Review: Tortured Relationships In East End Locales Is The Theme Of Raebeck’s “Night Life”

Some months ago in the BC (Before COVID) era, East Enders had a couple of chances to hear Ross School English teacher Shelby Raebeck’s short story, “Fremont’s Return,” a caustic, clever, at times bitterly hilarious two-part narrative turned into a dramatic monologue and delivered in a right-on deadpan performance by actor Gerard Doyle. It’s his hope, Raebeck says, that in the AC era, he will be able to schedule more readings. In the meantime, “Fremont” returns — again — as one of 16 stories in Raebeck’s collection of new and selected stories, “Night Life.” Most have local East End landscapes — Lazy Point, Promised Land, Louse Point, Amagansett, Springs — against which Raebeck crafts scenes from the disjointed lives of moody inarticulate youngsters and alienated working and middle class adults who make these communities their home.

Those who attended readings of “Fremont’s Return” may welcome the opportunity to see up-close how Raebeck juggles cynicism and sympathy and moves expertly to the finish line. It’s the longest piece in the collection and well worth future performances.

Taking place at a school called Hampton Country Day, its first-person narrator begins by correcting a rumor that he’s been fired. He’s on probation, he says, but he will soon admit that his condition is deteriorating — personally and professionally. But oh, are his high school students going to get a piece of his mind about teaching, learning, life: “What I wish for you, minions, is abject degradation and unendurable humiliation…”

And then in Part II, five years later, Fremont is back to give the school’s commencement address and confront his most ardent student nemesis.

Though “Fremont’s Return” gives ample evidence of the author’s ear-perfect voice in capturing the confusion, disillusion and often manic behavior of those who sense, but cannot control, the various entropic assaults on their lives, the characters in Raebeck’s other stories more typically take some refuge living in a beautiful place. In “Walking Dunes” a mother and daughter drive by Town Pond in East Hampton with the mother noting that the two swans are still there. The daughter demurs, “they’re not the same ones,” but the mother counters, “It’s the idea that’s the same.” Game on: tension, despair, impotence, acquiescence.

Raebeck’s signature style is to combine, casually, discrete details that signal the nature of his characters, as in the opening story, “Trophies” — “Willie had left Long Island Christmas day thirteen years earlier when, a little more than a year after our dad died, Willie and me moving back into the house, working together banging nails, my mother found him in the garret over the garage with a neighbor who lived two doors down, a widow twenty years older, the two of them lying amongst the garbage bags of clothes Mom’d been collecting but never delivering to Goodwill.”

The title story “Night Life” might be the weirdest or most surreal in the collection, as Raebeck metaphorically explores yearning for freedom by way of gangs of forlorn delinquent school kids who learn how to hang in trees or from building and bridges at night in the city, his narrator invoking not just ghetto slang but Foucault’s pendulum and Sisyphus. For sure, Raebeck demonstrates a wide range of subject matter.

“Freetown” may be of special interest to East End readers, many of whom do not know that this part of East Hampton, off Three Mile Harbor Road, was once a Black neighborhood. One of the shortest pieces in the collection — about a tentative friendship between two high school basketball players, one Black the other white, taciturn kids with “skills and above-the-rim hopes,” “Freetown” resonates in this era of BLM, as a pull-over check of the boys by a police car insidiously turns dark. Ricky, the white kid concludes, “…I just stood there looking at him, saying nothing, watching him turn again and walk off across the gym, the expanse between us widening, the curve of the earth itself rising up into the hard shining floor.”

Raebeck notes that often the order of any short story collection can be arbitrary, though he adds that “Trophies,” his newest, was a good introduction to the overall theme of “tortured relationships” that defines the volume, and that the last story, “Promised Land,” felt like a closer because “it deals with the tension out here between the reality of people’s unsettled lives and the place’s alluring beauty.” Unsettling, surprising, in many ways, these are stories for our time by a talented writer the East End can call its own.