Natural Habitat
By Michelle Reale

Reviewed by Erin McKnight

Burning River, 2010
Perfect Bound; 56pp; $5

It may be the place we know best, the one most often explored, but the construction of home—especially when unfamiliar and belonging to someone else—makes for one of the richest, and rawest, settings of contemporary literature. Arguably no other thematic domain signifies the same level of ambiguity as is located in the examination of where we come from, and whether that environment remains a fixed testament to where we belong.

In Natural Habitat, Michelle Reale confronts the issue of “true home,” as she queries in her short short story collection’s introductory statement: “Who belongs? Who doesn’t? How much of that is just a creation of our minds?” Guided by a New Yorker cartoon depicting two fish swimming in the sea, only to have one declare that “Even in water, I don’t feel like myself,” it is the fundamental search for self—conducted through a navigation of neighborhood—that Reale undertakes with earnest determination and winsome trepidation in this spirited grouping of brief tales.

Composed of twelve stories that have seen publication in venues like elimae, Word Riot, and Dogzplot, Habitat takes its reader to the streets of Reale’s Italian-American community and inside the homes of people who colored the film of a past she is willing to hold up to the light—even if the harshness of adulthood and the disappointment that often comes with leaving and then attempting to reexamine or reclaim an early environment, illuminates the distressing composition of adolescence.

Redolent of The House on Mango Street in that Reale’s loose compilation of domestically and communally derived vignettes feel fragmentary and oblique, yet undertakes similar familial, gender, and ethnic issues that pulsed in Cisneros’ pages with an authentic pluckiness, Natural Habitat is concerned with the microcosm of community and what it means to be within or without such a socially determining framework.

From the new mother trying to connect with an equally lonely and ill neighbor, to the uncle who knows too much about his brother’s daughter, forced Friday dinners, and a family leaving the old neighborhood for greener pastures, Habitat confronts the bounds of belonging—whether mapped by geography or blood. Much in the way that a conversation between relatives may bypass the niceties of “proper” discourse, Reale’s stories are constructed with a directness that cuts to the emotional quick and reveals the often-guarded intricacies of domestic behavior and feeling.

Within negative space that appears to embolden Reale’s rendering of the past, the painful, and the profoundly ordinary, a recurring smoke/smoking motif works to distort a memory that the author seems utterly devoted to animating. The stories of Natural Habitat, then, despite their honest and at times harsh rendering, are shrouded in a fog of cigarette smoke that feels reminiscent of time passing and of a past obscuring itself. For despite an earnestness of character and authorship, gleaned from this collection is the notion that one can never really go back; that although the intention may be sincere and a work pure, we remember what we experience—which very often stands in stark contrast to what actually occurred.

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Prick of the Spindle fiction editor Erin McKnight is a Scottish-born writer now living in Texas. Her writing has been nominated for Best of the Web, the Pushcart Prize, and W.W. Norton’s The Best Creative Nonfiction. Her collection of short short stories, To the Quick, was published by Recycled Karma Press, and her reviews of fiction and poetry titles can be found at Bookslut.com. Erin holds an MFA in creative writing and currently teaches fiction writing online and in the Dallas community college system.

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