Review by Samantha Rich
Tin House Books / November, 2019 / 246 pp
The publisher’s summary for Wyoming begins with “It’s 1988 and Shelley Cooper is in trouble,” an easy, accurate way to bring the reader in. Shelley is in trouble. Over the 130 pages of the book, he doesn’t so much find his way out of it as occasionally poke his head up for air before going under again—and every time it’s half deliberately diving, half being pushed down.
Wyoming doesn’t crackle with energy but roils with it, holding the reader’s attention with a strong narrative voice, quick-moving flow of events, and shifting perspectives on what, exactly, is going on under the surface. It tells a linear story: Shelley Cooper drives from Colorado to Texas to sell marijuana for his brother, loses the money, visits his ex-wife and son, and goes home to Colorado again. This story unfolds in alternating chapters, as Gritton tells the backstory of Shelley, his family, and his job in nonlinear patterns that loop back into the main narrative at unpredictable points.
The order of the past events alternating with the narrative present might seem haphazard, but Gritton places every piece of backstory with care, adding color and shading that illuminate the main narrative with terrible detail. The reader constantly loses her grip on characters and situations as Gritton rotates the heroes and villains to new angles. Eventually, all that remains is the fact that there are no heroes or villains at all.
Wyoming summons a host of ideas about working-class people in hard times, about people doing bad things for good reasons, about the choices one makes when there are no good choices, and presents them with raw, spare detail that reanimates potential clichés. The novel’s power derives from these details, which ground the reader in this specific story, while the broader text draws on universal actions and reactions. The red Formica table that gets moved from house to house from Shelley’s childhood to the novel’s end summons specific ideas about family and being bound together, while wearing a borrowed suit to a funeral threatens to tear two brothers apart.
Wyoming is set in the late 1980s. However, Gritton does not use pop-culture details or news references to invoke the era. The working-class people scrambling to pay for healthcare and hold on to vanishing jobs still resonate today, just as in 1988. This is both a strength of the narrative and a condemnation of a reality where not enough has changed.
Some of Wyoming’s details act as hidden prizes for readers who know the territory Gritton is writing about. I lived in Colorado and Missouri each for several years, and when Gritton describes the vagaries of taking a bus to Kansas City, or the highway that crosses the mountains near Boulder—“I drove past Nederland, past the scraggly creek that’d be a great river when the thaw come. The road corkscrewed up … And it was the same blue as in the winter, except it was dusk and not dawn this time,” I had the delight of connecting directly to the book’s exceptional detail.
A trail of breadcrumbs runs through the book, leading to questions about Shelley’s potential repression of, and inability to face and be honest with, his feelings, and whether these extend to a repressed queer sexuality. The reader could note one character sneeringly calling him a cocksucker and set it aside as another era-linked detail, but enough patterns run through the novel that this was the first question I jotted down when I finished reading. Shelley repeatedly says that his brother-in-law Mike is his best friend, that he trusts Mike above anyone else in the world, and that he will defend him against anyone’s suspicions. He thinks Mike’s eyes are beautiful. He wants to spend time with him whenever he can. He skitters close to clarity: “And I believe I’ve had my mark long as I’ve known Michael Edward Corliss. Wanting him, I mean, knowing better than to do it. Wanting him anyway.” And then turning away again.
Reading interviews with Gritton did not clarify Shelley and Mike’s relationship. He indicates that a “murkier and weirder” presentation, rather than a clear answer, was his goal. Fair enough. In that kingdom of the murky: toward the end of the story Shelley suggests to Mike that the two of them run away together. Mike says no, and while Shelley claims to know that he would answer that way, his pain is still palpable.
The final conversation between Mike and Shelley plays out over several pages, rising and falling with years of unspoken tension. Mike says to Shelley: “I never knew why and I still don’t, except you didn’t like to see me with your sister. You didn’t like seeing me with anybody but you.” Shelley addresses the reader: “He’d come to hate me. And I guess I don’t see any reason not to tell you here, I don’t see any reason not to tell you my heart was breaking. I loved him very much. Maybe I still do.” Is this romantic love, or platonic? Shelley doesn’t understand his own thoughts and emotions enough to determine the difference.
Shelley narrates from a tight first-person point of view. Over the course of the book, as each glimpse into the past adds texture to the narrative present, it becomes clearer that he sees the world as he wants to, exhibiting a stubborn refusal to consider anyone else’s perspective. Other characters offer him the opportunity to step back and look at things from another angle, over and over, but he stays where he is. Violence, shame, laughter, tears—none of them can move Shelley from where he stands and the sightline he’s used to. “You miss the signs, I guess, or anyway you can’t read them until it’s too late,” Shelley thinks. But they weren’t just signs, they were people directly asking him not to do the things he was about to do. Shelley did them anyway, then was stunned when consequences came.
Wyoming tells us that when we don’t know how to form bonds with those around us, or when we let those bonds wither and twist, we run the risk of them snapping and letting us slip away into confusion and danger, alone. It’s a powerful story that bridges the specific and the universal, telling us all about ourselves through Shelley Cooper’s stumble and fall.
Samantha Rich is a writer, reader, and history buff. She lives in Maryland with a (bossy) cat and a (nervous) dog.