Big of You by Elise Levine

Reviewed by Timothy Niedermann

Elise Levine is an award-winning writer with two novels, a pair of novellas, and two previous short-story collections under her belt. Big of You is her third.

The stories in this volume are quite diverse. A woman remembers a long-ago summer trip to Europe with a friend with whom she has lost contact. A trio of women—old friends—share a vacation in the US Southwest where they hike into a small box canyon to see ancient petroglyphs. A teacher laments his inability to connect with his elementary-school students. A woman composer reflects on her alienation from her husband, who is also a composer.

Some are quirky, even odd: An ancient carved idol muses on immortality while stuck as a tourist attraction somewhere in the American Southwest. The ne’er-do-well brother of a 19^th century French hot-air balloon pioneer and photographer wallows in envy of his sibling. A woman astronaut fights the boredom and isolation of living for an extended period on a space station.

But while the stories vary in plot and subject matter, some being straightforward, others not at all, they all have one thing in common: they are written in the first person. Consequently, everything in these stories plays out in the mind of the narrator. And none of the narrators are alike. Levine emphasizes this by having each one use language in a distinctly personal way, underscoring their individuality.

So, instead of being a distanced third-person observer relating what is happening around them, the narrator is a participant. And, in the narrator, the reader must contend with someone who has a self-involved perspective of what is happening, reacting to events and other characters in a manner that is often impulsive and occasionally thoughtless.

By using the first person in this way, however, Levine is able to capture the emotional intensity of a given situation, together with the often accompanying misapprehensions and confusion. Each of the stories also progresses in a winding way toward a deeper thought, one that the narrator is either unwilling to address directly or having trouble articulating. For example, in one story, a woman is living in a selective mountain community behaving oddly and causing trouble, all while flailing against her internal demons, sorrow first among them. The source of the sorrow, however, is only revealed obliquely, as if the woman is too emotionally distraught to form the necessary words. In another, a young woman tries to understand the relationship between a female friend and that friend’s brother after she has come to feel rejected by that friend.

Levine is not an easy writer. Her prose is at once intimate and challenging. The narrators are too enmeshed in their distracted thoughts and conflicting emotions to make any statement that is completely reliable on its face. And this is Levine’s point. Human beings do not and often cannot hold their emotions at bay. They are roiled and confused by them. Clarity is elusive, even non-existent.

Yet by showing all this chaos and confusion, Levine allows the humanity and frailty of the characters (even the stone idol!) to come across all the more palpably.

Big of You is published by Biblioasis.