Book Review: Shelby Raebeck's 'Louse Point'

The main appeal of Shelby Raebeck’s short stories in his collection “Louse Point” is their ear-perfect dialogue. People talk like that — past each other, on parallel lines of self-interest, vaguely hearing the other, responding with sound, if not sense. The conversations, the heart of Raebeck’s style, whether first or third-person point of view narrations, could almost be snippets from plays — Sam Shepherd plays, with their bleak comic observations, irrelevant interjections and odd pauses — all serving the speech rhythms of characters who don’t quite fit in or who live on the edge in modest areas. Certainly Raebeck is unusual in noticing those who live in Freetown, an area north of the village of East Hampton originally inhabited by freed slaves and relocated Montauketts.

Raebeck’s characters will likely never change. Though they may toy with the possibility, they will never be better (whatever they think this means), though they will likely not be worse. Raebeck’s talent is such that he can suggest indifference or depression in just few words, as he does in the opening line of the first story, “Dream Girls”: “I wake intermittently to the distant scraping sounds of my father in the basement patching the foundation, but remain in bed on the second floor until finally, near noon, my sense of obligation yields to the weightless comfort of doing nothing.”

“Nothing” punctuates other sentences as well, as characters yield silently to the sounds of the nearby ocean, going about their daily, lackluster routine of being alive. The marvel is that they persevere.

At times, Raebeck will insert telling details in the middle of a sentence, thus pushing meaning forward and back: “With Sydney again strapped in behind her — Darlene’s older sister had been killed as a teenager riding in the passenger seat — they joined the line of cars headed out to the island’s eastern tip.”

“Weird” often describes the effect of a Raebeck sentence, as he compresses odd details that subtly define a character’s socio-economic situation. Here’s the opening of ”Lazy Point”: “My twin sister Kathy said phone calls only pushed people farther away, so she rode the train three hours from Amagansett to my girlfriend’s studio in the East Village, flopped down in the beanbag chair and told me Mom had moved a bed and dresser to her studio over the garage.”

Remarkably — so different from characters typically found in fiction about the East End — Raebeck’s are mostly (not all) working class, not that educated, sons and daughters of multiple generations who have lived off the land or sea. Some are back in slightly changed form from previous publication, some are new, but all evince a slight sense of menace, unknown perhaps to themselves, until they talk or wander off, frustrated, unengaged, unmotivated. The irony is how their stories resonate with humanity — lonely or lost people who might yield to love (but won’t), angry people who might get violent (and may), ordinary people who live and make their tentative way not in The Hamptons but in places with names like Promised Land, Lazy Point, Walking Dunes, Accabonac Harbor, Two Mile Hollow, Louse Point — not Georgica. They might not exist were it not for Shelby Raebeck.

The longest and best known of the 15 stories in “Louse Point” — “Fremont’s Farewell” — is back in slightly changed form from earlier appearances as a two-part dramatic monologue by a cynical high school English teacher. Drawing no doubt on the author’s long career at Ross School, it presents Raebeck at his most comic and sarcastic, the monologue a perfect choice for a character who cannot make himself known without talking because he shines at what he says, rather than what he does or feels. As Ronald Fremont, disgraced teacher, addresses his graduating class, he exhibits a defensive arrogance that nonetheless warrants sympathy because… the reader knows he’s right. It’s a tough time to try to teach, to encourage virtue, to relate literature to life, to be honest with oneself. With mock Promethean pontification, Fremont wishes that his “minions” suffer “abject degradation and unendurable humiliation,” that they “be stretched to tearing on the ruthless rack of indifferent fate, the decrepit, starving multitudes from across the great arc of our globe converging to peck at [their] exposed, unprotected flesh, leaving [them] destitute and bloody.”

That Raebeck can manage such savage inner violence along with wistful nods to the ocean, bay and dunes shows where his heart is — if not in human nature, then in Nature itself, and a part of the glorious East End few visitors or second homeowners get to see.