The characters in "How Strange a Season," Megan Mayhew Bergman's latest collection of fiction, tend to anticipate slights and subtext. In "Workhouse," Marianna tells her father "You'll love it" when he plans to move to Sardinia. Her father replies: "So you can't wait for me to leave?"
Most of the relationships found here rely heavily on provocation; love must be proven again and again. Failing that, people choose to experiment with power. In "Wife Days," Farrah lounges in bed and idly threatens her husband with exposure of his embarrassing family secrets. Regan Love enjoys intimidating her male clients with her mechanical prowess in "The Heirloom."
In the stories "Inheritance" and "A Taste for Lionfish," women appraise men they barely know, trying to decide if the strangers are in need of help, and if helping them is worth the risk.
As in Bergman's earlier works, the prose regards nature with awe and curiosity. A donkey becomes an improbable pet; the world, as seen through the filter of an Adirondack lake, becomes manageable. The intensity of the Arizona sun is a part of Regan's power; in "Peaches, 1979," Darcy's farm suffers under a different era's relentless sun.
At times the nod to climate change feels slightly perfunctory (the house on the cliff in "Inheritance," seen alongside the threat of local slides); at others, it feels urgently entwined with the narrative, such as the storm in "A Taste for Lionfish." Bergman's ability to capture the force of weather, the dignity of animals, and the beauty of vegetation are all present throughout this collection.
There is a fair amount of repetition from one story to the next. The phrase "power pose" appears several times (in "Wife Days" and "The Heirloom"); the notion of "big feelings" also surfaces in multiple stories. Specific details — handshakes as a show of strength; the image of a terrarium; inherited waterfront properties — appear again and again, linking stories that otherwise seem unconnected.
Some of the works are brief glances into the lives and landscapes in which women have found themselves. "Peaches, 1979" has enough of a family saga in it to carry its own novel; the same is true of "Indigo Run." "Indigo Run," significantly longer than any other piece, makes the relationship between weather and story plain: "[Skip] liked bad weather. Dramatic weather. The kind you could watch unfold like a movie. The kind that made you feel small and ridiculous."
Like "A Taste of Lionfish," "Indigo Run" confronts the question of how to manage personal property with ties to historic atrocity (in this case, Stillwood, Skip's family's plantation).
Skip, like many of Bergman's characters, is strong-willed, sharp-tongued and interested in power. She prowls Stillwood, waiting for a storm to demolish it; meanwhile, Bergman offers a history of Skip's ancestors. In this way — clinging to property but hoping to see it destroyed — "Indigo Run" holds echoes of Regan's sentiment in "The Heirloom": "People were engaged in a cycle of coming and going," Bergman writes, "perpetually deciding to stay or to leave." These stories capture those cycles beautifully.
Jackie Thomas-Kennedy's writing has appeared in One Story, Electric Literature, Lenny Letter, Narrative, Harvard Review, the Ploughshares blog, and elsewhere. She held a 2014-2016 Stegner Fellowship at Stanford University.
How Strange a Season
By: Megan Mayhew Bergman.
Publisher: Scribner, 282 pages, $25.
