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Bathsheba Monk's
Short Story Contest
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One of the
“Best Books of 2006”
The Chicago Tribune.
Now You See It...
Sarah Crichton Books FSG
 |
|
Wednesday, June
21st, 2006
|
Now You See It...: Stories from Cokesville, Pa
by Bathsheba
Monk
The Unbearable
Lightness of Cokesville
A Review by Anna Godbersen
Now You See It..., the collection of linked stories by
Bathseba Monk, a coal-and-steel country prodigal daughter, reads
like a loosely bound collection of postcards, missives created from
some less earth-bound material than paper and ink. These tales are
so tidy and subtle it seems they might float away, which is curious
because the world they orbit is one in which a man who falls into a
vat of molten metal on the job will be replaced, in his funeral
casket, by an ingot that weighs what his body did in life. Gratis,
from the steel company. Or, in the case of Bruno Gojuk, an ingot
that, at a hundred and seventy five pounds, weighs slightly less
than he did at the end of his life-closer to what he weighed thirty
years ago or more, when he first filled out an application to work
at the steel plant. This is Cokesville, whose inhabitants have not
only "waked steel ingots," but, over the years, "stood reverently in
front of hunks of coal when mines collapsed on miners and the mines
were sealed before they could retrieve the bodies." It is a town
filled with guilt trips from the union, teenage necking, and the Ks
and Zs of Polish surnames. This is a heavy world from which the
bright and young yearn to escape, chief among them Annie Kusiak,
Monk's protagonist of sorts, whose twin desires to find her own
identity and success as a writer lead her on a serendipitous
sad-funny path that includes flirtations with suicide, Judaism and
cowgirl-hood. Like the other characters who try to walk out,
disappear entirely or put themselves up in the stars (i.e. Tess
Randall, nee Theresa Gojuk, about to be photographed in Vanity
Fair), Annie keeps circling Cokesville warily. Now You See
It... is a sublime and deadpan debut that cocks an eyebrow and
reminds us that it is never a light thing, this leaving home, though
we all must try.
 FICTION
You'll want to stay in Cokesville, Pa.
By KAREN BRADY
News Book Reviewer
8/13/2006
Now You See It . . .
Stories From
Cokesville, Pa.
By Bathsheba Monk
Farrar, Straus and Giroux,
228 pages, $22
 Bathsheba Monk grew up in a
similar town.
A strange and wonderful force is at work in Bathsheba Monk's "Now
You See It . . .: Stories From Cokesville, Pa."
In this, her
first book, she creates a chaotic but droll world wherein all roads
lead to the fictional Cokesville, an "Our Town" peopled principally
by Polish families whose livelihoods depend on the state of the coal
mines and steel mills. In Cokesville, "there's no such thing as a
free spirit in public housing," and the only happy residents seem to
be old, blind, clueless Theodore Cheslock and his much younger
mistress, Maria, a Puerto Rican orphan "raised in the local insane
asylum."
Annie Kusiak, a writer, and Theresa Gojuk, an actress,
emerge as the protagonists of this sassy, hard-boiled book of
stories, some of which will break your heart.
"Since high
school, Theresa and Annie had been in a conspiracy to leave
Cokesville and never come back," Monk writes in her title story,
"Now You See It."
The girls do get out of Cokesville - Annie to
Boston and points beyond and Theresa to Hollywood, where she becomes
soap star Tess Randall. But neither Annie nor Theresa can shed
Cokesville, which is forever drawing them back - for weddings,
funerals, christenings, illnesses - and is forever in their heads.
"It was what Theresa and I had in common: we both wanted a
different skin," Annie says in "Now You Don't," a sequel to "Now You
See It." Now, quips Annie, "when I look into the mirror, I know who
I am: somebody who doesn't live in Cokesville, Pa."
Monk's
Cokesville stories convincingly span more than 40 years of coal dust
and hard living. Two - "Mrs. Szewczak and the Rescue Dog" and
"Congratulations, Goldie Katowicz" - are worthy of becoming
classics.
In the first, a poignant piece about an aging widow
stranded at a bus stop in a snow storm, Mrs. Szewczak reluctantly
accepts a ride from two marijuana-smoking black men who treat her
carefully and compassionately, only to be betrayed by her unintended
and misplaced fear.
In the second, Annie's maternal "zedo,"
Theodore Cheslock - who had disappeared before she was born -
returns to the family fold an old, desperately ill man who has just
won the lottery.
