A Review of Laura Adamczyk’s “Hardly Children”
Distant and Vacant
Do you like to travel to far off distant places, such as outer space? Or do you like to soak in realism? When it comes to book reading, and you’re of the latter persuasion, you might enjoy the kitchen-sink realism of Laura Adamczyk’s Hardly Children. Maybe. It depends on how much sink you have in your kitchen, and this book has an awful lot of it. This is a short story collection that generally features distant young girls and women as they navigate through the hardships of life. The thing is, Hardly Children is desperately boring. The title of the book should really be called Hardly Anything Happens. These are stories that are paced at the crawl of molasses, and offer peeling wallpaper that’s a chore to look at. That’s not to say that Adamczyk isn’t talented. She is. She has won awards for these stories, and has been published in prestigious journals. She also works for the Onion’s A.V. Club, and you can’t really say anything bad about a person who works there. (It’s a cool rag.)
While I have my criticisms of this work, naturally, I will say that the author has a gift. And that is subtlety. In one story called “Girls,” three young girls at a grandmother’s house encounter a mysterious strange man who shows up and asks them to scratch his itches on his legs — and presumably elsewhere. This is seemingly creepy and probably amounts to some kind of abuse, but Adamczyk just doesn’t go for the obvious sexual molestation angle. She does something more distinctly quiet and weird. It kind of works. However, the big problem with this book as a whole is that it tends to go nowhere quickly. I have to admit that I kind of checked out when reading these pieces and started to think about my laundry and other things that needed to be done.
For instance, we get a short story about a man who is a kind of performative art piece who allows himself to be hoisted up by hooks in an art gallery for spectacle. It’s a neat idea. However, that’s the only thing I remember about that particular story. Nothing seems to happen. The story just drones on and on until it reaches its end — I would use the word “climax” but there really is none. There’s no release, nothing profound happens, and the reader is left wondering just what the heck Adamczyk was going on about. The author also has the habit of not using quote marks when someone is speaking. I suppose this is a method of making everything in the story become an internal dialogue, something hypnotic and hazy. The real result is confusion of a narrative sort, as you have to figure out when someone has stopped talking and the author is now riding the narrative. It’s hard to take.
In fact, the only halfway memorable story is the first one in this collection, “Wanted.” In it, a woman who is childless strikes up a playground conversation with a young boy, in a town where wanted posters have sprung up for child abduction. In this piece, Adamczyk makes the connection with wanting a child and the dangers of childhood by bridging the two together. However, it’s also a fairly short story by this collection’s standards, so that might be a backhanded criticism. Generally, the shorter the story is here, the more focused and involving it is. When the stories get longer, there’s a lot of flotsam and jetsam to a point where you have to wonder what would happen if this author wrote a novel. Would it be completely unreadable?
There’s a story here called “Here Comes Your Man,” and that’s the most interesting thing about it — it’s named after a Pixies song. It’s about a woman swaying between a truck driver and a young virgin man as her two lovers. And that’s all I really remember. There’s nothing else in the story that’s remotely memorable — aside from the fact that the unnamed virgin has a bit of an Abe Lincoln fetish. The end result is this story, and others in this book like it, will have you hitting the snooze button. A more boring and pointless (and plotless) collection I cannot recall ever reading.
Still, despite the fact that I was not very enamoured with Hardly Children, I do have to give the author some points for being original. I mean, it takes a certain art and skill to render life as it is and try to squeeze it into a written narrative. However, as anyone can tell you, ordinary life can be boring. It needs a gun that shows up in act one to go off in act three (which so happens to be the subject of a short story in this very collection called “Gun Control.”) There’s no flash or dazzle or reason to care — for these stories, for these characters that inhabit said stories, for the collection as a whole. Hardly Children is so dull, you will just find yourself drifting off into some netherworld where at least something exciting might happen.
All I can say is I wish I liked this book more. There’s stuff in here that has a kernel of interest. There’s stuff in here that is well sculpted. There’s stuff in here that takes some risks and does things that regular literary fiction may lack. But the problem is that these stories tend to just meander and not go anywhere. They putter out like a puff of smoke evaporating into thin air. It’s too bad, because one gets the sense that these stories were wrestled into existence. Again, these are very subtle stories. Perhaps one might get a lot of mileage out of that. For most readers, though, you may find these stories simply too boring and dull with withstand any scrutiny. You may find yourself wishing, in the end, that you were reading stories about spaceships, even if that’s not quite your bag. At least in space, unlike the kind of reality portraits that Adamczyk paints, something interesting is bound to happen. Nothing does here. Nothing at all.
Laura Adamczyk’s Hardly Children was published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux on November 20, 2018.
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Get in touch: zacharyhoule@rogers.com
