Book Review: Something that Feels like Truth by Donald Lystra

Something that Feels like Truth: Stories, by Donald Lystra. DeKalb, IL: Switchgrass Books/NIU Press, 2013. ($15.95, 290 pages)

In reading Donald Lystra’s story collection, SOMETHING THAT FEELS LIKE TRUTH, I was struck by its overall air of quiet thoughtfulness, a quality not often found in contemporary fiction, particularly the shallow sort often topping today’s bestseller lists. Because there are no werewolves or vampires here, no scenes of bloody violence or bodice-ripping passion. Indeed the only aberrations you’ll discover in these stories are the unspoken thoughts and suppressed desires of outwardly ordinary men and women, living their lives of quiet desperation, silently straining toward some undefinable other – wishing and wondering as they fill their finite days with mundane mind-numbing jobs and activities.

This yearning quality, this “Is That All There Is?” feeling permeates many of Lystra’s stories, beginning with the first, “Geese.” Its protagonist, Glenn, tries to remain aloof from the scary spectre of his brother-in-law’s “exploratory” surgery, but then, in agreeing to put down the man’s ailing old dog, is suddenly confronted with his own fear of isolation and death. “Nothing about today seemed normal, nothing at all,” Glenn thinks as he talks to his wife on the phone. “I heard her breathing on the wire. My heart was going like crazy. ‘Don’t hang up yet.'”

That wondering if there might be more to life continues in other stories: with Tom, a laid-off factory worker in “Marseilles;” with Norm, a night shift bus driver in “Hesitation;” and with Eleanor in “The Five O’Clock Train.”

The theme of the heart, as a fragile physical organ, crops up throughout the collection too. One of the stories, about a bitter, divorced architect is titled, for obvious reasons, “Bypass.” Following a visit from his ex-wife, Frank touches his scarred chest, feeling “deep within, the reassuring buck and shudder of his imperfect heart.” And the protagonist of “Speaking of Love Abstractly” has undergone an angioplasty. Recently separated from his wife and tentatively attracted to his much younger French tutor, Harold asks his doctor if his heart is healthy enough for sex. The tutor is young – and French – enough that she doesn’t know who Walter Cronkite is. She’s given no first name in the story, identified only as “Mademoiselle Carnot.” Puzzled, I wondered fleetingly if perhaps this were a gentle jest on Lystra’s part, combining carnal (as in carnal knowledge) with Bardot (as in the French sex-kitten actress from the fifties that only older men like myself and Lystra might remember). Nah, probably not.

There is too a push and pull between innocence and experience found scattered among the stories. Several could be considered coming of age tales – “Reckless” concerns a young boy on a hunting trip with his father; in “Treasure Hunt” a seventeen year-old grapples with family loyalties; in “Scout” a boy worried about his father’s serious illness discovers a derelict’s dead body. And in “Family Way” (the story which spawned Lystra’s critically acclaimed novel, SEASON OF WATER AND ICE), twelve year-old Danny’s attention is divided between his own sexual awakening, his parents’ failing marriage, and a new friend, a pregnant teenager.

The final story in the collection, “Bridge,” will make comparisons to Hemingway inevitable. In it, a sixty-something year-old makes a long-postponed pilgrimage to Seney in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula to retrace the journey of Nick Adams in “Big Two-Hearted River,” the story first published in Hemingway’s collection, IN OUR TIME, more than eighty years ago. The protagonist in Lystra’s story, identified only as “the old man,” is hoping to find something out about the truth of Hemingway’s story, to bridge the gap between fact and fiction, and in so doing, to make some sense of the choices he’s made in his own life.

Hmm … Looks like I’ve somehow managed to invoke Thoreau, Blake, Hemingway, and even Peggy Lee. But the truth is these pieces are pure Lystra – every one a perfectly polished gem of storytelling. There are no fillers or discards. In fact, each of these sixteen stories holds, somewhere within it, SOMETHING THAT FEELS LIKE TRUTH. If you are looking for serious fiction for grownups, read this book. I recommend it highly.

By Tim Bazzett

Tim Bazzett is the author of five books including his recently published “Booklover, A One-Year Journal of Reading, Reflecting & Remembering.” He resides in Reed City, Michigan. More information and/or to order his books, see his website here.