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RANCHO WEIRDO
By LAURA CHESTER
Reviewed
by Annie Clarkson
Rancho Weirdo is a quirky collection of short fiction: 17
stories mostly set on the US/Mexican border, but also flitting to New
York and Paris. At times disturbing or monstrous, other times tender or
funny, we are drawn into a world where strange anxieties are explored,
misplaced expectations let down, and prejudices exposed. These are not
pretty or gentle worlds. These are stories where a woman has
apparitions of an Apache Indian called "Grit", girls are sent to psych
camps, and a Vietnamese house-sitter becomes aggressively
mad. There
is a clear sense of voice in all her stories: a Southwest drawl or the
voice of a child or teenager and I found the writing fast, vivid and
edgy.
The settings are not familiar to
me, but Laura Chester draws them vividly for the reader, so that we can
inhabit the desert where ‘transients’ cross the border and the ranches
where holiday-makers stay. In the first few stories we get to
grips with the territory very quickly. In Bye-Ya Con Dios a
teenage girl grapples with her relationship with her dad on a
bird-watching holiday where there are signs saying "TRAVEL CAUTION:
SMUGGLING AND ILLEGAL IMMIGRANTS MAY BE ENCOUNTERED IN THIS AREA" ; in Law of Lead opens
her house up to transients and then gets annoyed when every "Tom, Dick
and Jorgés" wants a house tour; and in La Tortuga we take
in a landscape where "Every few feet, another blue plastic bottle,
along with the occasional shoe, used baby diaper, encrusted
jeans".
The stories explore border issues
in a darkly funny way and bravely expose the ignorance and prejudices
of the everyday complaints and worries of people living or visiting the
area. The best of these "border stories", was Law of Lead, a
hilarious story that exposed the underlying prejudices of a local
do-gooder who wants to help the "transients" that pass by her house. I
laughed out loud at this story, as her "good intentions" go to pieces.
She gives them yoga blankets and burritos, but panics when they want to
swim in her pool and start smoking "something funny". It’s a real
culture/class clash and very entertaining to read.
This was what I most enjoyed about Rancho Weirdo. I
felt there is some honest and wonderful insight into how the mind
works, the "nagging voices" inside the mind, people’s rose-tinted
expectations as well as their beliefs (misinformed and ignorant at
best, out and out racist at worst) about other groups of people.
Underneath the humour, the reality in these stories is frightening, for
example in Bye-Ya Con
Dios the narrator exposes her dad’s view that gay people
and AIDS are "like a leaky pen getting all over everything". These
views are gently challenged in these stories, or set up so readers can
see how ridiculous they are and decide for ourselves.
Other stories in Rancho Weirdo focus
on peoples’ expectations of life and each other, and our struggle with
a post 9/11 society. These stories are more sad then funny. For
example, The Right
Skates is a beautiful piece of writing, capturing the pain
that is felt after a relationship is over, before a person is ready to
move on. "I crept back to the sofa in the darkness, as if I had fallen
on slick, black ice, way out in the middle of nowhere."
I didn’t find the collection
consistently brilliant; some stories passed me by a little. But I want
to mention two stories that I felt were a cut above the rest. Don’t Tell Daddy is
one of the most powerful stories in the book, exploring the experience
of young girls in a "psych camp", a "fixer-up camp". They call
themselves the Minnehahas, and cut themselves, ride horses and sit
around the camp fire where they are supposed to solve their problems.
In Curse of the Forced
Flower, an exceptional story, the rich and educated
narrator ignores the signs that her Vietnamese house-guest has serious
mental health problems:
"Maybe her family members had been
abused in the war, and she was psychologically damaged. It certainly
was a piece of American history I was ashamed of, though at the time, I
had protested, and gone to various anti-war rallies. Who was I to talk
about her strange behaviour?"
The result of her ignorance is
devastating to both of them, and is a disturbing read. The
author is
not afraid to confront issues in both these stories and explore them to
their full violent end.
As a final note, Rancho Weirdo is a
beautifully produced collection.
The stories are complemented by 50 beautiful colour drawings by Korean
artist Haeri Yoo. These images are simple, stark, oddly violent and
sexual, part human, part animal, with sometimes unidentifiable pain.
They are not illustrations for the stories, although the disturbing,
and sad quality of many of the images reflects something of the themes.
These drawings are a real treat and make this collection of short
stories quite unique.
Read one of the stories
from this collection in the New Works Review
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