‘The Summer We Ate Off the China’ Is a Buffet of Varied Stories » PopMatters

At the outset of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain felt it necessary to explain to his readers that he had portrayed the panoply of voices along the Mississippi River, and did not want readers to think “all these characters were trying to talk alike and not succeeding.” Devin Jacobsen tackles the same kind of variety without warning – each of his 13 stories in The Summer We Ate Off the China portrays a different social and linguistic corner of his native Louisiana, in a voice uniquely suited to that corner.  

While each story holds up, a reader is most impressed by the various voices Jacobsen conjures to tell these stories. In “Possum on the Room”, the child in a rural, working-class family misses her recently deceased mother and Buttons, her dog, while watching her sister Velvet stumble towards marriage to JC. While the story is modern, with murder-mystery style clues to a seemingly immaculate conception, there is an old-fashioned, almost nostalgic tone to the voices. This is a family in crisis, but one that has endured for as long as poverty and chaos.

That story – which ends by evoking the animal of its title – gives way immediately to “The Man in the Sky”, a historical narrative about a formerly enslaved man searching for his mother.  Here, our narrator has overcome the circumstances of slavery to become a college professor, and most of the characters have highly educated diction. Where “Possum” presents certain conventional situations with new twists, “The Man in the Sky” sets out to defy expectations and convention, portraying an individual well at odds with the conventional portrait of his race and class.

That opening pair prepares us for a collection that covers substantial narrative ground. In “Secret Anna”, a mother struggles with her son’s attraction to lying and rambunctiousness in ways that will feel deeply familiar and wholly original to parents. The voice here is what I sometimes call “emotional realism”, with a world recognizably dominated by emotional relationships. 

A few pages later, “Tauroctony” offers narrative verse depicting a battle over control of the Maze of Ice between Hepidore, a kind of Norse hero, and the Bull King. Things here are not quite as recognizable, and the voice privileges drama over coherence. Realism is not the point.

In “Evil in the Object,” we return to Louisiana, but in a new narrative style. Here, a series of short declarative paragraphs pile, sometimes incongruously, building the story of an unhappy romantic relationship that finally runs aground when the young man gets a tattoo of a Confederate flag. 

We stay in Louisiana and focus on failed relationships in “The Elegance of Simplicity”, but in this case, a more storybook relationship gets a rich, complex treatment from a perspective some time after it has ended. Wilson’s life has been catastrophically restricted by the birth of his brain-dead child. His wife has left him, and he barely sustains his son with a dead-end job as a security guard. His devotion to his son’s care is all that gives him meaning, and then even that is called into question when freedom once again seems possible.

The diversity of Louisiana is again driven home in the final story, “Hitler in Love”, in which an orthodox Jewish family endures the horror of a school shooting. The story is narrated by a student in the school and is efficiently layered with glimpses of the community. We get a clear, uncomfortable picture of Adina’s parents; we learn that the one boy killed in the shooting was Alvie Pincus, who once dared say something nice about Hitler. Alvie’s sin is partially redeemed by his death and the revelation that he had a crush on Adina.  

In “Hitler in Love”, we get a particularly stark picture of Jacobsen’s ability to build these various narrative voices through smaller choices of words and images. As might be expected in a religiously Jewish family, Adina’s narration includes a variety of Hebrew phrases. However, in a world where people use words like “wacko” and shop at Cabela’s (a prominent hunting supply chain), references to “aliyah” and “levaya” might make the family seem uncomfortably exotic to some readers.

Jacobsen is usually more sure-footed in his language.  In this collection, characters “hopscotch from one disappointment to the next”, the sea “incarnates the rocks with a quilt of seaweed”, in one place and leaves a “revelation of mud” in another, while an ostensibly happily married man discovers kisses can’t wait to “scamper off his lips” when he thinks of his new mistress.  

I suspect that few readers will love every story, as they cover so many subjects and styles. However, every reader will find their favorites here while gaining a broad and complex view of how much humanity one region can hold and how much of it one writer can depict.