Snapshots of a City

Susan Finch’s linked short story collection, Dear Second Husband, takes readers on a layered journey through the lives of Nashvillians facing a range of emotional entanglements and predicaments. With a kaleidoscopic view of a fast-changing city and the fallout on its people, as well as a deep devotion to character development, Finch, an associate dean and professor of English at Belmont University, portrays Nashville in authentic detail and delivers a reading experience that is varied, surprising, and satisfying.

Finch has a particular skill for creating emotional resonance with character recurrence. Break-ups, natural disasters, complicated child-rearing commitments, deaths, and neighborhood squabbles knit together a tapestry of main characters, mostly women, who often grasp for more and come up short.

In the title story, Deborah has changed her name to Devin because her ex is a stalker. Fleeing Virginia, Devin can’t exactly come home again because — like so many real-life Nashville natives — she’s priced out of the suburb where she grew up. Though Forest Hills is out of reach, Devin is happy to at least land a job in that tony pocket as a park ranger at Radnor Lake, a job she commutes to from a one-bed across the city. Her father, Clint, a real estate bigwig, pulled strings on Devin’s application, one example of Finch’s commentary on privilege as survival in a gentrifying Nashville.

Peaceful at first, Devin’s new life becomes marred by minor disruptions — a nail in her tire and other acts of vandalism — that soon escalate to chilling threats, which the police, citing infuriating technicalities, do not act upon. The enduring impact of Devin’s experience arises from the maddening lack of recourse for a woman in harm’s way, which is highlighted by the story’s structure. Finch intermittently interrupts a third-person narrative with Devin’s letters to “a future husband…the kind of man you’d like to love,” written per her therapist to assuage mounting anxiety. The threat to Devin’s life juxtaposed with these epistolary hopes for her future is devasting:

Devin swung into the first side street she encountered and pulled into a random driveway. She waited for a car to follow but no one did. She put her hands, one still wrapped in a thick white bandage, on the wheel, and waited until they stopped trembling to drive home.

Dear Second Husband, we will watch our kids play together. They will toss a balloon in the air, fingertips poking it back and forth across the space between them.

In a subsequent story, “That Thing with Feathers,” the reader has all but forgotten Devin when her father returns as a main character. So as not to risk spoilers, I’ll simply say that Clint’s reflections on his several failed marriages include powerful, revelatory callbacks and connections to the title story. The placement of this story, late in the collection, demonstrates the ordering of stories as a meaningful art in itself.

Two quintessentially Nashville stories center nefarious forces, one natural, one not, bearing down on the city to demolish its landscape and lay waste to its soul.

In “Everybody Has a Flood Story,” we experience the horrific flood of 2010 through the eyes of four girlfriends. A shifting point of view mimics the roving, chaotic feel of water rising and running amok in the streets, eventually spilling over into residential and commercial structures. The flood and its lingering damage serve as an apt metaphor for the countless miniature destructions that rise up daily and gather power over time in the women’s relationships. Form and subject matter marry beautifully here.

Pedal taverns and other such influencer-culture spectacles of the Honky Tonk Highway take center stage in “We are the Bachelorettes and We Insist.” Two members of the friend group from “Flood” re-enter here, the plots of their intimate lives advanced in a second brand of chaotic, ongoing flood that has reduced Nashville to #NashVegas and #SmashedVille: the bachelorette bacchanal.

In a 48-hour timeframe, the story promises “three brunches, two happy hours, fifteen moderate disagreements, one unforgettable fight, eight matching t-shirts, one bar crawl, one pedal tavern, one sprained wrist, three twisted ankles, sixteen hangovers, too many tearful promises to count, and one sober regret.” The author opts for another effective structure here, a point of view that alternates between a first-person plural bridesmaid horde that descends on the strip and a first-person singular Nashville native who grits her teeth all weekend as the out-of-town partyers fail to grasp anything about the city’s enduring identity. Finch departs from a quiet, controlled style that’s in play throughout most of the book, reveling in parody and bombast to reconstruct an all too real, relentless vibe along a downtown Nashville street that increasingly has nothing to do with the city’s residents. 

Ten stories comprise this collection, each one a snapshot of a city and a full world unto itself.