Jeanne Althouse is a master of the short story and is particularly good at flash fiction, where every word has to carry its weight. This collection is longer stories, but you can see how she makes the words work for their space. Her sentences carry a lot of information. This is not writing to be rushed through: ‘Uncle lived at Grandma’s house, which smelled of peanut butter cookies, Grandpa’s cigar smoke and her old poodle who suffered from incontinence.’ Three characters and a house have been introduced in one sentence, and an unconventional placing of a pronoun has established Grandma as the significant element in this story, which is not, on the surface, about Grandma. Jeanne does this sort of thing again and again. It’s not a mistake. It’s compression of language.
The stories are grouped according to the ages of man, or woman: Secret Children; Sins and Regrets; Secret Desires and Ultimate Mystery – secrets, sins, regrets and mysteries - things people don’t talk about. You meet a woman who contemplates just how she might be related to the person who shares a cousin’s-worth percentage her DNA; a man who wonders why he wasn’t the person who paid for the groceries of the old man who couldn’t; a blind woman who never truly knows why a dance ended with ‘the air before her filling with emptiness’ and, when ‘Goran holds his breath’ you are left to finish the story for yourself, his choice unresolved.
Jeanne is a versatile writer and her stories vary in tone from the sinister to the compassionate and from the historical to the modern. There are World War Two stories and Covid lockdown stories. There are stories from the point of view of the older person looking back at a naïve childhood to the younger person learning to be astonished by a grandmother. There is variety here, not continuity. For that reason, and because they are so densely written, these stories deserve to be savored. Maybe read one at bedtime before picking up the novel you are going to be engrossed in until two in the morning (or the worthy piece of non-fiction you are going to peruse for twenty minutes before it drops on your nose and wakes you up).
But having said there is not continuity of character, place or time, there is a unifying impetus. In every story a character examines their own moral purpose and acknowledges their own choices. They might not be the choices you, the reader, think they should have made, but they are their choices and they are having to make them in the situation in which they find themselves. And that brings you face to face with your
own moral failings – the actions, feelings or desires, be they big or small, that you might not admit to, even to the person closest to you, even to yourself – the things you did or felt because of the situation in which you found yourself.
So, if you appreciate what can be done to make words work for their living and you are interested in moral dilemmas BIG Secrets Everywhere is a book for you. It might appear small on the outside but there’s a lot in it.
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