A review of Steve Fox’s Sometimes Creek
by Marcia Williams
The second story of this impressive debut collection is set during the early emergence from the pandemic. At a neighborhood gathering, the narrator arrives at Randy's home and goes to the basement to stash beer in the fridge. Down there, he meets an enormous mouse who, in the course of their conversation and after being asked how he'd opened a package of crackers says, "But look. You're down here in Randy's root cellar drinking beer and having a conversation with possibly the largest mouse ever to have lived on this planet...and you're wondering about opposable thumbs?" Are you going to put that story down? While clearly the lightest of the seventeen, this piece still plumbs the theme of community, one that recurs throughout along with endurance, loss, love, revenge, conformity, our sins against the earth, and the endless ineffectiveness of officials.
With one exception, these stories are set, or if the setting is not explicit at least anchored, in the Midwest. But Fox is using that the way that Alice Munro uses the Ottawa Valley or Eudora Welty her South—as a place from which to explore universal truths. The setting exception is "I Prefer You In Spanish" placed, not surprisingly, in Spain with a young couple in love. Like two other pieces, this story weaves in Spanish, here to posit that the male of the pair changes personality depending on whether he's speaking English or Spanish.
Throughout the author's voice is clear, confident, reliable, and interesting. The stories are told from all points of view, a couple from females. I didn't grow up as a boy in the Midwest fishing and playing hockey, but Fox has incidentally given me a vantage from which to understand how that might have felt while he's really talking about issues of much greater substance.
Seven of the pieces, including Randy's mouse, are mildly speculative, but like George Saunders, Fox is only asking us to believe one unexpected thing that he then carries flawlessly through to the end. We can even see the steps up to The Butcher's Ghost restaurant on the book's cover.
"Then It Would Be Raining," winner of the Montana Prize for Fiction that Rick Bass judged, is a tour-de-force of vulnerability and love. My favorite quote comes from that story:
It was April and snowing these large sugar-cookie snowflakes. He looked at me looking up University Avenue pulling at my bangs and gasping into a torrent of snow and said, "Mornin—nice day, eh?" He winked, the snow swirling like stars all around his black curls, and I said, "I spose though I sure wish it'd warm up justa bit."
"Yes," he said, slowly, unloading a devastating smile. "Then it would be raining."
This collection ends all too soon. But Fox continues to write, leaving us with the promise of more to come.
About Steve Fox
Steve Fox lives in Wisconsin with his wife, three boys, and one dog.
About Marcia Williams
Marcia Williams is a writer based in Missoula, Montana.