Tamiami Trail
Miami Stories
In Jennifer Bannan’s lush short story collection Tamiami Trail, cypresses and Spanish moss evoke the Everglades. While centered on Miami, Monroe Station and the Tamiami Trail function as a mythical loci from which spores of connection disperse, their modest connections yielding fertile epiphanies.
In “Museness,” a woman experiences an atavistic connection to nature spurred by a man’s annual visit to her diner. Elsewhere, nature is instructive: the “alien tide” of sneakers floating ashore as sea detritus lets a woman know that it’s time to let go of a relationship that’s dragging her down in “The Pairs.” Nature also punishes: In “Tidal,” a random fish attack forces a shallow man to accompany his wounded girlfriend to the hospital; it’s an ironic juxtaposition of his absence during her abortion. And in “This Crisis Brought To You By Me,” natural catastrophes are boons: profit can be made through climate finance, but there are ethical casualties.
There are rapacious encounters as well. Men use women, gay men use their best friends, and women use racial “others” for sex, to stanch loneliness, to feed hunger, and as a proxy for love or acceptance. A young mother in “Power Shovel” exoticizes a Zimbabwean construction worker and agrees to let an undocumented immigrant babysit her son. In “You’re Always Game,” a career-minded entrepreneur uses her best friend to keep her husband occupied so as to avoid losing him. Elsewhere, parents claim to protect their young daughter from the sexualized world of acting, but their love is performative.
Clinging to their tangential morality by way of a mystical sense of place, the characters in Tamiami Trail are flawed and full of want. Their grasping opportunism contrasts with the ineffable honoring of place and myth, thus revealing their naked humanity.
Reviewed by
Elaine Chiew
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