Secrets. Every family’s got them, and no matter how garden variety the categories may be, each one can cause its own exquisite pain. Two books I read this week delve into those secrets, the costs of keeping them, and what happens when they come out in the open: All the Things We Don’t Say by Nuria López and Buckeye by Patrick Ryan.
All the Things We Don’t Say by Nuria López
This slim collection of short stories from Spain contains six sharp looks at different kinds of family secrets: abuse, sexual assault, pregnancy, sexual orientation, adultery, and the process of dying. As most successful short story writers do, López has centered these narratives around key moments so that we’re immediately in the mix.
The story I most connected to, for personal reasons, was “The Week of Goodbye,” where the narrator recounts the process of watching their father die in the hospital on a day-by-day basis. It sounds bleak, but what López captures is instead the incredible variety of what happens: relatives who need something, a visit from an old friend, an improvement, a decline, and always, the background of the hospital itself which continues long after any one patient’s stay. This story reminded me of what can be so glorious in a short story—that finding of all of life as represented in one small set of moments.
This is the kind of book where you can read one story, close the book, and then think about the ramifications of those few pages all day long.
Buckeye by Patrick Ryan
On the other side of the brevity spectrum is Patrick Ryan’s Buckeye which chronicles life in a small Ohio town over the period of an entire life. The story centers on the Jenkins and Salt families and the way their lives entwine over time. As with All the Things We Don’t Say, there are secrets here, including adultery, sexual orientation, and abandonment, and those secrets shape the destinies of everyone involved. Because it’s such a sweeping book, Ryan can linger on the social events that background (and shape) their lives as well, including wars and the Civil Rights movement.
I happened to be watching War Sailor, a show about Norwegian merchant marines who were effectively drafted into permanent, deadly service delivering supplies during World War II, on Netflix at the same time as reading this book, which made the descriptions of Felix Salt’s time in the Navy feel especially visceral and harrowing.
Buckeye also deals with death, both sudden and prolonged, and I think the thing I will carry longest out of this reading is the way one virtual stranger aids a couple in the depth of their grief. It is simple and pure and perfect.
Both books are reserved, though, and while characters’ actions make sense, there’s a level of pulling back from their emotions that made me long for them to explore what was happening underneath. Easier in a novel than a short story, of course, but if everyone had said what they were feeling in Buckeye the actions of the characters would have had to have been different and the overall feeling would have been very different, too. And sometimes, when the conversation is had, we see how very little it would have changed anyway. In that way, Buckeye simultaneously begs you to have the conversations you’ve never had and also reminds you that you probably already know what you’re going to learn.
If you’re interested in reading about other people’s secrets, pick up a copy of All the Things We Don’t Say or Buckeye from Bookshop.org. If you use either of those links, I earn a commission.
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