Nona Caspers

A farm girl becomes too attached to another, a youngster obsessed with John F. Kennedy takes her brother on a fateful boat ride, a father recovers from a stroke, one woman is abandoned by her lover, a mother dies--the stories that make up "Heavier Than Air" by Nona Caspers paint an intimate portrait of small town America, even when they take place in the big city. Her characters are so rooted in the rural countryside, that they take it with them when the move away. You can't escape your family, not when your roots are deep.

The best of the stories in "Heavier Than Air," Nona Caspers new volume of short stories, are about farm girls. Ms. Caspers clearly has a great affinity for the experience of growing up in rural America; it shows in both the depth of her understanding and her empathy for her characters. She understands the way Carson McCullers understands. In "Country Girls" the fourteen year old narrator moves to a Minnesota farming town where she begins to fall in love with Cynthia, the girl who lives on the neighboring farm. The young narrator is mystified by love. She wonders why her father married her mother not her aunt whom he seems to prefer; she becomes interested then obsessed with Cynthia's family, and in the end publicly declares her love for a horrified Cynthia at the town dance. What does one do after that?

Outsider girls grab Ms. Caspers' attention in "La Maison de Madame Durard." Two young women spend a night trying to have some fun. They end up driving around with two guys they meet in a bar whom they later abandon by the road as they slowly discover their true interest is in each other. This same type of girl can be found at a younger age in "Wide Like an Eagle's Wings" and all grown up in "The EE Cry" and "Mother". Ms. Caspers writes about other types of people, writes about them well, but it's these girls and the women they become who stay with the reader long after their stories end.

In "Mother" a young woman, Deborah, is abandoned by her lover, who simply states that she is in love with someone else and can't stop it. Deborah calls her mother who comes out to San Francisco from Minnesota to help Deborah find a new apartment and to visit the city for the first and probably only time. Deborah's mother liked her ex-lover, thought she was a charmed girl and said so. She does not seem to know what to do with Deborah now that she is single, now that she has to face her without someone to divert them both and provide each with a safe distance. Mother and daughter visit a series of bad apartments and begin to grow on each other's nerves even as they begin to grow on each other. There is some unfinished business between them, some few things that now separate them much more than either ever thought possible. In the end, there is a small epiphany, a moment when Deborah really sees her mother and loves her as she is, fully aware of how alike the two of them are. Many of us only get these small epiphanies. Ms. Caspers understands how important they are.… (mere)