Customer Reviews

Now You See It . . .: Stories from Cokesville, PA

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Appropriately titled, "Now You See It...Stories from Cokesville" describes the existence and sudden disappearance of a Pennsylvania mining town. The immigrant miners who toil in desperately difficult circumstances and their children who either similarly submerge themselves into the mines or who desperately seek to leave lead fractured, hard lives. Author Bathsheba Monk mixes magical realism, incongruous happenings and a deep respect for the consequences of misery in her seventeen connected short stories. Despite the somewhat uneven quality of several stories, the result is a compelling, forceful and foreboding depiction of a way of life that once defined our national experience and has since been outsourced.

Annie Kusiak, whose character development is the strongest thread interweaving the short stories, represents the disillusion, resentment and frustration of second-generation Cokesville residents. She flees the danger and bleak hopelessness of the community but fails to eradicate its impact on her life. The adult Annie, bouncing from one unsatisfying relationship to another, laments having "lost our...connection to the earth...like balloons that some child has carelessly released." Hardly "recognizable...soon no one will see us and it will be as if we never existed." If nothing else, those who survive Cokesville are tough cookies. For instance, Annie off-handedly describes how coal companies return one-hundred-seventy-five pound ingots to families whose men have fallen into vats of molten steel. In Cokesville, "people found it as normal to view a 'Made in USA' stamp on a slab of steel as it was to view a face made up with lipstick" in a coffin.

The characters of Cokesville are lost souls, and it is not uncommon for them to simply disappear, some by virtue of the lures of a sexy magician, others, like Theresa Gojuk, to Hollywood. One of the most plaintive is the spinster Margaret, who thwarted ambitions for love leads her to ask the most elemental questions about life: "Is it possible to cease to exist because no one is paying attention to you?" Margaret speaks for all lost souls when she cries, "If you become invisible, are you already dead?"

In this respect Bathsheba Monk makes her art a form of social protest. Today, in the world of NAFTA and free trade, who other than artists decry the forced extinction of towns that provided the very resources that made the United States a world power? Who other than story tellers can relate the acute loneliness, social marginalization and unarticulated pain miners harvested with every chunk of coal extracted from the bowels of the earth? Monk makes us recognize that no matter how hard anyone hopes to escape a defining environment, disappearing is no easy task.

Like, I suppose, many readers, I bought this on the strength of the wonderful New York Times magazine piece. In that piece an uppity ex-pat returns to her decaying native rustbelt town, confidently believing that "home-keeping youths have ever homely wit" and tactlessly attempts to instruct the local yokels in ways of escape..

That clash remains a theme of this book. It also displays the same mordant wit. The humor is black and bitter and often has death as a topic. The steel mills and coal mines that are closing down were hideously dangerous, but the close-knit ethnic Slavic community suffers from their passing.

It's a collection of inter-related stories containing the ghost of a novel. The novel would have been about the Gojuck and Kusiak families. Their daughters, Theresa and Annie escape from Cokesville, Pennsylvania to Los Angeles and Boston, and hook up with Jews and Episcopalians, but keep getting reluctantly pulled back to their roots. Some of the stories that were not about members of the two families were brilliant but distracted from what could have been an even better novel.. I suspect that Bathsheba (love that name) Monk could not bear to leave out her best bits, which is understandable because some of them are very good indeed.

Bathsheba Monk's "Now You See It... Tales from Cokesvillem PA" is one of the finest story collections that I've ever read. She portrays the citizens of a decaying rust belt city--those who stayed and those who left--with compassion and intelligence, charm and sensitivity, grace and wit. This is a book that will make you both laugh and cry. A must.

Don't you love it when you pick up a book at the library, almost by chance, and end up really enjoying it? "Cokesville" was a sweet surprise of a collection of stories. Monk is a fine storyteller and writer. There aren't that many books I read from the library and end up buying a copy to read again or loan to friends, but "Cokesville" is a keeper.

Bathsheba's, Now You See It, is a collection of short stories with a common thread. People you meet in one story, occasionally have ancillary roles in a later story. The format of short stories with a common thread gives us the best of both worlds--at first we are relieved that we are only committed to reading a few pages; then, when we regret that the story is over, we look forward to the possibility of hearing more about the same people in a later chapter.

The characters are all from the same dying community. The residents want to continue on with their parochial lives, but life changes. Some of the characters plod on in misery; a few were brave enough and smart enough to leave, while some simply committed suicide.

