In Mouth, the ways we consume—from the drinks we can’t put down to the lovers we can’t resist—reveal deeper hungers we often keep hidden.
Please enjoy Lewis Buzbee’s review of Mouth, short stories by Kerry Donoghue.
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In This LitStack Review Of Mouth
Unquenchable Hunger
Every character in every story in Mouth is hungry, desperately so, rapacious and insatiable, dangerously hungry. For love, for fame, for food, for sex, for intimacy, for solitude, for both the sacred and the profane. It hardly matters which matters which hunger, it’s the fact of hunger alone that prevails.
The host of a home shopping channel craves nothing but fame. An older couple yearns, but separately, to make love to each other after years of distance. A woman so longs to become a mermaid that she devotes her life to this transformation, starting in her bathtub.
These characters chase their hungers, blindly, and it’s this pursuit that is their undoing, bringing each to the brink of dark revelations.
Be Careful What You Wish For
In the book’s first story, a woman, believing her husband sterile, has furious sex with her husband’s brother, only to be sickened by where her hunger has led.
Glory stumbled into the kitchen. Mother, lover, doctor, provider. Mother lover, doctor, provider. She was everything she’d ever wanted. A milk carton, half-opened, sat on the countertop. She stuck her nose inside, the stink sharper than she expected. Glory gagged with each inhale but couldn’t stop, over and over, the stench as filling as hope.
Each of the stories in Mouth rings with the shape and compression of the best short stories. We step into the characters’ lives at moments of crisis and confusion, watch them tumbling in turmoil as they seek both answers and relief. But there is no change, only revelation, epiphany if you will, a glimpse of the deep mystery of life.
But before any of that, she imagined the click of a door, soft and safe, the life she’d really wanted, the glimmer of happiness brightest from the shadows.
An Entire World Revealed
As with the finest collections of stories, it’s not only the individual stories that move us, but their accumulation, an entire world revealed. When I first read Raymond Carver’s 1976 debut collection, Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?, I was startled to find a universe of characters and setting and predicament that I always knew existed but had been unable to find or even name. There they were, Carver’s drinkers and renters, his out-of-workers, working class and underclass, his smart but mute people, all of them on the edge of survival and of understanding, every single one of them desperate.
I felt the same revelation reading Mouth. Donoghue’s characters are all trapped in their lives, neither rising nor falling. Bookkeepers, freelance washing machine repairers, minor voice-over actors, gig-by-gig musicians: subsistence. And as with Carver, each of these characters feels wholly authentic, snatched out of their real lives for these stories, almost shamefully. No character here is a literary invention on which the writer hangs a story. The visceral, hilarious, confounding pulse of the real world flows through every page. And their names, almost comical, reflect that reality somehow: Buick, Jupiter, Glory, Ash, Eustace.
Laughing With, Not At
It’s easy enough to see how these stories could have become arch, ironic, eventually judgmental, which is to say, too damn literary. But it is Donoghue’s tenderness for her characters that wins us over. These are people struggling to find their way in the world, and who, by their own bad choices and the bad fortune the world bestows upon them, still continue, still hope, still try to fill the hunger that we all feel. They are foolish and courageous at once; as are we all. And that’s the trick: as are we all.
And so, we laugh, not at, but with, Jenny in Mouth’s final story, as her homemade costume dissolves around her in the surf at the beach where she is determined to become the mermaid she has always known she is.
Some people are afraid of water the way they’re afraid of shadows—the darkness, the shifting, the clutching undertow. But that’s not being afraid of water. That’s being afraid of yourself. The unknown. What you won’t admit in the dark. What you’ll do when your dream crests.
Mouth is a revelation, a carnival mirror we peer into to see ourselves truly, a deeply moving and comic collection of stories.
~ Lewis Buzbee
About Kerry Donoghue, Author of Mouth
Kerry Donghue’s poetry and stories have appeared in Ninth Letter, Painted Bride Quarterly, Permafrost, The Louisville Review, and The South Carolina Review, among other journals. Mouth is her debut short story collection. She also wrote The Loudest Voice of All, a children’s book, to fundraise for an organization that educates girls about the power of voting.
She earned an MFA in Writing from the University of San Francisco. You can find her in the Bay Area, eating crunchwraps by the sea, where she lives with her family and, sadly, no good malls.
Get to know Kerry Donoghue at her website, and on Instagram.
Source: Publisher
Publisher: Unsolicited Press
ISBN: 9781963115314
Pub date: Jan 21, 2025
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