This Is Not Your City

Caitlin Horrocks

This Is Not Your City

Sarabande Books, 2011

4 1/2 Polychromatic Galaxy Skulls

A common thread throughout many of Horrock’s stories in This Is Not Your City is the exploration of an almost grotesque archetypal maternal figure.  At the end of “Zolaria,” the first story in the collection, the narrator forces her daughters to wade into a toxic lake.  “It Looks Like This” is told from the perspective of an 18 year old who is unable to finish high school because she needs to take care of her mom, who is suffering from rheumatoid arthritis.  “At the Zoo” focuses on a mother protecting her somewhat weak son from a somewhat violent grandfather.   While stories like “Zero Conditional” and “The Lion Gate” do not involve actual mothers, in both stories childless women take on maternal roles, half begrudgingly.  In “Zero Conditional” the main character is such an inept caregiver to a class of third-graders that she ends up killing the classroom pets and potentially harming the students.  It is not hard to imagine this young woman become the actual mother of “Embodied,” who suffocates her newborn in calm madness.  In the final story of the collection, “In the Gulf of Aden, Past the Cape of Guardafui,” the mother of a ten year old invalid writes her son postcards from a cruise ship hijacked by Somali pirates.  She and her husband took the cruise as a necessary respite from care-giving.  In the postcards she conveys both her ineffable love for her child and fantasizes killing him by feeding him too many pills.  Such a respite “made you infinitely less likely to smother your own child, to hit them, hurt them, hasten them out of this world” (168). 

The title story of the collection focuses on a young Russian mother who has recently become the mail-order bride of a Finnish man.  The story opens with the Russian mother, who barely speaks a word of Finnish, trying to communicate with Finnish police about the disappearance of her daughter (who also barely speaks Finnish).  The daughter failed to return after a camping trip with a young Finnish man.  It is a lovely, brutal story, with a fabulous scene in which the mother, still in Russia, is wearing her daughter’s clothing while her daughter photographs her, in order to appear sexy to potential Finnish husbands.  This kind of mildly abusive and desperate relationship between mothers and daughters is found again in “Sun City,” which is not in the collection (find it in The New Yorker, online or on magazine racks).  In “Sun City,” it’s not only mothers and daughters, but grandmothers, too, that rear up as grotesque figures of a maternal archetype.  However, in this story, the daughter ends up betraying her own mother, however symbolically, suggesting a way out of the oppressive family dynamic one finds in so many of the other stories.  

I’ve barely skimmed the surface of what Horrock’s stories are about.  They are about much more than grotesque maternal figures.  They are about abuse during childhood and adolescence (“Zolaria,” “It Looks Like This,” “Going to Estonia,” “Zero Conditional,” “Steal Small,” “At the Zoo,” “The Lion Gate,” “This Is Not Your City”).  They are about love relationships (“World Champion Cows,” “Steal Small,” and “Going to Estonia”).  And they are all about the power of imagination to both create and dismantle the horrors one faces in life.