Review: Chelsea Bieker’s Central Valley stories teem with awful people. You’ll love them anyway

The title of Chelsea Bieker’s first assortment of quick tales couldn’t be extra apt. “Heartbroke” is stuffed with cornered girls, poisoned relationships, lonesome California landscapes and quiet violence.

The title story consists of letters from a mom to a son, repeated makes an attempt to clarify how the dying of two youngsters earlier than his delivery has made her the best way she is. Within the story “Girls and Youngsters,” an addict steals one other addict’s child and goes on the lam. “Reality of Physique” follows a intercourse employee and her adolescent son residing out of their automobile in a polluted seashore city. Elsewhere, a woman locks her mom in a shed to maintain her from working off with a mad pastor and a son does the unthinkable to guard his mom.

Bieker has some clear themes, to make sure: The methods moms and dads and kids hurt each other; how dependancy weaves its method into on a regular basis life, shredding the material that when held it collectively. Bonnie and Clyde-type {couples} delude themselves and one another; persons are uncovered to the world’s depravity a lot too quickly, their half-formed smooth elements calcifying. The urge to destroy, emotionally or bodily, is very often fulfilled — and with out a lot regret.

Please excuse me whereas I let you know about one thing somebody stated in my fiction MFA workshop: One scholar noticed of one other’s characters that they felt cared for, that they have been rendered with palpable tenderness. As somebody with disdainful tendencies in her writing, I’ve by no means forgotten this remark, which means it’s potential to take care of individuals in fiction with out lapsing into sentimentality. That characters can steal infants and catfish their greatest buddies and nonetheless make your eyes nicely up, as they do within the quick tales of Denis Johnson, Mary Gaitskill and darker shades of Ray Bradbury.

“Heartbroke” falls inside this custom of writers fixing their lenses on the underbelly of small-town and rural America, inspecting the darkish issues that occur there earlier than they entrap you into empathizing with individuals you would possibly by no means meet in life — or need to. Bieker’s characters do unhealthy issues, typically horrible issues. You need to yell at them, “Don’t give that man oral intercourse in a public restroom with a child watching!” or “Don’t take up with that man who’s clearly a sociopath and goes to beat you whereas spreading peanut butter throughout his stomach and waving a gun!” However inevitably they do, and after they do, it’s with tenderness and a bizarre form of grace. It’s horrible to look at but additionally fascinating, as a result of their horrible selections carry a whiff of the mundane, the peculiar, and after they survive — in the event that they survive — you may’t assist admiring them for it.

Bieker’s 2020 debut novel, “Godshot,” is a sister-wife to this assortment. The story of a pregnant teenage woman whose mom runs off with a sex-trafficking cowboy, leaving her within the care of her weird widowed grandmother and a soda-drinking, rain-conjuring cult, it’s set in the identical forlorn cities and sunburnt fields of Central California and peopled with comparable sorts of characters — telephone intercourse employees; raisin farmers; girls abandoning girls; girls saving girls; poisonous, deluded males. Not solely do these two books’ preoccupations overlap, however their story strains often intersect.

“Heartbroke” isn’t the stuff of bedtime tales, however it’s embroidered with the stuff of American fable. Folks named Fairly, Vangie, Beulah, Chilly Willie and Maple who put on blue suede sneakers and go to bars referred to as Cadillac Flats and Seashell’s and make declarations like “tarnation,” who work at feed shops and purchase issues on the Greenback Disco. They occupy an unspecified period, principally earlier than computer systems and cellphones and the metaverse. It may simply as simply be 1952 or 1989.

At explicit moments, Bieker’s vignettes have the standard of a postcard despatched by a Quentin Tarantino character, if that character grew up in Del Rey studying Flannery O’Connor and Annie Proulx. They run brothels and date miners named Spider Dick at improbably younger ages, say issues like, “Me, I’d been out turning grapes way back to I may keep in mind however by then I used to be fixing to marry and I had lengthy pink hair right down to my waist and I used to be one sunburn away from previous age.”

“Heartbroke” is just not fairly our world, however it is rather a lot of our world. It’s a spot the place the parable of the West is inseparable from the deflation of the American dream — a water-thirsty panorama wherein we’re all left to drag ourselves up by the straps of our turquoise boots and proceed on as gracefully as we will.

Pariseau is a author and editor in New Orleans.