Bathsheba has an amazing talent for telling captivating stories about ordinary people. She only needs a few words to nail down the essence of her characters. You just feel like you know these people, you care about them and are charmed by them and affected by their fortunes and misfortunes. At times you wish you could knock some sense into them, yet you know them well enough to realize that it would be impossible for them to change.

I loved these stories! It's hard to choose my favorite, but I loved, "Mrs. Herbinko's Birthday Party." She dies and heaven hands her a frustrating bureaucratic snafu-- but with a happy ending. Another favorite is "Mrs. Szewczak and the Rescue Dog." In a life and death situation, Mrs. Szewczak finds that the people she has always feared are worthy of her trust. And, the trustworthy learn once again, that no good deed goes unpunished.

Now You See It reminds me of The Last Days of Dogtown, the latest novel by Anita Diamant (best known for the Red Tent). The books are similar because both are about the ordinary lives of the people in a dying community. Of the two books, I enjoyed Now You See It, the first novel by a new writer, over the work of a well-known writer. What a pleasure to find a new writer who can tell a great story without relying on a serial murderer to hold our interest!

I was stunned as I read this new voice, whose stories of Cokesville and its inhabitants thrilled me with laughter, tears and hope for us all. I remember a guy yelping about how Italians weren't anything like the Sopranos on TV. The mope totally missed the poetic journey of Tony and the gang. As the Sopranos is about the great large family under the tragic duress of societies forces, we are all from Cokesville, every one of us, and the life of it is the life of America, perhaps beyond. I am moved by this author's humanity and her powerful way with the page.

Now You See It...Stories from Cokesville, PA is a wonderful read. It tacks into the dark of the human condition but at the same time is wildly funny. My favorite story is "Mrs. Szewczak and the Rescue Dog." Or is is it "Annie Kusiak's Meaning of Life." Or is it...? I keep changing my mind as I re-read. Monk's is the most compelling voice to come out of PA since O'Hara and Updike. Kudos, Ms. Monk!

I thoroughly enjoyed this book.Bathsheba Monk has written an evocative bildungsroman of life in a small Pennsylvania city on the verge of collapse. She has unsparingly written of the good times and the bad times with humor and with sentimental empathy.By couching her story in a series of connected short-stories,she was able to write of different, disconnected time periods and to introduce people,places and events important in her life in a non-linear stream. she was also able to write the growing-up stories of her close friends, not only in relation to herself,but almost as secondary biographies. Bathsheba Monk writes beautifully, and I found the book a pleasure to read.

With a Chicago Tribune best book of the year pick and good reviews from the likes of the New Yorker and Esquire, it should be no huge surprise that Bathsheba Monk is an exciting new talent. However, I didn't know all of that when I started reading this book. I selected it because I am a writer who also lives in the quirky state of Pennsylvania, and that was enough to pique my interest.

By page two, I knew I was in for a treat. There are several moments during this collection of stories that have stayed with me. In "Congratulations, Goldie Katowitz," a young woman admits to her Uncle that she may not have the skill to become the writer she wants to be. "It was true. Every time I tried to imagine the lives of people I knew, it was like creating fanciful, useless additions to structures that couldn't support them. The whole thing crumbled." I like the fact that Bathsheba Monk can pin point and describe such an artistic hurdle and then so deftly overcome it by giving us such a rich and dynamic population.

In her description of Theresa, the Hollywood starlet who reaches for a glass that isn't there, she writes that she later jumps up, "her drink welded to her fist." A simple phrase, but placed there it suddenly conveys all of her connection to and loathing of the town of Cokesville. And so voila, you have a character upon whose head you can practically balance a book. But she is only one of a large cast of such succinctly described and original personalities.

Now You See It... is a collection of short stories, but the stories are woven together making it feel closer to novel form. Characters reoccur, develop from one story to the next, and so when you become attached to one you know there is a possibility you will meet them again in future pages, as so often you do. Spanning over forty years, each story is anchored with the year it is set in and then you are either in Cokesville, a dying mining town, or out of it, having escaped with one of its eager and often slightly bitter refugees. Anyone who knows what it is like to hate a place and want nothing more than to leave it will feel for them, and anyone who knows how impossible it is to ever completely leave your roots behind will find the often morbid moments as funny as they are tragic.

Review by Jennifer M. Wilson

This book slowly and inexorably lets you know that you are on the trail of something new and worthy, a study of a time and place not so different from where we grew up, and of those who were trapped and/or tried to escape to a worthier life, whatever that may be. With hints of Anderson's "Winesburg, Ohio", it leaves aftertastes of nostalgia, sadness, amusement and the quiet tragedies of everyday life. Monk is someone we will hear from again, and with great anticipation.