If you like Southern Fiction as I do, especially fresh new voices of South Carolinians who go to the Piggly Wiggly, buy tacky hats at South of the Border, and swap Dale Earnhardt stories, you'll want to read Someone to Crawl Back To By Phillip Gardner, a faculty member at Franics Marion University in Florence.
It's a collection of 19 interrelated short stories touching the lives of about 20 characters who inhabit Florence and Myrtle Beach and the Paradise Lounge and who can't quite figure out how to love and live with each other. The book doesn't read like a novel, but it achieves a more satisfying unified effect than most story collections.
Gardner's tone is wistful, hopeful yet resigned, the attitude of most 30-somethings and 40- somethings who want something more but doubt that they'll ever get it. The book opens with a monologue by Rene Severance ( an appropriate name) about conversations couples can't have, in particular the conversation about lost passion: "Words can do anything, repair almost any pain," she says. "but they can do nothing for lost passion."
In the next three pieces, we read her story. The plot switches to her husband, Josh, who develops into a sympathetic, distraught, abandoned spouse and who is the central character in the last two stories of the book.
Not all the stories are tied neatly to the central thread, but you don't have to strain to see the pattern in the fabric.. For example, "This is Not a Story Story" begins with "the fourth or fifth tender moment in a (daylong) conversation" between Rita and George Scarborough in which she says, "If I could crank that chain saw, I'd cut you up and feed you to the hogs."
At the end of their long, contentious day, the two are crawling around in the rain-made mud of the church league softball field, looking for their lost keys. They might find them, but as the last line of the story says, "The odds were against it."
Gardner's book is funny an intelligent and all too true. It's about people who have lost what they love, or thought they loved, and don't know how to get it back, or if they want it back. In the end, Josh Severance rides a broken bike over to his former wife's apartment, and she lets him in. Although she might let him spend the night, the next day, we know, he'll have to return to his empty house, and eventually he won't even have someone to crawl back to.