Review: “Enough to Lose,” RS Deeren.
RS Deeren. Enough to Lose. Michigan: Wayne State University Press, 2023.
In the tradition of Willa Cather, Theodore Dreiser, Jim Harrison, and Bonnie Jo Campbell, RS Deeren deftly weaves short stories with deceptively simple, linear prose that contextualize cultural values and lived experiences rooted in rural, remote landscapes. An equal character in Deeren’s Michigan, violence from the land and its rural precarity predictably gnaws away at any conception of idealistic pastoralism. Deeren’s style is like the river that flows through the landscape surrounding Caro -- a seemingly pure, pristine and deadly body of water whose undercurrent carries fist-crushed cans of angstily emptied cheap beer. Enough to Lose is a masterclass in intergenerational midwestern gothic showcasing geographic space and time’s pull-on hopes, dreams, grief and loss.
Ranging from 1986 to 2019, characters recur through the stories, showcasing the complexities, closeness and loneliness over three decades of the Midwest’s most radical changes. While everything changes, like the introduction of wind turbines to generate clean electricity and smart phones that record and swiftly share posed selfies and real violence, the through lines of desperation and loss remain constant. The collection opens with “The Mirror,” in which a great flood sweeps away the new home of the Chuberts, but the great loss in this story isn’t the home—it’s Jackie’s husband Chub who wades through the flood waters to retrieve supplies and family heirloom: a mirror. The house, along with Chubs and the mirror, are washed away downstream, leaving Jackie, pregnant and bereft, to pick up the pieces. Subsequent stories detail the lives of a kid who crashes his dad’s car on a bridge over the river, a man trying to make ends meet by mowing the lawns of bank-owned homes during the great recession while his wife tries to build an MLM empire to support a hoped-for baby, and other normal albeit grinding narratives of poverty, violence and dreams deferred.
In the final story, “Streaks of White and Color,” a promising young artist dies after drinking and driving too fast. In her final moments, “Leah died slowly from drowning [...] she figured she was dreaming and was scared that, when she woke up, she’d still be tired, unemployed and drunk.”[1] In their mourning, her friends return night after night to the riverside under the bridge where she ran off the road, and her friend Jennifer relents: “In my mind, it’s like she’s dying over and over again and I can’t do anything to stop it.”[2] Similarly, Deeren hurtles readers through narrative after narrative of desperation and loss, and no one, including the reader, can do anything to stop it.
In the unfurling of white working-class rural truths of hardship, Deeren captures the essence of growing up and aging in a place of contradictions: a community that worships rugged individualism, hard-told lived truths clashing with misinformation, and desperation—for security, a life well lived—that serves to pull down the bootstraps instead of pulling them up. My husband and I, too, grew up in rural Michigan in these same decades, raised by working-class parents. The bars, diners and riversides that are the place markers of the rural region are hauntingly familiar; but I only took up the coffee and vodka, not the cigarettes and beer. To me, Deeren’s characters and their losses hit almost too close to home, and triggered a grotesque nostalgia for a predictable, unexpectant destiny so completely antithetical to my present educated, middle-class reality.
Schemes and thwarted future plans are the overarching theme of Enough to Lose. In their own unique ways, each primary character desires growth—of family, of business and money, or of self-respect. But the twist of the Midwestern gothic is to use the horrors of the real to turn hopes to fears, growth to rot, dreams to nightmares, life to death. There are no safety nets, no one to swoop in and save the day. In the end, Deeren’s characters tell us, as with McKinnon in “Her, Guts and All”: “...in the planning for life, the days spent working toward the next, [was] where the violence happened.”[3]
Michelle M. Campbell is Program Director of Culture, Grants, and Advancement in the Office of Culture, Community, and Equity at University of Michigan. She completed her PhD in English at Purdue University where she specialized in Midwestern literature and radical political theory. She was born and raised in rural west Michigan. After a decade of living and working outside of Michigan in the Midwest and the South, she has gladly returned home to Michigan.
[1] RS Deeren, Enough to Lose. (Detroit: Wayne State UP, 2023, 148).
[2] Ibid., 161.
[3] Ibid., 102-103.