Book Review: The Grass Labyrinth by Charlotte Holmes

Reviewed by Ray Barker

The Grass Labyrinth
Stories by Charlotte Holmes
BkMk Press, March 2016
$15.95; 158 pp.
ISBN-13: 978-1943491049

The ten interweaving pieces in Charlotte Holmes’ latest collection, The Grass Labyrinth, culminate in a breadth of scope more indicative of a novel. Documenting three generations, and spanning roughly 30 years in a vague chronology, the collection forms a thematic maze by its end. Holmes follows the family’s professional and personal artistic impulses, examining their non-traditional lifestyles and the attending pains, struggles and losses that come with that choice. These individual stories, although quiet and small, demand that the reader stay in the present moment. That permission is a gift to the reader.  

The once burgeoning but later renowned children’s book author and illustrator Henry Tillman, pony-tailed, with striking blue eyes, is at the center of the family tree. Many branches extend outward: Lisa, his first wife of 20 years and one-time English teacher, now pursuing a PhD, he has known since they were teenagers; their son, Ben, a figurative painter; Agnes Landowska, Polish refugee and painter, Henry’s one and only affair, which led to the birth of their poet daughter, Rika, although Henry never realized she was his child; Kerry, Henry’s second wife, a computer-generated designer; and their child, Emma. The themes explored in one character’s life echo across the landscape of the others.

The collection begins with three strong, emotionally engaging pieces. The first, “Coast,” features Henry at 30, who is not yet the popular children’s book author and illustrator he later becomes, sharing his internal thoughts with the reader regarding his newfound love for his brief mistress, Agnes (she gets her own story later in the collection). Lisa, his wife of eight years at the time, flits on the periphery of his mind as he sits in his family beach house. The scene plays out in real-time, as Henry’s thoughts pull him away to more stimulating and provocative conversations with Agnes, a few weeks prior, fresh in his mind. The story, toggling between his past intimate exchanges with Agnes and his present turmoil with Lisa, is a slow burn of a marriage gradually disintegrating:

After being with her for so long, I know the routine: a spray of words, a slammed door, an hour or two of tense silence. But this time, she altered the performance. Tears began sliding down her cheeks.

And this:

Watching her, I wonder when I came to feel so distant. I’ve left her as surely as if I’d walked out of the room. What remains is emptiness that I both cause and occupy… Falling out of love is not what I expected.

The two scenes are so familiar, played out countless times before. Henry later remarks somewhat casually on the abortion of their unwanted child soon after their courtship began years ago: “…she was pregnant, although it took another month before we knew that, and yet another month before we found a doctor who could help us.” Lisa’s emotional breakdown is introduced almost as an aside, though she traces her personal trauma as cathartic exercise in “Songs Without Words,” the title itself suggesting an absence.

The story consists of Lisa struggling to put the event of the miscarriage, and how that experience relates to the pain of the abortion many years before, as she watches a group of preschoolers as they cross in front of her stopped car. Each child is a reminder of what could have been, displayed twofold:

They’re younger than your first child would be, if you’d allowed her (you are certain it was a girl) to live. For years, you’ve thought of that child as the baby. That baby is perpetually infant, now with an infant sibling, the one you wanted to be born.

Lisa talks to herself throughout, trying to put the loss in proper context: “…you are, quite reasonably, selfishly, heartbroken, your loss a drop in an endless sea of losses.”  

And it is loss that drives “What Is,” where Kerry, Henry’s second wife, dives into her own pain, reflecting on her life with Henry, how they met, their intimate moments, and time lost, unrealized. And then her thoughts turn to their daughter Emma, who Kerry says, has “Henry indelibly at her core.” Without Henry, Kerry serves as a poor stand-in, lacking his imagination and creativity, in a tender end to the story, a rare, raw emotion revealed genuinely:

But I find my slippers in the dark and go to her. When I pick her up, she locks her arms  around my neck and whispers, “Turn it down, Mama.”
“The moon?” I ask, and she nods against my neck.                   
I almost tell her that I’m not the parent who had that power, the gift of taking reality and shaping it into something extraordinary, but what good would that do at this time of night?
“I’ll give it a try,” I say, carrying her back into her own moonlit room.

Finally, “The Grass Labyrinth,” thoughtfully and intentionally placed near the end of the collection develops a theme across the final two stories, suggesting that there is interior logic at play as destiny, Ben (Henry’s son from his first marriage) forms a familial, a spiritual, then surprisingly, romantic bond with Kerry. The labyrinth of the story’s title is imbued with layers of meaning—as a confusing, physical puzzle to be explored, yet is symbolic of all the characters’ personal explorations of their emotional lives. Later in life now, Ben has no physical place to call home (his failures, both artistic and personal, are detailed extensively in the experimental and satisfying, “Erratics”). For him, and for all of the characters, their entangled lives and cumulation of experiences becomes a maze to navigate, a web one is ensnared in, never completely free.

The many artists here suffer loss that is truly felt and described, yet the economic impacts of pursuing an artistic life is never explored with any real intent. A sense of privilege pervades these stories. The characters’ artistic failures, however frequent or damaging, are generally couched in an assumed economic status (white, upper-class) that ultimately is never threatened. Therefore, their risk and sacrifice is only of a personal, emotional kind—a long road of broken hearts. Readers may desire a more substantial “weight” to the collection, something with more substance and sustenance. They may ask the characters to take real risk and danger, requiring that their decisions—though often poor and selfish—have greater consequence. But their actions are seemingly always secure, protected in the safety net a certain kind of privilege provides.

But one never doubts the ultimate loss these characters experience for their art and the people they love. And Holmes is adept at depicting them as real people with lived-in histories. She captures evocative details, depicts the beauty of the natural world succinctly, describing characters’ nuances, and her ear for dialogue is perfect, shown in page after page—a gentle unfolding of intersecting relationships, continually damaged and repaired, as all lives are.

Ray Barker is the Chief Archivist/Librarian for Glenstone, a private, modern art museum in Potomac, Maryland. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Music & Literature, The Collagist, Heavy Feather Review, Full Stop, Gulf Coast, 3:AM Magazine, and elsewhere. He lives with his wife and daughter in Washington, DC.