The Opposite of Loneliness
We don’t have a word for the opposite of loneliness, but if we did, I could say that’s what I want in life
The Opposite of Loneliness brings together Marina Keegan’s
short stories and essays, both previously published and unpublished, to great
effect. Personally, I have rarely found the draw of short stories alluring. I
see Edgar Allen Poe as overtly sombre and more akin to something I would have
read at school, and Ali Smith unsatisfactory – without the chapters of back
story I can find her work clipped, and care little for the characters. However –
Marina Keegan shows masterful skill over the short story and for the first time
had me rapt. After each story I felt as though I needed a break, to digest and
wrap myself in the characters for a moment. They did not appear to be the
beginnings of a novel, each one, in a chapter sized length, is a whole and complete
journey –rarely resolved by our writer, however never concluded predictably. I
loved Reading Aloud, where sixty-something Anna strips as she reads for
twenty-something Sam, and also Cold Pastoral, an examination of how you might
feel when someone you are sleeping with passes away, when you do not have the
title of “girlfriend” or “wife” – how are you meant to feel?
It cannot be said that Keegan is narrowed to one style – The
Opposite of Loneliness shows her style to be far ranging. Challenger Deep is
horror-esque in the details, what it would be like to be 36,000 feet deep in
the ocean in pitch black with food stocks depleting, and then later, Keegan
changes gear and talks us through her first car, and what it smelt like and
what it saw in Stability in Motion. The key to a body of work like this
thriving when it is written by someone so young, and this is something that was
touched upon by Anne Fadiman, is that, whilst I’m sure she could, she does not
try to dazzle you with her sophistication, or cleverness – instead, with fresh
and pure writing, she captures exactly how it feels to be 20 or 17 or 22.
We’re so young. We’re so young. We’re twenty-two years old. We have so much time.
Marina graduated from Yale in 2012 and was due to start her
inevitably successful career at the New Yorker when she died in a tragic car
accident. And whilst the word tragic is sometimes overused, and potentially cliché
– I would argue that it is entirely pertinent. Whilst I considered leaving out
this detail as I believe her body of work is so much more than the fact it is
posthumous – it would thrive if Marina herself were publishing it, but I
believe it makes her work even more poignant. Part of this comes in the
finality; we will likely never see any more of her work. Further to this, death
is a recurrent theme in her work, and Marina’s death adds extra weight to her
comments about her future children and the parties she will throw when she’s
thirty.
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