Book Review: Company
Company by Shannon Sanders (Graywolf Press, 2023).
On one level, reading Shannon Sanders’s debut collection of short stories is like carefully piecing together a large, intricate puzzle. Company centers on three generations of the Collins family—from the grandparents who ran an Atlantic City nightclub, to the grandchildren scattered around New York and D.C.—along with many of their neighbors, friends, and other occasionally surprising connections. It moves back and forth through time and space, and with each move it grows more and more intriguing.
Sanders is a master at threading surprising little twists and startling revelations throughout these interlocking stories. She’ll withhold something important over here only to spring it on us without warning over there, so that our perspective keeps shifting and broadening. Even the simple family tree at the beginning of the book, with one name corrected and another person apparently written in last-minute, holds subtle clues to information that will eventually become significant. (But Sanders, true to form, teases us with a completely different family tree in “Rioja” before she finally deals with that one!)
The office flirt who briefly annoys us in “Mote” suddenly appears in “Dragonflies” as a woman longing for a child and dealing with her own mother’s disapproval. In “Bird of Paradise,” we see Cassandra, the new provost at a D.C. university, anxiously hoping her nieces will do her credit at the party her boss throws for her; in “La Belle Hottentote,” we get to find out what her nieces think of that hope. In one of my favorites, “The Gatekeepers,” the connection to the Collins family is so slight that it took me multiple readings to spot it, but once I did, it threw new light on the character of Janet and her clashes with her son’s young family.
But despite all this, to describe this short story collection as a puzzle doesn’t do it justice. Because these stories are first and foremost exactly that—stories. All this interweaving isn’t just to show us Sanders’s skill, though it certainly does that; its purpose is to draw us wholly into the life of one Black family and the communities around them, with all their virtues, foibles, and conflicts. Every puzzle piece that clicks satisfyingly into place, in addition to building the overall picture, shows us all kinds of new angles on these people. Every small decision, every little change in plans, not only reveals more depths of character but also has the potential to lead us off in unexpected new directions.
Sanders writes with a deep understanding of generational connections and divides, and a patient affection for even her most wayward characters. She also excels at changes in mood, from comic to wistful to suspenseful. “Mote” is a slow, slow burn of a story that follows one particularly frustrating character, making us wonder why she can’t get her act together, until one final reveal upends it all and makes horrifying sense of every strange act we’ve witnessed. The night I read it—I’m not joking—I had to turn a light on in the hallway before I could walk through the house. There was nothing at all gory or violent about it; it was the clever use of psychological horror that left me shivering.
Though the other stories don’t delve so far into the supernatural realm, most of them deal with life’s stresses and fulfillments in equally powerful ways. But much as I loved this collection, I did find a few of the stories less effective than others, especially toward the end of the book. “Three Guests” feels like little more than a rehash of one of the book’s best stories, “Rule Number One”; I’m not sure the ending of “The Opal Cleft” fully addresses the story’s central conflict; and the title story, “Company,” leans too far into the “bitter spinster” stereotype for my liking (and just when it had seemed to promise something different and better).
But then the final story, “The Everest Society,” turns things around and ends the book on a note of warmth and hope that lingers pleasantly in the memory. Sanders, a sharp observer of history and culture, can satirize with the best of them, but she isn’t afraid to let her characters embrace life’s goodness when they get the chance, and that gives them great appeal.
(Cover image copyright Graywolf Press.)
Book Links:
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