I'd like to comment...on IRREGULARS

and the joys of short books

The summer days are fading. We’re to that point in August where those long summer evenings are inching towards darkness a smidge earlier at the end of each day. And whereas at the beginning of summer, when the evenings stretched out and the idea of a chunky book felt like a luxury, I now find myself reaching for shorter reads. Shorter, but not less satisfying. Call it a seasonal cycle.

This weekend, Kerry Trautman’s Irregulars fit the bill perfectly. Enter a diner through the consciousness of an unnamed waitress, who, table by table, both witnesses and invents the characters who order their eggs and pancakes (and oh, the variety of pancakes!). A modern-day Purgatorio, the waitress becomes a Beatrice-fused- with-Dante-like figure to cloistered slice of northwest Ohio. We see the desires and foibles of the patrons: a woman who can’t conceive children silently seething about a brother-in-law whose former girlfriend had two abortions, a widow whose only pleasures are the birds she spies from a lounge in her retirement home and her twice weekly visits to the diner, the good-looking customer who tips well but who also had a tryst with one of the other servers only to prefer her sister.

Trautman’s waitress wades through these stories both as they stand and as a way to probe her own situation. In her own view, she’s a college graduate serving coffee, who keeps at remove from the rest of the restaurant crew, her approach to people in general. “In the end it wouldn’t matter how many parties we’d go to or pizza’s we’d share, we’d still just be ‘work friends’—” muses Trautman’s narrator. “…that messy, half-breed category of sub-par relationships where you never know if they genuinely like you or are just trying to stay on your good side so you’ll swap shifts when they need to.” She makes it clear she’s here to make money, not to bond with others. Of the customers, this waitress muses, “Flirt just enough to keep them in a good mood” but she recommends never crossing the line into actual relationships.

The line between who these people are and how she invents them in her mind blurs, and we see a writer’s cosnciouness at work. The book often comes back to the narrator’s own relationships, especially with her mother and father. The narrator’s father, we learn, dies early in life from pancreatitis due to heavy drinking. She grieves him. But it’s the relationship the waitress has to her mother that’s interesting and complex. Watching adult triplets and their mother drink cream-filled coffee, the waitress interjects a tiny bit of her relationship with her own mother: “My mom taught me to take it black. To sip slowly and with a lot of air, like wine. To drench your tongue. To respect it. To take it seriously.” This leads to a memory of preparations for a holiday dinner that doesn’t quite turn out, but there’s a real sense of connection that starts to reveal itself.

Throughout Irregulars we see how these characters, including our guide, the waitress-narrator, are suspended in a purgatory-like existence. They aren’t going anywhere. They cycle like the dishes, clean to dirty to clean again. Whereas in Dante, according to Catholic faith, those in purgatory are being cleansed and prepared for heaven, in this secular version we are left to wonder if any of these character might escape the diner, which is to say, escape themselves and their circumstances. Trautman’s language for the idea of rising beyond takes the heighten pitch of poetry—of which she also writes—about halfway through the book. The narrator, sitting around a campfire, one of the few times she indulges in out of work activities with her fellow waitresses, muses on the fire itself, a symbol of escape:

I poked at the fire with a long stick, stirring the embers, thought about how a fire grows, what feeds it. It needed the same things I do—air, food, and space to grow, spread. Flecks of gleaming ash swirled up from the flames, disappearing into the black above. I wondered where they would land, wondered what it would feel like to flicker and fly away, a fading light in the sky.

The longing here provides us with the narrator’s beautiful ache, the one she protects and hides from others. Perhaps we understand why she safeguards herself, shielding her flicker of hope to become something more, even as more seems undefined and ambigous. That’s a feeling most of us can align with, understand, and probably, if we’re being honest, have felt more than once. We constantly find ourselves in a tug-of-war between what’s safe and what we yearn for. This narrator isn’t always likeable, just as we aren’t always likeable. But she’s incredibly relateable, and that pulls us through this story, through this short but complex book. It’s complexity lurks beyond the surface.

It’s exciting, too, to see a book that focuses on work and the workplace. Given how much of our lives we give over to our workplaces, it’s amazing how little time it tends to get in print. Irregulars does not gloss the diner in some kind of meaning-making sheen. Waitressing is a means to an end. We get that clearly from this narrator. But because this waitress begins to imaginatively engage with the lives of her customers, we see that even for her, the lines blur. That doesn’t make her work more glamorous, but it does show how even when we draw the fences tight around us, we look for ways of connection and our ability to imagine. For this waitress, her imagination is her gateway to compassion. And, like her, most of us can hardly help ourselves, imagination both our way out and our way in. In our culture, work has become a source of identity and meaning, but this little book pushes back on that notion. The inner life of the narrator makes the work bearable, and the customers more human, but also the work perpetuates the purgatory-like feeling that pervades. Perhaps we need to examine our working lives more in our literarure, in the way Irregulars does. It might do us good to see our identities as something beyond our work lives, and that maybe who we are can be more than what we do to make money and make ends meet.

What I also appreciated about Irregulars is that it reads as if it could be fiction or nonfiction. Because of the way its written, I didn’t actually care much which genre I was reading. I simply wanted to follow this voice I connected with.

Finally, I loved that the author included her favorite restuarants as part of the backmatter, along with acknolwedgements and her author bio. I won’t include it here, though—that should be one of many pleasures of finishing the book.

News and Notes

Postscripts is alive and well in the world! Thanks to all of you who snapped photos to text and post on social media. So much fun. You can purchase a copy at most online booksellers.

I’m starting to book my Fall 2024 events, which includes the launch of What We Do In The Hollows, a short book of poetry and art in collaboration with the talented Sally Jane Brown. If you’re in Morgantown, WV on Friday, October 4, 2024 from 6-9 PM, we’ll be at the Art Bar. We’re doing a limited run of this collaborative effort.

I’ll be doing an event on November 1, 2024, which is World Ballet Day at Booktenders in Barboursville, WV. You can get either Fierce and Delicate: Essays on Dance and Illness or Postscripts at the store. (Why not indulge and get both?)

My friends at the WVU Press have been enjoying the State Fair of West Virginia, where, among many titles, you can check out Matthew Ferrence’s I Hate It Here, Please Vote For Me, a perfect read for this election year.