English Studies Forum

The Forum Reviews

Fellowship of Loss

Douglas Trevor. The Thin Tear in the Fabric of Space. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2005. 164 pages. $15.95.

By Beth Widmaier Capo, Illinois College

           Douglas Trevor’s collection of nine short stories, seven of which have been previously published, bears the title of its first story but could as well be described by the title of the last, “Fellowship of the Bereaved.” This collection, winner of the 2005 Iowa Short Fiction Award and a 2006 Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award finalist, offers a series of stories whose touchstone is the alienation of loss. A sense of grief, and the way that mortality can seem to tear open the universe, pervades these well-written tales.

           The separation between living and dead, with grief acting as a portal between states, is explored in various forms in Trevor’s stories. In the title story Elena Gavrushnekov, a former professor of English who is suffering from the affects of brain surgery and the loss of her lover, is courting the young and dumb Patti, seeking out life, youth and beauty as the antidote to her mortality. Elena is developing a theory of the universe that proposes Heaven as “a p-place outside of space and time in which there is no difference between light and matter. It is through the tear . . . the tear of which I speak, the thin tear in the . . . in the f-fabric of space” that our dead await us (12). The underlying pathos from “The Thin Tear in the Fabric of Space” is further developed in later stories where characters are adrift, lonely, and almost crippled by loss. Indeed, the stories prove Elena’s musing that “The difference is between the living and the dead. Everything else is . . . other differences are very, very small” (14). From the first person narrator of “Haircuts,” a boy in Colorado witnessing the feud between two brothers and barbers, to the old woman of “Labor Day” looking back at the 1935 hurricane in Key West, these characters demonstrate how grief and longing bind us together in a common humanity.

           The strengths of these stories reside in Trevor’s quirky and believably human characters. The protagonist of “Girls I Know” is a rather pathetic English ABD still writing his dissertation on Robert Lowell and the Boston Brahmins; his girlfriend, whose “grandfather had known Lowell at Harvard” and thus was “two degrees separated from a major American poet” (16), writes a successful book comprised of interviews with various women. The aimless narrator, who donates sperm to help pay his bills, ends the story by ruminating on the sons he’ll never know, sons “oblivious to the presence of their father, the man who provided them with their ghostly parentage: with the unknowable lines of a peculiar, faint family” (32). “Girls I Know” won the 2006 O. Henry prize and is anthologized in Best American Nonrequired Reading 2005. Another memorable character is Edward, the allergy-prone shoplifter and member of “Organizations of Families and Friends of Airplane Fatalities, or Awful as he calls it,” who is attempting to write “an allegory of Saint Francis’s life that takes place in late-twentieth-century America” (126, 128). With these characters Trevor skates to the edge of parody, ultimately giving us characters with humorous and endearing neuroses.  The careful use of detail to explore the human reaction to loss keeps these characters believable. Indeed, I could imagine several of the characters as guests on Oprah or Jerry Springer, sharing their intimate emotions with the voyeuristic audience.

            Other stories have similarly memorable characters suffused with nameless longing for a connection that will salve their grief. The first person narrator of “Labor Day,” an old woman recounting the 1935 Key West Hurricane, remembers the feud between her father and his brothers and her own wounded family. After a vivid scene of corpses floating in water, the narrator remarks “I’ll tell you what I think and you may take it or leave it as you wish. I think that most families are very fragile . . . And that we who somehow survive remember so little, and pass on even less, is a merciful and melancholic thing—more merciful than melancholic, but only just” (55-56). The fragility of family, and of our own mortality, recurs in other stories where characters cope with the loss of a family member. One of the most memorable stories, “The Surprising Weight of the Body’s Organs,” depicts a mother’s grief and rage after her son’s death. The surprising weight is both the needed organs she delivers to waiting juvenile patients, and the emotion she carries after being unable to save her own son. Trevor’s characters offer a variety of responses as coping mechanisms for grief, including anger, alcoholism, shoplifting, exercise, and violence.

            This collection does, however, suffer from a few flaws that detract from an otherwise engaging work. The opening story, “The Thin Tear in the Fabric of Space,” relies too heavily on well-worn academic stereotypes: the lecherous and lonely lesbian English professor, the “former English major” coffee shop barista (7), and the dumb blond who will “make an excellent elementary school teacher” (9). Once past “Thin Tear,” the reliance on stereotypes largely dissipates (although several characters are English graduate students stuck in ABD limbo), and the stories offer a variety of characters and situations. Trevor excels at small-scale setting depictions, such as Juma’s barbershop in “Haircuts,” with its “line of folding chairs,” “cardboard box” full of hard-core pornography, and “large clumps” of hair everywhere. However, the larger settings of Boston, Denver, Houston, and even Tours, France blur together. Similarly, Trevor seems to favor quiet endings that at times, such as in “The River” and “Fellowship of the Bereaved,” feel incomplete, perhaps simply because multiple stories rely on the same sense of muted reflection for closure.

            Trevor is an associate professor of English at the University of Iowa specializing in Renaissance literature. His first book, The Poetics of Melancholy in Early Modern England, reveals that Trevor has long been interested in emotional expression (Cambridge University Press, 2004).  His familiarity with literature is evident, with references as diverse as Elizabeth Bishop, Randall Jarrell, Shakespeare, and Milton woven into the text. In The Thin Tear in the Fabric of Space, Trevor offers a sad and yet ultimately redemptive meditation on modern personalities alienated by death. His characters are united by their individual losses, and as readers we can empathize with the pain, anger, and grief that Trevor’s deft and surprisingly humorous writing reveals.  We join the “Fellowship of the Bereaved” by sharing with these characters a very human response: “In the face of death, we become greedy for life: selfish and hoarding” (159).