Where You're All Going

by Joan Frank

In her quartet of novellas, Joan Frank invites readers into the inner lives of characters bewildered by love, grief, and inexplicable affinities. A young couple navigates a strange friendship and unexpected pregnancy; a woman recalls the bizarre fallout of her former lover's fame; a lonely widow is drawn to an arrogant young man; a wealthy spiritual seeker grapples with what wealth cannot affect. Witty and humane, Frank taps the riches of the novella form as she writes of loneliness, friendship, loss, and the filaments of intimacy that connect us through time.

Genres: Fiction, Short Stories, Novella

234 pages, Paperback

First published February 18, 2020

Reviews

[Jennifer nyc · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a hard one to rate.

I love her sentences, I want to eat them or crawl inside them. Her analogies are unique and delightful.

The first novella in the collection of four reminded me of a cross between Denis Johnson’s, Largesse of the Sea Maiden, and Rachel Cusk’s recent trilogy - which, to me, is excellent. After that, the experience went downhill.

I solidly liked the two middle novellas, but they didn’t wow me. The last one began and ended well, (I loved Julia’s rage, and Mason’s trajectory), but regardless of how many times I tried to reread the middle, my attention wandered.

I’m curious about her as a writer. I want to read another. But now that I’ve finished this book, I’m hungry for a compelling story.

[Tash · Rating 2 out of 5]

I think I’m always wary of collections of stories, I have yet to read any where every single story satisfies, and unfortunately, with a book of only 4, of which I liked only the first, tolerated the 3rd, and slogged through the rest, there’s a lot less room to hide.

[Sarah Stone · Rating 5 out of 5]

Joan Frank’s exquisite, moving novellas feel like short novels: each one has so much in it that reading it felt like living several different lives. I was a fan of her work already and bought this book at a reading (along with her new collection of essays, Try to Get Lost), right before we went into sheltering in place.

Her sentences are extraordinary, full of electric perceptions. "People need to smooth the ground over the crater-blast, to believe that catastrophe did not happen (and never will again) if they can make themselves forget it enough, that most days they will get up to place two feet on a firm floor and find the objects and people and rules of living pretty much as they left them the night before. How else to continue, how else do our dailiness? How else can our brains not explode?"

The first novella starts with the story of a long love affair (or addictive relationship) between two artists who meet at an art colony, a young woman and an old rapscallion composer, genius and vampire. She’s remembering him after his death, that “demented need,” and wrestling with her memories. Then we get the story of how an older woman, recently widowed, starts to painfully come back to life—Frannie, a character I loved in the novel before these books, All the News I Need. Next there’s “Cavatina for Passsenger X,” the story of a youthful marriage and a complicated friendship. And finally the title novella, in which the blankness of wealth, the bitterness of poverty, the sweetness and bafflement of marriage between such different people is all swept away by death, but the ending of this one brings a kind of happiness I hadn’t foreseen.

Music weaves in and through this book, like the waves so beautifully described here, like the sentences and lists that are music and waves themselves. The closer we get to death in the course of these four intricate stories, the closer we get to nature. There’s a movement, over the four novellas, from the self out into the world. These lives are connected, thematically, emotionally, and reading all four feels like a journey I am so glad to have taken.

In the middle of this time when we are afraid for everyone we love, and the scale of human death has become surreal and catastrophic, it is so precious to come back to this work that insists on the importance of each life, that celebrates all the details of life, resilience after loss, our ability to live with such puzzling irrationality in our lovers and friends. This is a wonderful book, perfect at a moment when so many of us are not just trying to survive but also thinking about what our lives are, and have been, what gives our lives meaning.

[Carol Sklenicka · Rating 5 out of 5]

This collection of four novellas is a tour de force. All four are, one way or another, about mortality (spoiler: that's where we're all going) but what makes these stories satisfying to read is the specificity of Frank's characters and their lives. I hate to admit this, but I'm a biographer and I found myself googling details in the story (Greek composers, for instance) to try to suss out how Frank came up with such remarkably precise details. But fiction triumphs. I have to assume she transformed her source materials so beautifully that she's defied google. Her settings are real though-- I recognize them because I live in the same part of California as this author. Her title story uses as setting and metaphor the hiking trails and high cliffs rough seas of Bodega Head in Sonoma County. Descriptions of walking in the wind in that place are interleaved with Frank's story of a freakish death and a surprising new life and the strangeness of human connections. Not to give away too much but "Where You're All Going" is as brilliant as it is surprising.

[wbie]

i actually like her flowery & convoluted prose, just really don't care for the stories. the first was excruciating, i couldn't care about the dislikeable narrator and her dislikeable love interest, and the lack of anything that happened between them, and a simple expected treatment of grief. then i come online and find reviews saying the first story is the BEST of the four. i gave #2 a brief attempt, but these just don't speak to me.

[Dale · Rating 3 out of 5]

Actually 3.5. Its four novellas, not connected to each other except one character appears in two of them - one as a main character and the other just a mention. I found the stories rather strange but the writing is absolutely beautiful.

[Bob Wake · Rating 5 out of 5]

My review is online at www.coffeespew.org.

[Josephine Ensign · Rating 4 out of 5]

An excellent collection of linked short stories.

[Misha · Rating 3 out of 5]

Nothing wrong with it, am just deciding I don’t feel like reading it any more. I even stopped in the middle of a story. It’s sat here for almost a week and I didn’t pick it up. p89

[Kate · Rating 3 out of 5]

I liked the way these stories unfolded in fleeting bits and gasps, gradually revealing more and more without feeling like a tease. That said though, they also didn't really hold me.

[Kara · Rating 3 out of 5]

*3.5

The first novella was the best, in my opinion.

[Jean]

The women in Frank’s novellas do not expect to find beauty or joy unblemished. The women are skeptical — and skepticism is often the result of having converted the human condition into an intellectual conundrum. But sometimes, they break through and get a glimpse of something more vital.

Frank makes us work as hard as her characters do to extract some significance out their fleeting and flawed lives. And should the struggle yield any beautiful truths, those, too, must be recognized as provisional.

My (longer) review is posted at On the Seawall