The Beauty of Their Youth
A Review by Ruth Knafo Setton
In the titular story of Joyce Hinnefeld’s wondrous, pitch-perfect new collection, The Beauty of Their Youth, middle-aged Fran shepherds her college-age daughter, Miranda, through Greece and Rome, including visits to the Greek lover of her youth and the Italian friend with whom she traveled to the Greek island Naxos thirty years earlier. Miranda finds a photo of Fran and her friend after their summer of sensual awakening. “You were both so young!” she exclaims. “And so pretty!”
Studying the photo, Fran agrees that yes, they were pretty, “their faces clear and open.” They were all promise and possibility. Choices hadn’t been made yet. Doors hadn’t closed. Fran hadn’t yet rewritten the experiences of that summer to suit the myth of her life, hadn’t blocked out shadowy memories, hadn’t acknowledged the truths that lurked behind the faces in the photo.
But under the light of Mediterranean skies, where the past never dies, and you stumble into ruins at every turn, Fran confronts what really happened that summer, and how it may have determined choices she made later. While Miranda faithfully posts sound-bites of her travel experiences on social media, Fran recognizes the inherent lie of the self we present to others—the photo taken under flattering light, the moment that makes us appear carefree, happy, loved, and beautiful—and the danger of believing the myth we ourselves have created. “Did Facebook somehow make you believe you would never be truly old?” she wonders.
In the opening story, “Polymorphous,” Joan, pushing sixty, has settled into her “role of local eccentric,” but she resents carrying on her late mother’s task of driving Richard, their aging gay neighbor-tenant, to town each week to do his errands. Joan’s relationship with her mother was tense, never resolved, and Richard, who may be dying, holds secrets about her mother, secrets that Joan never probed while her mother was alive, but secrets that still crackle with urgency, and that center around the “pool of desire,” the site of Richard’s mysterious, wild parties years ago. In order to recapture self-awareness and forgiveness, Joan must reenter the past and go “back into the woods, to the deepest part. The pool of desire.”
What lies in the depths of the pool of desire? The main characters in all five stories journey back to their own deep woods, their own pool of desire, and reexamine choices they made in the past, and discover unflinching naked truths. For Joan, it may be mortality—holding tight to oneself to prevent grief from entering. For the painter Van Lloyd in the story, “Benedicta,” his quest for truth leads him to the much-reviled and feared image of “a woman’s legs parted, her cervix widened beyond recognition, for the passage of a human head.”
In “A Better Law of Gravity,” Hinnefeld reimagines Frankie from Carson McCuller’s Member of the Wedding as FJ, a college girl on a mad drive with her bitter, desperate, and over-medicated sister-in-law, who advises her to “stay away from stop signs” and hurtles down a highway in a Thelma and Louise “we’re coming loose” ride to freedom or disaster or death. But in a wonderful ending that manages to be both surprising and inevitable, FJ acts in a way that makes her feel “strong enough to hold the whole world in place with her very own arms.”
“Everglade City” follows pretty German tourist, Inge, as she moves in with a handsome alligator handler in the Florida Everglades, but as their desire for each other dissipates, Inge’s “restless anxiety” rises from the swamps of this “new-hot, green world,” and she turns to the power of guns “loaded, cocked, and aimed,” to try to make sense of a man, a place, a country she cannot fathom.
These stories, with indelible imagery and incisive language, remind us that the past cannot be changed, the future has yet to be written, but we can glimpse both past and future through a wider lens that encompasses blind spots, distortions, lies, and our myths, and perhaps open the door to new choices and possibilities. Like the pool of desire, our reflection may appear serene and still, but we know it simmers and burns deep down, where no one can see.
