Fifty Books Project 2023

Eightball by Elizabeth Geoghegan

I stare at him, barefooted, a thread-worn prayer rug beneath his bony, veiny feet.  Still tan from last summer.  I remember the rug from his bedroom.  It was antique even then, but today in the striated sunlight through his blinds it appears ragged.  The bright red and turquoise geometry faded to soft coral swirls, the threadbare melancholy of no longer blue.  He leans from the sofa over the low coffee table.  Slow ballet.  Razorblade in hand, cutting lines on a framed black and white photograph, an early one of mine.  The beach.  Our beach.  Those grassy dunes that poked us, the soft white sand that soothed us, the cold gray sea we loved so well.

A young art student falls in love with an unusual distant and noncommittal peer and he uses her for crude sexual satisfaction.  A woman builds her life around a man with a checkered history of leaving girlfriends, then gets left by him.  A woman falls in love on a first date, loses track of her love and then discovers she is pregnant.  A woman tries to get a man to leave his girlfriend for her and ends up alone.  A woman follows her brother to college and sacrifices endlessly for him, only to have him use her and abandon her.

Eightball is a collection of stories about women who make poor choices regarding men and then pay a price for them.  The stories are set in Seattle, Boulder, Rome, Paris and Bali.  The characters are carefully and drawn to feel like organic members of these communities – so one woman in Boulder is an outdoor enthusiast who loves dogs, the woman in Paris has a deep appreciation for the romance of that city, the young student is surrounded by hipsters and trying to be authentic.  Her descriptions of places – often focused on smaller details like the prayer rug above, are evocative and become talismans of these characters.  

Geoghan also has a solid ability to mix lush visuals with blunt and crude prose and the tension between the two can be exciting.  These woman are not shy, retreating victims, though they are virtually all victims.  They are strong, independent people.  They have goals and the talent and means to achieve them.  They are sexually independent and often curious.  Yet at crucial moments they put their faith in males and are let down.

The strongest work here is the title novella, which tells the story of Quinn, who has followed her brother to college in Boulder, Colorado.  The story moves back and forth between the tale of a drug-soaked night in Boulder and a series of scenes from their childhood and life with their alcoholic parents.  The balance of these is taut and musical and both worlds are drawn vividly.  In the flashbacks, we see the toll alcohol takes on their family as they grow up and Patrick begins to center his own life around drugs.  While these scenes could have been more holistically organized – alternating two fully drawn narratives instead of one narrative and a collage of incidents – they do steadily move west, from the sun-drenched beach of their childhood, to an adolescence near Chicago after their father is promoted, to the dark hedonism of Colorado, so that setting helps form an arc in the flashbacks even if plot does not.

The problem here is that we are rooting for Quinn throughout – against her parents and against her brother. It is absolutely clear from the opening scene in Boulder that her devotion to him is a mistake, so we are neither surprised nor particularly moved when her urge to save him ends in failure.  This weakness affects all the stories and becomes multiplied if you read the collection straight through.  Among the most effective moments is the end of the first story, when the narrator’s home for romance is dashed as the man she is attracted to – Tree-Boy – takes his pleasure with rough selfishness.  It is not just bad sex because there is a hint that this woman has gotten what she deserved, for not seeing this man for who he really was.  There are three stories in which the key male figures are given these reductive nicknames – “Tree Boy,” “Cricket Boy” and “Dog Boy.”  The stories build on each other, but they do not build on the power of the first encounter.

There is an unfortunate tendency towards obviously literary touches.  “eightball,” for example, ends with an extended encounter with butterflies and the sudden intrusion of literary symbolism in a story of such gritty realism is off-putting, even while the descriptions of the butterflies are beautiful.

There is powerful writing here, and characters that seem real.  I would love to say that I will miss them, but they are real without being attractive.