by Dan White
December 15, 2021
D.W. White is a graduate of the M.F.A. Creative Writing program at Otis College in Los Angeles and is currently seeking representation for his first novel. He was a Fellow at Stony Brook University's BookEnds program for the 2020-2021 year. He serves as Fiction Editor for West Trade Review, where he also contributes reviews and critical essays. His writing appears or is forthcoming in Tulane Review, Trouvaille Review, Chicago Review of Books, The Rupture, Fatal Flaw, and On The Seawall. A Chicago ex-pat, he has lived in Long Beach, California, for seven years, where he frequents the beach to hide from writer’s block.
You Never Get It Back by Cara Blue Adams; University of Iowa Press; 186 pages; $16
In some ways, perhaps, all of art, and even all of life, is storytelling, and it may be argued the greatest story of all is that which we forge about ourselves. In the artistic world, the question of how we tell our stories, and how we make sense of our lives, has long been the domain, chiefly, of the first-person novel, especially vis-a-vis that cagey appellation ‘autofiction’ with its slippery boundaries and murky origins. In her ephemeral, layered, and rich debut collection, You Never Get It Back, however, Cara Blue Adams formulates a fresh strategy, foregoing a traditional novel with its traditional plot and instead linking stories across space and time around a single protagonist, and an ensemble cast of emotions and memories, as she crafts a compelling and relatable narrative.
Our heroine is an intelligent and pensive young woman named Kate, with whom we spend the majority of our time as the book covers the decade-plus after her graduation from college. We first meet her in the title piece, "You Never Get It Back," a year out of university, working in a lab as she prepares to enter graduate school to further her scientific studies and living with her mother, destined herself to be a major character in the stories to come. Kate and her also-recurring friend Esme are headed to Cambridge to attend a Harvard Law soirée, set against a foreground of both women’s romantic intrigues. Kate has been dating Michael, we learn, for two years, during which he’s seemingly given her plenty of reasons to end things (as Esme, smart readerly avatar that she is, continually reminds), although Kate remains committed. During the party, interrupted by frequent stretches of revealing Katian interiority and occasional stretches of brilliant Adamsian prose, the foundation for many of the collection’s central themes and storylines are laid down.
As the book moves, Adams prefers to stay with Kate, jumping ahead a few years at a time, on average, to relate salient moments in her life. By the end, we have a portrait of a literary figure as full as in most novels, having followed her life, relationships, memories, and regrets for more than ten years. In this sense You Never Get It Back truly reads as a study of one character, freed into creativity in form and technique by its being a set of short stories, but never really ranging in plot or subject matter as is seen in most collections. We meet Kate’s mother and sister Agnes in great detail, learning family secrets and interpersonal dramas along the way. The bulk of the attention, however, is given to romantic entanglements, as Kate’s relationships and the demands they place on her are given ample room for exploration and exorcision.
Because of its nature as a collection of linked stories, Adams is freed up, more so than one might be in a novel (despite the refreshing welcome given to unconventionality in recent years), to change speed in tactics and approach. In its use of point of view, You Never Get It Back seems to pride itself on diversity in method, coming at each new episode in the story of her temporally fluid protagonist from a fresh angle. And, if Adams is perhaps not entirely comfortable or in full command at the sentence level with each method, the collection nonetheless benefits from her unhesitating and eclectic assortment of perspectives and narrative techniques. Ranging from snug thirds to discursive firsts and even one conversational first-second hybrid, they show Adams at her most inventive as she picks up the life of her heroine like a child does a toy, curious to examine it from all sides, to allow the light to fall in illuminating patterns.
The book is divided into three sections, each roughly concerned with a chronologically-progressive third of Kate’s twenties and the cross-country moves, changing jobs, new partners, and shifting friendships that form early adulthood. As the collection progresses through the latter two, the tone becomes more personal and more confessional, each story growing increasingly tethered to Kate’s narrative arc. It is here — the episodic relation of one protagonist’s life — where the work takes on its novelistic feel, perhaps accounting for the increasing use of the first person, in which Adams seems to be more comfortable. While this choice allows for narrative flexibility and unity across the stories, one cannot help but wish for a bit more of the diversity of technique found in the first section; indeed Adams’ close third-person is an effective and underutilized form, reaching its apogee at the close of the title piece — the second story in the book — a scene of arresting power due, in part, to the psychic distance and intimate empathy Adams is able to create and blend together:
Those girls went around perpetually fifteen, weak, cutting themselves or wearing unattractive clothes, on the brink of crying when one didn’t expect it. No thank you. She didn't want it, and what’s more, she couldn’t afford it. That was for people who wanted attention from the world, not people who were working to be invisible so they could rise in it, rise above their place in the only way one could: quietly, without eliciting alarm. That was for people who had given up, not for her. She would be better. She would be better than that.
The quoted passage, although in a minority point of view, demonstrates many of the best elements to be found in You Never Get It Back. The strengths of the collection are in its brutal honesty, in the delicate, insightful episodes it picks to tell the story of Kate’s young adulthood, Adams’ instinct for when to end a piece, and, above all, in the atmosphere she creates. Hanging over the book like a shroud is a nearly palpable sensation of regret, of loss and mistakes and missed opportunity, of bad timing and bad decisions, of salient moments lit up from the past and of what might have been. To read this book is inevitably to think back on one’s own youth, of the choices one makes and of the threads that connect events separated by thousands of miles and thousands of days.
You Never Get It Back, while perhaps open to some fair criticism about Adams’ decision making in structure and technique, stands as a powerful debut and moving collection. Individually and as a whole, her stories offer an original look at self-discovery and self-identity, painting a heartfelt, sad, and enlightening portrait of a young woman while inviting its reader to rethink their own history and the stories we tell about ourselves.
©2021 West Trade Review
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(Self)Portrait of the Artist: Identity and Storytelling in Cara Blue Adams' You Never Get It Back
FICTION REVIEW
Image by Jake Blucker on Unsplash
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