Here, Monk pulls out all her zany stops to tell a heartrending
tale featuring, among others, a Runyonesque Uncle Mike, whose
largess to Annie includes a gold bracelet of dubious origin.
In
other Monk stories, we meet characters such as Annie's niece Monica,
who gets a cemetery plot for her 16th birthday; Mrs. Wojic, a
neighbor, who thinks a stray dog is the reincarnation of her late
husband; Father Novakowski of St. Cunegunde's Church, who has a
brief dalliance with Theresa's sister Margaret; and Theresa's mother
Helen who, in her last days, is sent plane tickets to Lourdes by her
actress daughter.
Yet, just beneath this folktale's levity is
life on life's terms - Vietnam, steel mill and mine closings, teen
marriage, miscarriage, birth and, of course, death, lots of death
and lots of kinds of death.
"You know, once you get out of
Cokesville, you can actually see the sunset," Theresa tells her
sister Margaret. "It's not a tired orange ball falling into a bowl
of pea soup."
Monk knows these people, knows this place because
she grew up in similar Bethlehem, Pa.
We know these people and
this place as well - as the fictional Cokesville, in the waning of
its industrial era, is often like parts of Buffalo and Lackawanna
not so long ago.
Bathsheba Monk - a nom de plume - is a
writer capable of the perfect bizarre touch, as in the story of Mrs.
Herbinko, who goes to the afterlife only to find she has prayed for
the wrong Ignatz Herbinko since her husband Ignatz's death in a mine
disaster 40 years before.
Monk can also capture the telling
moment, as when the restless, troubled Theresa tells Annie: "Fix it.
Fix my life. You're a writer. . . . Make it come out right. Life
never comes out right, but you can fix it. Give me a neat life.
Something with pink in it."
The stories here go together, like
clothes strung on a line. In them, time passes, people endure and
old women still scrub sidewalks. All of the stories are touching,
some profoundly so.
But one of them misses. "Epilogue: Excellent
Sperm," the last story in the book, is out of step with the others
and breaks the continuum. It has little of the strong, spare effect
of the earlier stories and seems, beside them, overreaching and
overwritten.
But then, "Epilogue" takes place in intellectual
Boston, and once Monk has taken her readers to down-to-earth
Cokesville, she's going to have a hard time getting them out of it.
Just like Annie and Theresa - no matter where they go.
Karen Brady is a former News columnist.
This is a printer-friendly version of this article. Click
here to return to Rain Taxi.
Now
You See It… Stories from Cokesville, PA
Bathsheba
Monk Farrar, Strauss and Giroux ($22)
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.
Short takes
July 2, 2006
Now You See It . . . : Stories From
Cokesville, PA
By Bathsheba Monk
Farrar, Straus
& Giroux, 228 pp., $22
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
© 2006 cleveland.com All Rights Reserved.
Issue of
2006-06-19
Posted 2006-06-12
Short Stories
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.”
“Bathsheba captures the small town life, those endearing characters, and
the yearning to break from it all to the outside world with style, humor and
emotion. Look for her work to shine for many years to come." Jordan Rich, WBZ, Boston
Chicago Tribune
--------------------
STRONG DEBUT SETS FICTIONAL
TOWN, ITS PEOPLE IN OUR IMAGINATION
--------------------
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 SeeIt ... ,"
establishing Cokesville and its people in our imaginary geography.
----------
Carlo Rotella's latest book is "Cut Time: An Education at the Fights."
Copyright (c) 2006, Chicago Tribune
Library Journal
Monk’s loosely connected set of short
stories makes up a witty, sardonic history of several families with ties to
Cokesville, a coal-mining and steel-mill town in Pennsylvania. Anchoring some
stories are a seemingly autobiographical character, Annie Kusiak, and her friend
Theresa, or Tess, who has become a soap opera star in Hollywood. The stories
move from their grandparents’ generation in the 1940s up through the 1990s as
grandsons and granddaughters try to make it outside the Rust Belt. One story
even follows an elderly neighbor into the hereafter. Themes recur like genetic
traits: aside from the uncanny lure of show business, we encounter resilient,
sometimes beautiful women, men who take pride in their dangerous work, and those
who feel trapped and abandon their families. Monk shows how even an unpleasant
place becomes a part of you and depicts the loss and disconnection that set in
when that place is taken over by economic or historic forces. A debut author of
great promise, Monk makes us see that we are all exiles in a changing world.
