Reviewed by Pedro Ponce
4.23.07

O Street, Corrina Wycoff’s debut collection of linked stories, starts out like one of Paul Auster’s metaphysical mysteries. Beth Dinard receives an urgent phone call informing her that her estranged mother is dying. As she packs to be by her mother’s side in Jersey City, Beth remembers the life of vagrant poverty she experienced as a child, a life she finally escaped by running away five years before: “She wanted the memory to make her feel something, some kind of love for her mother, some kind of loss. But mostly, she felt proud to no longer know a life of head lice and evictions and Thanksgiving dinners at soup kitchens.”

When Beth discovers that the phone call is just a ruse to get her to bring money, concern turns to anger. Beth, lacking her mother’s current address, wanders the streets of her former home. The more she wanders, the more past and present fuse surreally for Wycoff’s protagonist, leaving her in a kind of existential limbo. Outside her mother’s presumed hospital, she encounters April, a neighborhood girl: “When the girl waved, Beth thought she saw her mother’s face replicated in April’s.”

Beth’s trip to Jersey City in “The Wrong Place in the World” sets up O Street’s complex narrative structure, which goes back in time to explore the life of Beth’s mother, Angela, and then forward from Beth’s panicked visit to Jersey City. “September 1981” dramatizes the origins of Angela’s mental illness as well as her growing drug habit. The consequences for Beth are revealed in “O Street,” which describes the horrifying lengths to which Angela exploits her daughter in order to support her habit. The second half of the collection follows Beth as she turns to prostitution and has a child with a married man, eventually sharing custody and the precarious semblance of a normal life.

As Beth ruminates on her past in “The Wrong Place in the World,” she expresses what could be the keynote to Wycoff’s nuanced narrative: “There was no such thing as before and after. There was no such thing as a whole new life.” No matter how far Beth comes, the life she lived with her mother always threatens to consume her, whether through unfulfilled needs that haunt her adult relationships, or through the emotional hardness developed by necessity in order to survive deprivation and trauma. The collection’s final story, “Read Me Through the Bardo, Won’t You,” deals in part with Beth’s own ambivalent experience of motherhood: “Kerry hugged hard, the way little children do, but her size made it feel frightening, as if Beth would disappear forever. Kerry smelled overly sweet, like a baby, and her big hands were sticky with ice cream.”

The novel-in-stories or linked collection has experienced something of a vogue in recent years. For the aspiring published writer, it is arguably the best—and most marketable—of both worlds, accommodating the often episodic work of one’s apprenticeship within the framework of a continuous narrative. Rare in this genre is the work in which form and vision merge seamlessly to create effects on the page that could not be created otherwise. Denis Johnson’s Jesus’ Son uses the episodic sequence to track a character’s halting, gradual recovery from addiction. In Floating in My Mother’s Palm, Ursula Hegi uses a similar structure to explore the life of a German girl and her community after World War II. Wycoff’s uncompromising debut, in which the protagonists’ past and present coexist as emotional reality and fictional structure, doubtless belongs in such esteemed company.