Migration Patterns
by Gary Schanbacher
Published by Fulcrum Publishing
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Reviewed by Nick Capo, Assistant Professor of English, Illinois College
A Virginia transplant now living in Colorado, Gary Schanbacher holds a Ph.D. in economics, and while working in industry and academia, he apparently split his leisure time between fishing and writing fiction. Four of the stories in this collection appeared in literary journals such as Colorado Review and South Dakota Review.
As the title indicates, the author explores how a diverse range of characters deal with change, with the internal and external movements that put them in places where they are not sure how to live.
“The Sea in These Hills,” a novella, dominates the first third of the collection. It is an ambitious work that experiments with embedded flashbacks and the conventions of coming-of-age tales. Sprawling over a period of decades, it also might be seen as a love story painted in gritty realism or an ode to human resiliency.
Perhaps the funniest story in the collection is “Windship Universe Floats to Earth.” Satayan, the female main character and devotee of Eastern philosophy, experiences either an existential dilemma or a midlife crisis that makes it hard to endure some of the annoyances of every day life. Her solution to this dilemma is inventive and well attuned to the natural world.
Schanbacher’s prose style is concise and powerful. “I really admire how successful short story writers are able to distill the universe,” he told an interviewer. “Simple prose is what I aim for.” Fans of well-crafted minimalism will find much to enjoy in this collection. Here is a description of a character named Walter in “The Sea of the Hills”: “His face was beet red; sweat dripped from his nose onto the counter, the huge barrel of his midsection heaving like a bellows.”
A sad reality, given the fecund proliferation of good fiction in contemporary times, is that Schanbacher might struggle to find a readership. Yet his stories effectively weave a stand of American realism, with its recognizably human characters, together with strands of nature writing, regional writing, and well-crafted minimalism.
Read the Q&A with author on Reader’s Place on our site.
Armchair Interviews says: This writer is worth your time.