In his commencement address at Syracuse University, author George Saunders writes, “What I regret most in my life are failures of kindness. Those moments when another human being was there, in front of me, suffering, and I responded…sensibly. Reservedly. Mildly.” Failures of kindness, and the regrets they leave in their wake, permeate SCAR SONGS, a short story collection by W. Royce Adams. Over the nine stories that comprise SCAR SONGS, Adams, whose work has received Honorable Mention awards from Glimmer Train and been selected as a Notable Essay in Best American Essays 2017, writes about characters whose experiences—from the loss of loved ones to shattered relationships—have left them emotionally scarred.
Many of the stories in the collection center around illness and death. In “Ever After,” a man is forced to confront a lifetime of mistakes when his ex-wife is stricken with terminal cancer. In “Ties That Bind,” long-suppressed resentment and envy between siblings erupts when they are reunited for their mother’s funeral. And in “Scar Song,” the narrator speaks with his dying brother as he reflects on their relationship. In other stories, characters ruminate over guilt feelings, as in “Thief Catcher,” in which a supermarket employee regrets his role in the arrest of a shoplifter. Or crumble beneath the weight of a lifetime of disillusionment, as in “Winter Break,” in which a college professor suffers a mental breakdown while discussing James Joyce’s short story “Araby.”
Adams’s protagonists, often older characters delving into past memories, are typically not the victims of trauma but observers. Standing on the sidelines of other people’s anguish, these narrators suffer the inarticulable pain of survivor’s guilt—both literal and figurative—over actions they cannot take back or past neglect that cannot be addressed. There are no villains in SCAR SONGS, just ordinary, flawed people struggling with a life’s accumulation of small but significant wrongs. Adams writes the lives of his broken, haunted characters with spare but artful grace, uncovering their frailties with clear-eyed candor while acknowledging the ambiguities and contradictions of human nature. Shunning the impulse to wrap up his narratives in tidy moral lessons, Adams frequently leaves his protagonists in a limbo of unresolvable, inarticulable remorse, wracked with pain they can recognize but not quite identify. SCAR SONGS is a difficult but rewarding journey, studded with hard-won truths and sharp, if bitter, insights.
Author W. Royce Adams writes the lives of his broken, haunted characters with spare but artful grace, uncovering their frailties with clear-eyed candor while acknowledging the ambiguities and contradictions of human nature.
~Edward Sung for IndieReader