The Hardmen

April 18, 2016
In her debut collection of 11 stories, Noyes describes the lives of New England women in silky, lucid prose. In “This Is Who She Was,” a woman goes on vacation with her new boyfriend’s family, only to discover that the boyfriend’s mother is dying; in “Changeling,” a woman follows a stranger off the bus because the stranger looks like her estranged mother. In two different stories (“Glow Baby” and the title story), a young girl reluctantly gets into a car as her mother attempts to leave a partner. A woman copes with the suicide of her father in “Treelaw”; in “Hibernation,” a woman copes with the suicide of her husband. By the third story it becomes difficult to distinguish one voice from another, and certain repeated moments (chain restaurants, wounded vacationing girls, and, most commonly, variations of the same kind yet useless male character) begin to seem less like motifs and more like crutches. Still, Noyes has a fluid, raw, and strikingly original manner with both language and emotion, and much of the writing in this collection is tender and innovative.