158
2021
NORTH CAROLINA L I T E R A R Y RE V I E W
WHEN WE TALK ABOUT LOVE, THERE’S PAIN a review by Helen Stead Shuly Xóchitl Cawood. A Small Thing to Want: Stories. Press 53, 2020. Ray Morrison. I Hear the Human Noise. Press 53, 2019.
HELEN STEAD earned an MFA in creative writing from the University of Missouri, Kansas City, and a PhD in creative writing from the University of Tennessee, where she was the Editor of Grist: A Journal of the Literary Arts. Her writing has appeared in journals, including Echo Ink Review, Blue River Review, and Rougarou, and has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. She previously taught at ECU and continues to serve as an Assistant Editor of NCLR from her home in Colorado.
Love is the absence of hate, like light from darkness, or goodness from evil, or so we’ve been told through fairy tales, television, and religion. But after thousands of years of writing about love, from the Sumerians’ cuneiform in Mesopotamia to Snapchatting your boo in 2020, we still don’t know what it actually is. Love is an abstraction, and the job of writers is to attempt to ground that unknown. In two new story collections, Ray Morrison’s I Hear the Human Noise and Shuly Xóchitl Cawood’s A Small Thing to Want, characters make connections to others through deaths, beatings, stalkings, cheatings, abandonments – as if inextricably linked to love – and seem to ask, can we have love without feeling its pain? These collections echo Raymond Carver’s What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, in which the title story carries the weight of the question: what is love? In it, two couples discuss the answer. Terri explains that her ex, Ed, beat her because he loved her so much and would say he loved her over and over again while pummeling her. Terri’s (now) husband, Mel, a heart surgeon, responds with a story of a brutal car accident in which the survivors, a mangled elderly couple, make it, but the old man is depressed because he can’t see out of the eye holes in his body cast. Mel exclaims, “the man’s heart was breaking because he couldn’t turn his goddamn head and see his goddamn wife.”1 Mel tries to counter Terri’s example of love with a tender moment, yet there is still pain and death in his example.
1
Raymond Carver, What We Talk About When We Talk About Love (Vintage, 1989) 126; subsequently cited parenthetically.
Carver’s connection of love to death or pain is a common theme in Ray Morrison’s I Hear the Human Noise, which takes the title of the collection from the very last sentence of Carver’s story: “I could hear my heart beating. I could hear everyone’s heart. I could hear the human noise we sat there making, not one of us moving, not even when the room went dark” (129; emphasis added). Like Carver’s matter-of-fact style, Morrison crafts death expertly, without excessive emotion or flamboyance. Morrison lives in WinstonSalem, NC, where he works as a veterinarian. The clinical approach to death in his stories is pungent. In most of them, the terrible thing happens at the beginning, not to serve as a surprise or crisis point but as an avenue to investigate the conditions necessary for it. The pacing is generally even but begs for reprieve in some moments, as tension is held high throughout, refusing the reader a chance to look away. In many of Morrison’s narratives, the deaths are a sort of mercy: in “Dawn Branch,” a troubled daughter drowns in a river. The story moves retroactively to show the relationship between the parents and the daughter, and it is revealed that the parents were afraid of their teen. In the narrative, the mother remembers the daughter’s birth, when the baby is crying on her breasts, and she “presses her daughter’s head against her, and the baby quiets” (14). On the surface, this is an affectionate moment after birth, but situ-