Another mainstream. A Flicker of Old Dreams

A Flicker of Old Dreams by Susan Henderson.

While I want to mainly review small press to support writers who don't have the powerhouses behind them, I just have to pause and say something about this book that came out in 2018. I'd read Susan Henderson's first book and loved it--Up from the Blue--and planned to read this one, too, but I'd put it on Kindle. And that's the problem with kindles—as you buy, you push books back and before you know it, you forget what you’ve bought. But I think we all need to read about rural America. We need to understand these dying towns. So, here's my quick review.

This story is about a young woman who yearns to leave a dying town and find her dreams. What sparks her final decision is a relationship with a complicated man who left town at the age of fourteen. He's riddled with guilt and confusion resulting from a tragic mistake that killed his brother and led to the closing of a business that had kept the dying town limping along. The boy’s character was so tarnished, he was forced to escape and find a home elsewhere. While judgement usually languishes with intimacy and relationship building, the boy’s disappearance instead contributes to imagined actions, imagined darkness, all exacerbating anger and resentment. Memory is altered; character is permanently stained. 
 
When the man returns to town to sit with his dying mother and manage her funeral, the daughter (the narrator of the book) of a funeral director and town embalmer, becomes intrigued. She, too, is an outsider, but one without his scars and drama. She now is the only friend this man has during his grief.
 
But the story is about so much more than a development of a complex relationship. It’s also  more than a story about a lonely young woman who yearns to escape a suffocating town and open up her eyes and life.
 
Susan Henderson has succeeded in developing one of the most unique characters I have ever read—death-- and in her development of death, she teaches us about intimacy and yearning for life. She writes beautifully about types of death. Death of a town when industry leaves. Death of a childhood when a tragedy kills innocence. Death of our soul, our humanity, when we suffer and blame. But it is the death of the human body where she really excels. It is here, with this amazing metaphor development, the book is lifted to a different level, from a good, entertaining story to extraordinary, insightful poetry.  
 
This past year, I embalmed Jenny Johnson, one of my high school classmates, and we never got along so well as the day I fixed her hair with rollers and painted her nails crimson, like he school’s colors.
 
Intimacy for this lonely person is achieved in her care and compassion for the body devoid of life. Details of attempts to restore life to the dead body are simply amazing. And throughout the entire novel, every inch of it, the writing is filled with smart observations that bring us closer to loneliness—which of course is a part of all death.
 
Sometimes I feel like we get along best when I tell only pieces of the truth.
 
All my life, I have learned the lesson that closeness is tangled up with rejection and shame.
 
…”Sometimes that’s a lonely place to be, and yet, you don’t really want to be on the inside, either, where you feel pressure to be someone you’re not.”
 
And on and on. I could quote and quote this book. It is filled with treasures. I am so sorry I got around to it this late, but maybe there are people out there who have not found it yet.
 
As I said, I loved Up from the Blue too. This is a different book, but it has the familiar, strong writing voice-- centered in details, filled with compassion and intimacy, always displaying competent understanding of the importance of place, and of course anchored in poetry of written word. That’s Susan Henderson.