Dumbass Decisions

“The next afternoon, near the outskirts of El Paso, he was downing his last beer.” Our man here is a serially irresponsible truck driver named Donnie, one of several characters defined by thoughtless choices and worse luck in It Falls Gently All Around, linked short stories by Ramona Reeves.

Donnie has been locked out of his apartment for failing to pay the rent. His father has died. His wife has left him, and he’s fallen for the delusion that he can change, that surely he’ll win her back. Still, driving a load from Mobile, Alabama, to the West Coast could be the first step toward at least minimal financial solvency, and the drive might go smoothly, despite Donnie’s decision “to drink on markers divisible by fifty.” But then this:

“A billboard advertised Psychic Readings by Sylvia and boasted Get Answers Now. He’d driven past the billboard hundreds of times, but the double weight of losing his father and his wife had him feeling like the heavy end of a pickax. Sylvia’s answers couldn’t be worse than his own.” Even a somewhat clueless reader will chuckle here, knowing that a freeway psychic along the outskirts of any American city is not likely to offer actual rescue.

But Ramona Reeves knows this character. She lets him make the foolish move, the predictable but surprising move—the mistake that keeps on giving. Donnie leaves the freeway, his exit a fork for driver and story. His life unravels as the story comes into its own, engaging us in a sad but comic misadventure to a dead end for Donnie.

“The GPS led him onto a tar-and-chip road littered with rocks and potholes” to a derelict house that looks abandoned, where he draws the death card from a tarot deck, then drinks from a bottle of beer after watching as the psychic “emptied a capsule into the bottle.” I love this moment in the story. It’s a hinge moment, when a character does something both appallingly foolish and—given what deft storytelling has revealed about him so far—absolutely credible.

These are among the moments that make fiction worth the bother for this reader, when I witness a character make absolutely the wrong mistake, the foolish mistake, the patently avoidable mistake—the mistake that reveals him to me.

It Falls Gently All Around has an ensemble cast that deserves an award of some kind—characters who stumble over their own worst impulses, then get up and try again. Their missteps surprise as their stories engage. I’ll be reading this collection again.

Note:

Ramona Reeves won the Drue Heinz Literature Prize for It Falls Gently All Around (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2022).

Available at University of Pittsburgh Press ⇒

Check out Ramona’s website ⇒