New West Book Review

‘In This Light’ Collects Utah Writer Melanie Rae Thon’s Greatest Hits

By Jenny Shank, 5-23-11

The accomplished writer Melanie Rae Thon grew up in Montana and teaches at the University of Utah. In This Light: New & Selected Stories (Graywolf Press, 256 pages, $15) collects some of the highlights of her career, and there have been many—her stories have regularly appeared in the Best American Short Stories, O. Henry Prize Stories, and Pushcart Prize anthologies. Thon frequently sets her stories in the West, but they follow none of the typical paths Western writers are often expected to take.

Thon focuses on people who exist on the fringes of society, who are damaged, dispossessed, addicted to drugs, alcohol, sex, or all three, people who never have the chance to stop and admire the landscape—like the homeless kids of Kalispell in her story “Heavenly Creatures"—they’re too busy scrapping for survival. Thon relentlessly turns her attention on people that society ignores, and describes them with intense language in stories that are replete with ghosts.

In reading these stories, which range from those published in 1991 in Girls in the Grass to some written two decades later, it becomes clear that Thon has invented her own characteristic structure. Instead of moving from one clear-cut scene to the next, the stories have a dreamy movement, jumping back and forth in time to make past and present mingle together in the same moment. In several stories, a ghost speaks as often as the living do, such as in the arresting “Xmas, Jamaica Plain,” the middle story in a triptych about two neglected sisters who strike out on their own. It begins, “I’m your worst fear. But not the worst thing that can happen.”

As young Nadine and her androgynous companion Emile, homeless kids who survive by turning tricks and stealing, break into an empty house, Nadine’s older sister Clare advises her as she goes through the rooms. “Take the jewelry; it’s yours,” Clare says. But Clare is only present in Nadine’s mind—we learn in the next story, “Home,” that she’s died from some combination of drugs, AIDS, and exposure.

I remember reading this story in the Best American Short Stories in 1996 and thinking it was shocking—at twenty I focused on the theft, drugs, overdoses and kid prostitution. But re-reading it now I realize how tender and beautiful it is. She writes about these young people on the wrong side of the law as though they’re fallen angels, worthy of forgiveness. Thon features characters that might have some traits in common with those in a Kathy Acker or Mary Gaitskill story, but she has a compassionate touch. Her intent is never to shock, or to display characters as freaks, but to reveal people who most might turn away from as humans worthy of empathy.

Take “Iona Moon,” the first story in the collection, about a country girl from Montana who is willing to go farther with boys faster than any of the other girls at her high school. At this time and place, Iona is shunned and pitied, but the way Thon portays it, Iona’s behavior is more direct, generous, and honest than that of anyone else in the community. “You hang on to something too long,” Iona thinks, “you start to think it’s worth more than it is.”
Even when Thon’s characters are conventionally employed, as is Sid, the protagonist of “First, Body,” who works as orderly in a hospital, Thon complicates them. Sid is haunted by his experiences in Vietnam, and he falls hard for Roxanne despite her teeth “rotted out on smack and sugar” and the fact that she’s not pretty and tells him she never was, “So don’t go thinking you missed out on something.” The story culminates expertly when Sid blows out his knee trying to move the body of woman who weighs more than three hundred pounds onto the slab for an autopsy. He thinks about her, “Nobody loved you enough or in the right way.”

Perhaps the only character in these stories who comes close to being a Western literary archetype is the laconic Montana father of “Father, Lover, Deadman, Dreamer,” who accepts the transgressions of his wife and daughter with stoicism and without comment. When the narrator was nine, her mother said she was going to the movies in Kalispell and never came back. Her father went to look for her once and found her dancing with another man at a dive bar near a reservation. The narrator reports that like her mother, “I am a woman now. I have lovers. I am my mother’s daughter. I dance all night. Strangers with black hair hold me close.”

Thon takes this story of maternal abandonment and father-daughter tenderness and pushes it further when we see what a wreck the daughter becomes, hitting a drunk Indian man on the road one night when she is driving drunk. She doesn’t tell her father she’s hit a man, not a deer, and he repairs the car and tells no one her secret. No one questions the incident. She thinks, “I knew what people would think, reading this. Just one Indian killing another on a reservation road. Let the tribal police figure it out.” But it causes a lifetime of unbearable guilt for her. As in many stories, Thon artfully floats between past and present, fashioning a portrait of a life by touching and re-touching on its central incidents.

For readers unfamiliar with the power and artistry of Melanie Rae Thon’s stories, In This Light is a great place to start.

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