The Mechanics of Falling and other stories by Catherine Brady

Release date: 2009 / 227 pages

Synopsis (from back cover): “In all our lives, there are moments when the seemingly fixed coordinates of our existence abruptly give way — mother love fractures, a faithful husband abandons his family, a conscientious middle-class life implodes, loyalty demands an excruciating sacrifice.”

First Line: The first night they thought about going home.

Review:  I was so impressed by this collection that I am a bit intimidated to write this review!  I know I will not be able to do justice to the prose, the characterization, and especially the magic that happens when a short story simply “works.”  But I will attempt to describe what was so extraordinary about The Mechanics of Falling.

First, in the spirit of full disclosure, I was initially reluctant to begin this collection.  Last week I finished Steven Millhauser’s Dangerous Laughter at a client’s request for discussion questions and was amazed.  Millhauser, like Lahiri did a few years ago, reawakened my love of the short story, and I didn’t want to lose my taste for this genre so soon after last week’s discovery.

However, I had promised TLC I would review Mechanics so I began reading with trepidation — and did NOT enjoy the first story.  In fact, I strongly recommend that readers skip Looking for a Female Tenet completely.  The prose seemed disjointed and out of sorts — too many sentences beginning with a conjunction (which, as I have told countless students, is perfectly acceptable in this day and age, but should be used sparingly, in my opinion).  Plus, too many sentences felt as if they had been cut in half (“The first night they thought about going home.  But Jules and Mary Lee told themselves there was a finite limit on their time in hell.”).  In fact, when I came upon the following sentence: “… to speak to one another in phrases that stalled out before they could become sentences” I was dismayed, because it described the feel of the prose so well.  And the characters may have been stoned, and thus excused, but I was not. 

Fortunately, I had also struggled with the first story in Dangerous Laughter, yet went on to love the collection as a whole — so I cautiously started the second story.  And thank goodness I did!  The subsequent stories seemed to engage my attention even more fully than the preceeding one, until I was mourning the loss of the characters’ presence in my life at the end of the last five stories. 

Unlike Lahiri’s stories, the vignettes in Mechanics are quite varied and address subjects from the complexities of marriage — both happy and unhappy — to the frustrations of mother-daughter relationships — to the sacrifices we make in order to stay gainfully employed — to general ennui. 

Brady embraces language, even plays with it, yet somehow never becomes self-conscious or indulgent.  In the third story, Slender Little Thing,  Brady uses the sentences from the first paragraph of the story as jumping off places for the subsequent sections.  In other words, the second sentence of the story reappeared as the first sentence of the second section, and so on…  This was not simply a creative, quirky device but became resonating grace notes that echoed throughout the story.  The repetition created a sense of circling back, subtlely requiring the reader to consider how our past actions shape our futures.

All throughout the collection I found sentences that demanded attention and consideration.  For example, when a woman and her housekeeper attempt to communicate, despite a prohibitive language barrier, Brady observes  “Funny what topics they are willing to trust to uncertainty: flowers, weather, children, parents.”  And in The Dazzling World, “When the bus jerked over a rut, the people jammed in the aisle rocked and swayed in a motion that seemed as smooth as the parabolic arc of a whip but was felt in jolting increments, flesh and all its vulnerable softnesses smacked against other flesh, against the metal frames of the seats and the shifting contents of the packages compressed between one body and another.”  Nice!

The beauty of a well-wrought short story is its ability to transport a reader as fully as a novel does, but in a much more compressed time frame.  After each of Brady’s stories I would resurface, disoriented in my every day life, as if I had somehow teleported from another land. 

So, if you think you might enjoy experiencing this feeling for yourself, simply drop me a comment below!  I will soon choose a winner and send along a free copy of The Mechanics of Falling.

In the meantime, be sure to check out other reviews of this collection:

Wednesday, April 1st: Diary of an Eccentric

Thursday, April 2nd: Musings of a Bookish Kitty

Friday, April 3rd: S. Krishna’s Books

Monday, April 6th: Caribou’s Mom

Tuesday, April 7th: Maw Books Blog

Wednesday, April 8th: A Simple Walk

Friday, April 10th: Eleanor’s Trousers

Monday, April 13th: …and hijinks ensued.

Thursday, April 16th: Tomorrow is Another Day

Friday, April 17th: A Blog of Her Own

Monday, April 20th: The State I Am In

Tuesday, April 21st: Book Club Classics!

Wednesday, April 22nd: Books on the Brain

Friday, April 24th: Savvy Verse and Wit

Tuesday, April 28th: Clever Girl Goes Blog

Thursday, April 30th: Estella’s Revenge

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