Highly recommended.
Tim O’Brien
“Bathsheba Monk is a writer I'll be talking about when I talk about brilliant
new writers. Now You See It . . . is the work of an imaginative, funny,
and electrically gifted storyteller.”
Susan Minot
“Bathsheba Monk must have been thinking about these stories for a long
time—stories this good are earned. She seems to have stories busting out of her.
It is as if Winesburg, Ohio were moved to Cokesville and filtered through the
eye of a tough, seen-it-all narrator whose singular personality misses nothing
and reports back with a lack of fanfare that socks you in the gut.”
D. Keith Mano
“Monk’s fiction is so subtly structured, so downright plausible and fine,
that you can read it either as a short story collection or as a fully realized
novel. No matter how you read this book, Now You See It…announces
the presence among us of a new and magical voice.”
Books
Amid
the Smokestacks, An American Dream
By Judy Bolton-Fasman
May 26, 2006
Now You See It... Stories from Cokesville, PA
By
Bathsheba Monk
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 240 pages, $22.
Cokesville, Pa., is a gritty fictional American shtetl. It is populated by
Polish-Catholic émigrés and anchored by the steel mills in which they are
employed. It is a place both defined and defeated by the customs of the Old
World.
Bathsheba Monk was born and raised in a small Pennsylvania town
similar to Cokesville; her grandfather, a coal miner. It is this experience that
she draws on in her debut collection, "Now You See It... Stories from
Cokesville, PA," 17 linked short stories told mostly in the wry voice of young
Annie Kusiak. But in addition to the inspiration offered by her native town,
Monk has plumbed the time she spent exploring Judaism while living in Israel.
Through her studies at a Yeshiva in Jerusalem and her relationships with
Israelis, her connection to Judaism translates into engaging and profound
moments in which people attempt to transform their identities — or cling to them
— at the expense of their happiness.
Cokesville is a place where the American
dream is dulled by pollution and bankrupted by the harsh economics of living
from paycheck to paycheck. When one character learns that the steel mill will
close a few months shy of his retirement, he jumps into a vat of molten steel;
the company sends an ingot to replace the body at the funeral. "No one was
surprised to see an ingot in the casket instead of Bruno. Accidents happened all
the time at the plant, and people found it as normal to view a 'Made in the USA'
stamp on a slab of steel as it was to view a face made up with lipstick to meet
its maker."
Although all her characters grapple with multilayered
identities, the work turns especially complex when Annie leaves Cokesville to
attend college in Boston. After a half-hearted suicide attempt, the reader
learns that Annie is grieving over her breakup with her Jewish boyfriend, who
declared that he "needed to marry a Jewish girl." Annie eventually realizes that
it's not Ben whom she misses, but "being with a nice Jewish man who gave me
entrée into a special and defined club. Jews were a definite thing. They ate
gefilte fish, the most horrible food on the face of the earth, and they all knew
it, but they stuck by it, because it was their fish. I liked that kind of
loyalty. They questioned everything: right and wrong, the nature of God who
could treat His chosen to such an astounding variety of cruelty, which they
accepted as proof of His special attention to them. God was with them. I wanted
to be part of a people who had access to that kind of attention."
Annie soon
learns that converting to Judaism involves more than declaring loyalty to a
particular man and the fish he eats. Monk's razor-sharp wit melds humor that
stops short of clichés with a blunt portrayal of identity politics. The rabbi
instructs Annie and an older woman — a devout Polish Catholic who is obeying a
dream she had in which she was ordered to convert to Judaism — in Jewish law and
the role of their fellow Poles in the Holocaust. His lessons exasperate Annie,
who "only wanted an identity. Why was he making it so grisly?"
In a crisp,
clear voice, Bathsheba Monk continuously explores the ongoing effect that
"living the unexamined life" has on her characters and on the world around them.
By the final story in the collection, most of Annie's generation has moved to
places where "you can actually see the sunset. It's not a tired orange ball
falling into a bowl of soup." Still there's no place like home, even if it is an
America "that hates ignorance, hates excess, and hates misery, yet unwittingly
nourishes all three."
Judy Bolton-Fasman, a research associate at the
Hadassah-Brandeis Institute, is at work on a memoir about the year she said
Kaddish.
