"These Are the Days That Are," A concise review of Barbara Byar's Collection, Some Days Are Better Than Ours
The title story to Barbara Byar’s incredible collection Some Days Are Better Than Ours (Reflex Press, 2019) reads like a side-bar to an updated Dickens novel. The narrator, an unnamed child, describes a most dreadful home life with an ease that comes only from normality: the mother lying prone on the floor, the father acting out some strange Edgar Allan Poe ritual outside with the dog, the younger sibling unable or unwilling to speak, and our protagonist making dinner, of sorts, while the puppet show on the television cooly reminds them that there are other, better worlds, cruelly close by.
Byar’s collection is subtitled “a collection of tragedies,” and fair warning: this is a correct assessment. These stories are full of desperate, lonely, hurt people at, near, or, sometimes, past the end of their rope, struggling to simply make due in the situations the universe has handed them.
In “Old Woman in a Black Buick Tripping on Nine Inch Nails,” the eponymous character, desperate, broken, and angry, begins a mad dash across the heart of the United States to California and the reader is left guessing whether she is running from or towards something.
This is the real strength of Byar’s stories individually and the collection as a whole: you do not always get an explanation in life. Terrible and commonplace tragedies can happen to anyone, at anytime. The universe most often does not offer up solutions to these problems, so we are left to fend for ourselves and let our conscience guide us. That conscience is not always the wisest or most constructive voice to follow, of course, but this is what makes human beings real.
In the end, Byar’s collection is so strong and moving because it is so human. The characters’ situations and reactions are universal and recognizable, even if not specifically our own. The stories in this collection are written as a sort of anthem for the days we wish to put behind us in hopes, perhaps misplaced, of better days to come.
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