Cities I've Never Lived In

November 9, 2015
The stories in Majka’s debut collection are linked in two ways: many feature the same first-person narrator, a youngish woman whose marriage has broken up, but even those that don’t have a common mood—a loneliness and yearning for something that will likely not occur. In the title story, the narrator travels from city to city going to soup kitchens—she’s not hungry for food, but for a connection, a way to be open to the people she meets there. It’s not a plan with a measurable success or failure—when it ends, she’s still looking for “an answer to the loneliness.” In “Four Hills,” she meets an appealing man, and when she sees that he’s married, she feels “the calm settling of disappointment as it joined the tide of all the other disappointments.” The stories that aren’t about this character seem to be told by her. These are set mainly in Maine, sometimes in Portland, and sometimes on islands; they feature people who are figuratively and literally getting cut off. In “Strangers,” an island loses its only grocery store; in “Saint Andrews Hotel,” a touching foray into a less realistic mode, the islanders lose their ability to reach the mainland. Though the stories seem to blend together, this seems a deliberate choice, and the result is a human and eloquent exploration of isolation.

December 15, 2015
A clutch of delicate stories, for the most part set in Maine but generally occupied by more cerebral concerns about distance and disconnection. In the title story of Majka's debut collection, the artist narrator decides to bail on a relationship and instead travel the United States to tour soup kitchens. Perhaps needless to say, it's a glum grand tour: from Buffalo to Detroit to Cleveland and then parts further west, she wrestles with the question of "what was effective art about the hungry or homeless," paralleled by her own loneliness. The other 13 stories are defined by similar emotional brittleness among its female protagonists. The narrator of "Nashua" sinks into a relationship with a heavy drinker; in "White Heart Bar," a declining marriage is paired with the narrator's contemplation of a missing girl; a child who went missing from a church's day care weighs heavily on the mind of the narrator of "Travelers." These could be the same fragile women from story to story, the same lost girls, the same despairing bars in Maine, or different ones (the narrators are typically nameless). Regardless, the emotional pitch remains the same--brittle, hurt but plainspoken, unassuming or airy prose. To her credit, Majka has a talent for striking observation. "Four Hills" opens with a brilliant line: "He had the sort of face that made me check for a ring." And "Saint Andrews Hotel" has this somber note: "We fall out of love only to fall in love with a duplicate of what we've left, never understanding that we love what we love and that it doesn't change." Such gemlike sentences come with trade-offs, though. There's little sense of forward movement, and though Majka doesn't rely on tidy endings, avoiding closure for the sake of contemplation makes these stories relatively inert. A stylist to watch but one needing a broader palette of conflicts.

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