Copyright 2006 © The Forward
Home › Spotlight › Books
A
new pecking order
Weary of reading the same old authors and their
formulaic plots? Today, we welcome some fresh faces
By Patti Thorn, Rocky Mountain News
December 8,
2006
This year, while big-name authors were busy stealing the
spotlight, scores of titles by unknowns were hatched. Many were superb reads.
How do we know? Our critics spent 2006 screening nearly 60 debut novels that
weren’t reviewed on the regular books pages. They read books of all stripes:
futuristic tales, family sagas, suspense stories and more. And when it was all
said and done, they had uncovered a wealth of fresh talent — in every genre.
Today, we offer 10 of the best, books of all types of plot and style. If you
missed these titles when they were first released, here’s a hint: Don’t make the
same mistake twice.
Now You See It ... Stories from Cokesville, PA
By Bathsheba Monk (Farrar, Straus and
Giroux, 240 pages, $23.95).
Author’s background: Monk
began her writing career on her high school newspaper, in the economically
depressed Pennsylvania-part of the Appalachian coal seam. She joined the Army,
and after being discharged, lived in Europe, where she supported herself as a
painter. She now lives in Allentown, Pa., where she is writing her second book.
Plot in a nutshell:This is a collection of interrelated
short stories about residents of Cokesville, Pa., a fictional coal and steel
town. Plots revolve around characters both in their native element, and in other
locations, where the transition between worlds isn’t very smooth. Theresa Gojuk,
for example, thought she needed just one break to become Tess Randall the soap
opera queen, but no such luck. Monica Kusiak is dating a WASP, but really
doesn’t fit in with his family. And these are the lucky ones, with a ticket out.
As for those who stayed in the dying town, they tend to live dull lives.
Monk punctuates their days with black comedy, and unexpected kindness. For
instance, Mrs. Szewczak, a lonely widow who has "spun a cocoon around her
misery" rides out a blizzard with a (gasp) black man of questionable character
who saves her feet from frostbite in his snowbound car. The police assume the
worst when they rescue the stranded pair, and Mrs. Szewczak tries her best to
keep her savior out of their hands.
Sample of prose: Mrs.
Wojic is consulting Mrs. Szilborski about a troubling question. It seems her
husband told her that, after his death, he would return to her as a yellow dog.
Sure enough, a stray dog has appeared: "It was just the sort of dog she thought
Mr. Wojic would look like, and when it was still there at suppertime, Mrs. Wojic
let it inside. Everything was just fine, she said, until this other yellow dog
showed up. Now she didn’t know which one was Mr. Wojic."
Author
reminds me of: Mona Simpson, in her gift for depicting tension between
mothers and daughters.
Best reason to read: Monk’s dark
sense of humor dovetails with her characters’ genuine grief and loneliness.
These are stories to revisit.
Christine Jacques
Books in brief
Chicago Sun-Times,
Jul 9,
2006 by Teresa
Budasi
FICTION
NOW YOU SEE IT ... STORIES FROM COKESVILLE, PA
BY BATHSHEBA MONK
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 228 pages, $22
An impressive debut
collection of stories, each of which stands on its own but can also be seen as
chapters in one woman's repeated attempts at escaping her small-town roots in
search of herself.
Annie Kusiak is at the center of the book. She gives
first- person accounts of her own experiences and her voice resonates throughout
the other stories of the fictional Cokesville, Pa., where coal and steel fuel
the livelihoods of the town's Polish-American population.
Lives intertwine,
cross over and collide head-on. There's Annie's best friend Theresa Gojuk, who
makes her own escape by going to Hollywood and becoming the actress "Tess
Randall." Theresa's best friend marries Annie's big brother, David, who must
give up a football scholarship to provide for his new wife and unborn child. A
neighbor, Mrs. Wojic, thinks a stray dog is the reincarnation of her dead
husband. Theresa's father dies by falling into a vat of molten steel. Annie's
grandfather, whom she never knew because he left before she was born, returns
one day, seemingly to die.
Those and the other tales, 17 in all, hammer home
the drudgery that has permeated America's ethnic working class for hundreds of
years. (Cokesville was "the sort of place where an inch of soot on the
windowsill means a regular paycheck -- and two inches means a fat one.") They
also illustrate that life is a series of episodes -- many of them heartbreaking
in one way or another -- that, like it or not, defines us in ways we may never
fully understand.
Copyright CHICAGO SUN-TIMES 2006
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