wilder.

It's a spot where Mrs. Szilborski daily bakes a cake from scratch that no one wants; where the men wander their back yards with bottles of beer, and the gardeners place cinders between their rows to keep the weeds down:

"Seventeen church spires probe into the brown atmosphere of the downtown - looking for God, but finding soot, which rains like manna on the southside row houses. An inch of soot on the windowsill means a regular paycheck. Two inches means a fat one."

Monk shows a canny ability to fix just the right detail in the right era: the red plaid thermos, the Butterick pattern, the high school slam book. Each story is carefully dated, the earliest in 1949, the last one in 1994.

This attention to the particular, Thomas McGuane recently told the Los Angeles Times, is "one of the great challenges of short fiction. Finding things that have a resonant feel, that look innocent on the surface but have a lingering aura."

Monk's work starts out thin, but by her third story, "Flying Lessons," she is in McGuane's zone, developing her themes of escape and loss and thwarted ambition like a film developing in its chemical bath. Her characters intersect through different decades; those who were babies in one story, or young siblings in another, pop up as complex adults as the generations turn over.

At the center is Annie Kusiak, who narrates most of these tales with a wit and insight that do her little good. Toward the end, she drifts into a second marriage to a Texas oilman that sees her "metamorphose into a Lone Star cowgirl. My hair got big. My boots got pointy. My chili rings five bells."

Be warned: Monk's poignant figures fight for air, for relevancy, and find themselves gasping. Monk is a terrific writer but stingy in what she parcels out. When two women, each for her own misguided reason, consider ditching Catholicism for Judaism, one tells the skeptical rabbi: "God told me to convert. Do you think He would tell me to do something that would kill me?"

"It's His specialty," the rabbi replies.

Like the soot in Cokesville, there is blackness to Monk's writing, but she is so funny that her fierceness sneaks up and smacks us from behind. Her stories bite into class and race with an almost European lightness.

When Monk writes about Mrs. Szilborski - who Maces the dogs that pee in her yard - and Mrs. Wojic - who believes her husband killed in the mill has been reincarnated as one of those yellow stray dogs - we fret about each eccentric character, seeing her from a different vantage as the stories unfold.

"Now You See It" is beautifully structured but would have been better without the final piece, which trots out a new character from Russia and an analogy of America as a carcass crawling with parasites. Monk doesn't need either.

Still, this collection heralds an important new voice in American fiction. My hope, as Monk writes her second book in Allentown, Pa., is that she'll make room for more of the basic decency that is also part of the story.

Long is book editor of The Plain Dealer.

To reach this Plain Dealer columnist: klong@plaind.com, 216-999-4410

© 2006 The Plain Dealer

This appealing collection of 17 interrelated stories, set between 1948 and 1994, provides an indelible portrait of Eastern Pennsylvania coal country, of what a hard place can do to its people, both those who stay and the idealists game for escape.

Cokesville is a mythical name, though the place is undoubtedly Bethlehem. Bathsheba Monk is an obvious pseudonym, too.  Clearly, the author knows firsthand the rough business of growing up working-class Eastern European in a place smothered by grit, decay and a near-monopoly that drains the life out of its own. She loves the place and then again, not. Hence, the Monk business.

In "Annie Kusiak's Meaning of Life," she writes, "suddenly the trees become stunted, the houses crabbed, and the sky turns cadmium orange, like on Mars. ... The riverbanks are lined with monstrous smokestacks and brick buildings whose windows flash with sudden blasts of burning light."Annie leaves, only to flounder, a would-be writer who flails at reinvention like a fish on a dock, and Monk is as tough on her as she is on Cokesville and its denizens. Annie isn't sure she can write, either." 'Opportunity is one thing,' I said. 'Hustle is one thing. But writing fiction is like lying. You have to lie and make stuff up, and I don't know if I can do it. Lie. About people.'"

Monk's not about to bathe Cokesville, or its people, in a warm glow unless it's cadmium orange, that noxious residue of anthracite coal. Her characters aren't given to chatter and excess, unless they get out, and Monk knows when to withdraw.

