Reasons for and Advantages of Breathing
Peelle, Lydia. Reasons for and Advantages of Breathing. 2009. (Fiction Peell.L)
Reasons for and Advantages of Breathing, the debut short story collection from Lydia Peele is so clear, concise, direct, and beautiful that it will at times stop you dead in mid- sentence, your breath sucked in, your insides resonating like a bell that has been struck. Ostensibly another entry into the canon of Southern literature (Peelle lives in
The stories paint a sadly recognizable portrait of the vanishing American countryside where hunters with GPS units tool around on ATVs, Wal-Mart is king, and the omnipresent sub-division creeps ever further outward, flattening whatever shared nature, culture, and history lies in its path. This deadening sense of an irreversible loss of place seeps from between Peele’s words, but that is not to say that the stories are suffused with dread and heaviness. The characters in these stories evince nothing so much as a sense of resignation to the inevitable march of time. It is not so much that the past has a hold on them, but more that they struggle with finding meaning in the present when the past is meaningless and obliterated. Peelle’s protagonists get through their days the same way most of us do, heads down, one foot in front of the other, attending to the tasks at hand. But what makes these characters and these stories so human, so personal, so relatable, is in the moments when they slip, and just simply getting by isn’t enough. A common thread among the stories is a search for a connection of some kind to something bigger than the everyday—something timeless and lasting, something that makes sense. All in all, the book can be a bit of a downer, but it is through its questioning and its searching for something still of meaning in our land and our lives that the barest shards of hope and belief (albeit shaken and staggered) break through its most overcast of days. (Andy R., Reader's Services)
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