Sibs
Nathan Leslie
Aqueous Books
ISBN: 978-0-9892387-5-5

Reviewer: Charles Rammelkamp


          Sibs is Nathan Leslie’s seventh collection of stories. As is true with many of his collections—Believers and Drivers,for instance—these twenty-one stories have a unifying theme that holds them together; namely, brothers and sisters in all their varying permutations and ages, conflicts and love. In a way, this collection could be paired with his previous collection, Madre,which deals with motherhood: both collections examine the tensions and dynamics of family relationships. With friends and acquaintances, after all, it’s easier to walk away; not so easy with blood relatives. Perhaps for this reason, though the stories all follow a plot structure, and have endings, the underlying issues that Leslie explores are never really resolved. Never can be.

          Take the story “Backsliding,” for instance. As the title suggests, a character keeps falling into the same destructive pattern of behavior: Elvi is a shop-o-holic who spends way more than she has on things, stuff. Her sister Channing is supportive in trying to help Elvi resolve this tendency—or is she really an enabler? Similarly, in “Attending,” a successful, upwardly mobile brother tries to get his slacker brother to take charge of his life, but the brother, Eddie, prefers his job as a gas-station attendant because it gives him to freedom to read Proust and Dostoyevsky.  The brother does not budge Eddie before the story is over. (In a way Eddie is the more admirable of the two brothers, as we see what a philistine cretin the unnamed narrator is, materially comfortable but without a clue about culture.)

          In these stories, siblings look out for each other, regardless of what we may suspect about their motives. This is also true in many other stories, such as “Preservation,” in which Cora looks out for her younger brother Brent after their parents’ divorce, trying, however futilely, to preserve a sense of family cohesion.

          Indeed, throughout these stories siblings try to maintain this dying sense of family. In “Shaletown,” a brother and sister in a moribund western Maryland community try to preserve their family, to stick it out in the same wasteland as their parents, before finally throwing in the towel. In “Olives,” a man watches more or less helplessly as his brother Duke screws his life up, though at every turn he tries to throw his brother a life preserver. Marge and Nelson, childless siblings from Boston in “Southward Bound,” travel together each year to a different southern town, to foster the family sense, but it feels like a desperate, frustrating move.

          In “Lists,” the same dynamic is at work though the effect is a bit more humorous. The narrator of this story confesses up-front that she loves making lists and crossing off her accomplishments, a tangible sign of progress. She calls her brother and after he picks up during the fourteenth ring, announces that “number sixteen on my to-do list for today is reviving faded feelings for humanity, and that since he is part of the subset in question, and that since our feelings have, yes, actually faded I am ready and prepared to attempt the revival process of our mutual humanity.” The response? “My brother hocks his throat, spits, cracks open a can of beer.” “Some things in life you just can’t control,” she concludes at the end of the story, giving up on her brother Quinn.

          In another more humorous tale, “Let Me Go,” a pair of sisters team up to save the narrator’s marriage. It’s not exactly a lighthearted story—the husband, Pete, is a depressive who has lost his umpiring job through his bizarre (comical) superstitious behavior—but the sisters’ strategy works. These sisters are close is the point; they comfort one another. (“She reaches over, pats my shoulder. I can hardly remember the last time someone did that. I want to grab her hand and press it back onto me.”)

          Keeping the family together is a burden that often falls on the children of families that break up. Divorce, and its consequences, is a sad theme throughout. This is true in “Preservation,” and equally in “Just Cheese,” in which a boy worries about his brother as their parents split up. In the sad, grisly story “Burlap,” a tour de force related from the simplistic worldview of a very, very young kid, we get a sense of the lengths children will go to in order to preserve this dubious sense of “family,” of “blood.”

          But we all know, from as far back as Cain and Abel, that the rivalry between siblings can be intense, vicious, destructive. In “The Bed,” Maria tries so hard to undermine her sister Angie, until Angie finally snaps and orders Maria out of her home. Of course, we know that they will resume their unhealthy relationship before long, but the moment offers a feeling of triumph and catharsis.

          Many of the characters in Leslie’s stories are seemingly one step away from destitution and homelessness. They drive trucks and stalk their ex-girlfriends. In some stories, notably “The Mellow” and “Joy Pasture,” the lives of the featured characters seem particularly bleak and pointless. Many of the characters have unskilled, nowhere jobs that pretty much keep them at or not far beyond the poverty line—waitresses, quarry workers, shipping clerks, stock-boys, fast-food workers, cashier in a jewelry store, receptionist at a veterinarian clinic.

          Reading Sibs is like getting a glimpse past the closed curtains and locked doors into the real lives of anonymous people who may live just around the corner from us, people whose names we may have heard once but never bothered to remember. Leslie’s descriptions are at once realistic and poetic, and there’s a sheer pleasure experienced while reading his well-crafted sentences.