Failure to Thrive by Meghan Lamb

Review by S. D. Stewart

Meghan Lamb’s writing is what I look for and rarely find in contemporary American realist fiction. Admittedly, though, I don’t try very hard in this endeavour, because in general realist fiction bores me. But Lamb is a writer who knows the ways to make realism interesting—blurring and scribbling outside the rigid lines that so many realist writers insist on staying within. I’ve read all of the fiction of hers I’ve been able to track down and it’s never failed to captivate me, only getting better as time goes on. She writes around the unsaid with surgical precision⁠—expertly troweling rich, earthy language into the gaps you almost forgot were there. And yet this language when cured into narrative is paradoxically both spare and dense, reflective of a deep care in word choice and sentence-level mechanics. Failure to Thrive visits a broken coal town by way of the stories of three individuals, each suffering their own tragedy. These tragedies radiate out, passing the pain through family veins. The town as a whole rests upon a delicate pyre constructed from this pain and the pain of all the stories that came before the ones we read here. It could be a real town, rooted as it is in actual history and studded with bits and pieces of the real (revealed in photos at the end). But instead Lamb’s version serves to amplify the real, serving as an amalgamation of what could be the stories of so many thousands of other Americans living or having lived in towns just like it.