Now You See It…Stories from Cokesville, PA

By Bathsheba Monk
Picador

With a Chicago Tribune best book of the year pick and good reviews from the likes of the New Yorker and Esquire, it should be no huge surprise that Bathsheba Monk is an exciting new talent. However, I didn't know all of that when I started reading this book. I selected it because I am a writer who also lives in the quirky state of Pennsylvania, and that was enough to pique my interest.

By page two, I knew I was in for a treat. There are several moments during this collection of stories that have stayed with me. In "Congratulations, Goldie Katowitz," a young woman admits to her Uncle that she may not have the skill to become the writer she wants to be. "It was true. Every time I tried to imagine the lives of people I knew, it was like creating fanciful, useless additions to structures that couldn't support them. The whole thing crumbled." I like the fact that Bathsheba Monk can pin point and describe such an artistic hurdle and then so deftly overcome it by giving us such a rich and dynamic population.

In her description of Theresa, the Hollywood starlet who reaches for a glass that isn't there, she writes that she later jumps up, "her drink welded to her fist." A simple phrase, but placed there it suddenly conveys all of her connection to and loathing of the town of Cokesville. And so voila, you have a character upon whose head you can practically balance a book. But she is only one of a large cast of such succinctly described and original personalities.

Now You See It… is a collection of short stories, but the stories are woven together making it feel closer to novel form. Characters reoccur, develop from one story to the next, and so when you become attached to one you know there is a possibility you will meet them again in future pages, as so often you do. Spanning over forty years, each story is anchored with the year it is set in and then you are either in Cokesville, a dying mining town, or out of it, having escaped with one of its eager and often slightly bitter refugees. Anyone who knows what it is like to hate a place and want nothing more than to leave it will feel for them, and anyone who knows how impossible it is to ever completely leave your roots behind will find the often morbid moments as funny as they are tragic.

Review by Jen Wilson Lloyd

Click here to buy:

Now You See It . . .: Stories from Cokesville, PA