Nobody Gets Out Alive by Leigh Newman

At Whitehorse and even before Whitehorse, I was unsettled. I was not right. This is a condition that many people experience after arriving in Alaska. Nothing here is fixed, nothing is any better. Where is there left to go, except out of your mind?

OK, last Alaska book. The stories in Leigh Newman's 2022 collection Nobody Gets Out Alive all take place in her native Alaska, sometimes in the seedy strip malls of Anchorage, and sometimes in the not-so-distant wilderness, tinged with danger, but still accessible to upper middle class Anchoragites who have access to their Super Cub light aircraft. Many of the stories are related, centering on a group of Anchorage friends and their children, all of whom pass various traumas back and forth like chicken pox. These stories revolve around, as best as I can tell, a single and significant adulterous affair that destabilizes friendships and families.

But the truth is, I couldn't really make sense of them. I found myself going back and forth from story to story, trying to figure out whether the character from story Y was the same as the character from story X, trying to see how the pieces fit. Then again, even when I made the connection easily--Yes, I see that the bossy adult Jamie of "The Valley of the Moon" is the same as the beleaguered child on a rafting trip in "High Jinks"--the knowledge did nothing for me. I had the feeling, instead, of a collection of stories revolving around a great absence; in their insistence on dealing with the margins and the fallout rather than the thing itself it seemed to me that the stories had an emptiness at the middle of them. What am I supposed to get out of the "blue bear," a stuffed hunting trophy whose fur is discolored by glacial water or perhaps a blueberry diet, and which the older generation of Anchoragites steal or pass back and forth according to their wounded egos and jealousies? The symbolism of it stands out bright and clear, but the deeper feelings it symbolizes were lost on me.

So, I had a lot of trouble with these. Even on an individual level, I struggled to incorporate the significance of details, or make sense of the way people behaved. If the connection between adult Jamie and kid Jamie was lost on me, it was almost more disorienting to see characters who were the same but clearly not meant to be the same people, as in the troublesome autistic children at the heart of "Alcan, an Oral History" and "Slide and Glide." But certain themes did become clear to me. Mostly, these stories seem to suggest that, despite one's hope for a deeper connection to nature, or to wilderness and raw human spirit, Alaska is no different than anyplace else. "Nothing here is fixed," as Maggie writes in "Alcan, an Oral History," "nothing is any better." The families of the interrelated stories are known to one another because they own cabins on a place called Diamond Lake, which is the staging ground for the rafting trip of "High Jinks" and the crosscountry ski trip of Slide and Glide, each perhaps undergone heedless of the risk toward the youngest children who participate. And in each case these trips do bring out raw truths--enmities laid on the table, loveless marriages lade bare--and yet they don't allow anyone to move forward, or change, or understand themselves any better.

The strongest story, I thought, was the longest, "Alcan, an Oral History," about several road trippers who are making urgent escapes from the Lower 48 to Alaska on the highway that runs from British Columbia and the Yukon into Alaska, and how their stories become interwoven. A poor agricultural student travels with a friend, whom she realizes for the first time comes from a rich but hateful household. An abused woman travels with her difficult children, away from one soured relationship toward another she knows is only doomed. The way that these stories come together, involving a Folger's coffee can full of cash, a souvenir vial of Alaskan gold, and a depressed waitress at a highway truck stop, is ludicrously convoluted, but for the first and only time in the collection, the overpacked narrative is given enough space on the page to develop naturally. Some of these characters will end up in Alaska, and some of them won't--I particularly liked the way that one of the ag school students becomes a famous outsider artist after whittling faces into the trees of a secluded forest--but whether they will or not seems immaterial to the lives they will end up living. Not, at least, in comparison to who ends up with the coffee can of cash.