BookBrowse Reviews Nobody Gets Out Alive by Leigh Newman

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Set mostly in Alaska, these wildly twisting, often hilarious short stories explore the lives of a variety of characters with unmet needs and big dreams.

The eight stories in this collection reveal rugged characters tangled up in complicated relationships with each other and the wild terrain they inhabit. Stories mostly take place in the 49th state of Alaska, a region that looms large in the popular imagination. Its landmass is greater than the size of Texas, Montana and California combined, but its population is less than one million.

Author Leigh Newman, who grew up in Alaska, has a talent for exploring decades in the span of a single paragraph. She also has a fine eye for humorous, descriptive images. In "Howl Palace," the narrator, Dutch, prepares to sell her home: "…every good thing that had ever happened to me had happened in Howl Palace. And every bad thing too. Forty-three years. Five husbands. Two floatplanes. A lifetime. It felt as if I should honor my home, that strangers shouldn't come around poking through the kitchen or kicking the baseboards, seeing only the mold in the hot tub and the gnaw marks on the cabinets…" Things do not go as planned during the open house, but life rarely does in these stories.

Details of characters' inner lives surface through vibrant descriptions that are often hilarious. In "Howl Palace" we meet Carl, the "beautiful, bedeviling heartbreak" of the narrator's life. She notes, "His smell was the same as ever: WD-40, line-dried shirt, the peppermint soap he used to cut through fish slime."

In "Valley of the Moon," estranged sisters Becca and Jamie meet at a wine bar in Anchorage and excavate the events of their traumatic childhoods. The emotional turbulence of their present lives also begins to surface more and more — with many twists and turns — the longer they're at the bar.

In one of my favorite stories, "High Jinks," preteen Jamie flies off to fish for a week with her best friend, Katrina, and Katrina's dad. Jamie's own drunk father catches up four days later, and the family dynamics are complicated by rivalry, grudges, secrets and a dispute about a trophy bearskin. "High Jinks" describes survival in the wilderness and also the larger struggle to endure a world where children have no power but parents and other adults are unreliable.

Grown-up Katrina makes an appearance in the story "Nobody Gets Out Alive," which spirals out emotionally from the scene of an elaborate wedding party at a "log-cabin mansion" honoring Katrina and her new husband Carter. Carter has just arrived in Alaska, and by mid-party he is worried: "Was this marriage, he wondered, how well the worst in you worked with the worst in the other person? … He and Katrina had years to find out, a lifetime, once they staggered home through the snow together."

Newman deploys multiple points of view to stunning storytelling effect in "Alcan, An Oral History," which focuses on several wayward people traveling from the Lower 48 to Alaska. There's a family on the run from hard times, whose story is told from the perspective of the daughter, Janice, with another section narrated by the mom, Laurel. Readers also encounter best friends Maggie and Danielle, recent college graduates driving a VW Bug with "twelve ounces of home-grown sewn into the backseat upholstery and $1,136 American packed inside a half-full jar of Folgers crystals." They all end up together in a diner where a waitress, Maureen, narrates a section of the story from her vantage point. In a splendid flash forward 20 years, future Danielle writes to Maggie to catch up about their lives. There are enough twists and turns here to propel a novel or a feature-length film; these are entertaining, tender portraits of people with unmet needs and big dreams. The narrative consistently renders human consciousness with exquisite compassion and detail.

The chronology is non-linear, and the final piece in the collection, "An Extravaganza in Two Acts," takes place in 1915 in the region now known as Anchorage. The author explores early white settlement here, and foreshadows decades of ecological exploitation.

"The fires on the bluff above Ship Creek burn all day. Forty square miles of spruce forest crashing and collapsing into white ash and wind. Take a breath and you taste burnt sap. Cough and a black deposit, the size of a lozenge, glistens dully on your handkerchief. Bald eagles scream through the smoke and skeleton trees."

"Extravaganza" centers on the people involved in two unhappy female-male pairings, and the flare of attraction between the women.

Nonconforming white women frequently take center stage in Newman's stories. This collection turns a lens directly on people who have migrated to and inhabit the northern wilds for assorted reasons, and who grapple with circumstances of emotional as well as physical survival. Considering that the presence of Indigenous Alaskans, who comprise about 15% of the state's population, is occasionally alluded to, I am curious about how the fictional characters in Newman's stories might feel or think about their own settlement on native lands.

Nobody Gets Out Alive may appeal to book groups or classrooms that want to explore separate stories. It's also an ideal take-along for those heading to Alaska on holiday. Thematic crosscurrents include identity, family dynamics, taking risks, coming of age and humans vs. the ecosystem. In a contemporary world where provisions can be procured at big box stores, essentials like kindness, love and sustainable home lives seem notably scarce. While it's true that in life, nobody gets out alive, the characters in this collection usually manage to land on their feet despite immense challenges.

This review was originally published in The BookBrowse Review in May 2022, and has been updated for the May 2023 edition. Click here to go to this issue.