-- By Karen Heller,

The Philadelphia Inquirer

by William Bush

The fictional town of Cokesville, Pennsylvania is the real main character of Bathsheba Monk’s first book, and such a portrayal seems overdue. Most people who haven’t had the pleasure of the state’s long, winding, constantly-under-construction turnpike tend to think of the stretch between Pittsburgh and Philadelphia as something vaguely rural, but it’s not. Each in their time, the lumber, coal, steel, and railroad industries had all disassembled and reassembled the place by 1949, the chronological setting for the earliest of Monk’s stories, and in their wake they’ve left a dense scattering of places like Cokesville—small, tightly-knit towns that themselves cluster around only slightly larger cities, a rusted-out belt of humanity that spans a distance significant enough that the two cities on either end have two different regional accents. Cokesville has everything that’s been needed for a long time to evoke that certain, elusive, small-town Pennsylvanian-ness required by fiction: a coal mine, a steel mill, an eclectic cast of old Polish and Ukranian ladies with their stern, borderline-abusive husbands—and, most importantly of all, a generation of youngsters who can’t wait to get out. No surprise why: Cokesville seems to its children to be transforming itself into a grisly, literal ghost town. As we learn in “Last Call (1982),” “It was becoming almost routine for the fifty-five-year-old men of Cokesville Forge to look at their newly idle fingers, start fiddling with this or that, until they finally found their way to the hunting rifle in the garage.”

The wonderful—if cumbersomely titled—Now You See It… Stories from Cokesville, PA, is a 240-page temporal odyssey of sorts—seventeen stories spanning almost fifty years and chronicling the lives of what feels like about twenty of the town’s residents. Each one comes with a timestamp, which creates an eerie, fade-in, fade-out sort of feeling as you read, as though by the time the empty space at the end of a story yields once again to Monk’s quietly confident prose, you may have very well have missed something—a marriage or a divorce, the death of someone’s uncle or someone else’s dream. At the heart of things are the Gojuk and Kusiak families and their two prodigal daughters—Theresa Gojuk, who goes to Hollywood as the mediocre-movie-star turned magnate-producer “Tess Randall,” and Annie Kusiak, who cycles through a series of bad marriages and struggles to find her voice as a writer. The two girls maintain a kind of psychic friendship, occasionally meeting in California or some other distant place that is, significantly, neither Annie’s current home nor Cokesville.

The eight stories mostly about Annie are the only ones told in the first person. That she’s trying to make it as a writer seems like a too-practical conceit, at first. Putting a writer in charge of a piece of first-person fiction causes a unique brand of trouble, and forces us to wonder how self-consciously constructed the narrative really is: with every story Annie tells, we have to wonder whether we’re reading one of her stories or a story about her struggle to write stories. Plus, the Annie stories don’t have the cultural texture of the third-person pieces—though they possess a compelling energy enhanced by our growing familiarity with their narrator, the contemporary feel makes it seem as though Annie is groping, herself, for something less rich than what we’re able to take ourselves from what (it ultimately turns out) are likely her own stories about Cokesville’s past. Eventually, the context of Annie’s revelation to turn away from her previous writing pursuits—to turn towards the home she has been fleeing for thirty years—redeems not only her character but also those stories of her struggle to run, giving them the air of a confession the young, Cokesville-bound Annie was never able to make in Father Novakowski’s church.

“Now you see it. Poof. Now you don’t”— the titular phrase and its inevitable answer turn up from time to time in Monk’s stories, in the voices of several of Cokesville’s characters, creating an additional level of sorrowful, ironic, and ultimately resigning connection between the people of a town who dislike each other as often as the opposite. By the time Annie extends her magical metaphor (“We’re like rabbits that were pulled out of a magician’s hat, coming out of nowhere for the show. Disappearing before anyone thinks to miss us”), she could be talking about herself and Theresa, or the people of Cokesville in general. Annie isn’t in the final story, about another Cokesville expatriate and her bohemian Russian lover, a man who makes art of sperm donation and can’t find poetry in the rush of Boston. By this time, Annie Kusiak is at rest with Theresa, as well as the other Gojuks and Szewzcaks, the Szilborskis and Herbinkos—all are phantoms, dancing on the dirty breeze of the past.