In her collection Close to a Flame, Colleen Alles demonstrates that not much out of the ordinary must happen in a story for it to be good. The reader addicted to excess might find these stories staid. The unseasoned writer might believe they are easy to produce. Neither could be further from the truth. Close to a Flame is a whisper, not a shout. If you don’t know how to listen, you’ll miss all the collection offers.
The characters in this collection are unmoored in their adulthood and often caught in liminal states, their lives unstable but not in crisis. Take Christine, for example, who, in “Visitor’s Pass,” embraces a moment to look like a mother to someone else’s child or Carol, in “Arrangements,” who plays dress up with a work colleague, a woman much younger than her, who she imagines could be the daughter she never had. And there’s Casey too, a mother and wife in “Logger Head,” who is beyond her teen years in all ways but one. These and other narrators hover between youth and adulthood, responsibility and irresponsibility, acceptance and resistance, and all do so without firm footing. They’re not falling apart, but they are suspended, and they generate a kind of tension that isn’t dramatic catastrophe but quiet dislocation—life in mid-stride.
Muted regret and silent disappointment are pervasive throughout this collection. Regret appears often but rarely with volume. We see this, perhaps most dynamically, in Jamie, a character who, alongside her friend Miriam, develops across several stories in the collection. Jaime’s loudest quiet regret might come in “Baby Registry,” where she seems to regret that she struggles to be the friend Miriam needs at that important moment or to truly relay the struggles ahead of her friend as she becomes a new mother. A fair portion of the story is spent with Jamie in a flashback to her bachelorette party, where she lied to another, and herself, about the fact that she was rushing into a marriage with someone who isn’t her best friend. It’s a marriage that we later learn dissolves. Regrets and disappointments like these, abound throughout the collection, are ambient and non-confrontational. They’re often implied rather than declared and run in the background like a soft tinnitus. Despite feeling tempered, the regret and disappointment in these pieces penetrate.
Close to a Flame is especially indicative of a work that showcases the ordinary as emotionally consequential. In it are Target runs, beach days, frozen pizza nights, bar bathrooms, hotel stays, phone calls. Mundane activities carry disproportionate emotional weight in these stories, repeatedly demonstrating that nothing “big” needs to occur for something big to happen. These emotional stakes are embedded in routine behavior, not exceptional events. Any standard person, let alone woman, can place themselves in these stories. They are universal and refuse to parade around as anything but.
As a male reader, I felt myself most intrigued by (and perhaps most self-aware of) the nature of female friendship portrayed in these stories. To me, the friendships were either a mirror, measure, or site of misalignment for the narrator. Consider, for example, the pairings of: Christine/Dalia, Carol/Shaylin, Jamie/Miriam, narrator/Lauren, narrator/Ashley, narrator/Chloe. These friendships rarely offer clean support. Instead, they expose differences, insecurity, yearning, or divergence in life paths. These exposed elements often unfold within or include experiences that are difficult for characters to explain or name directly. Jamie, for example, cannot explain motherhood. Christine misreads her own dissatisfaction. Young narrators, both named and unnamed alike, often sense moral or emotional boundaries before they can explain them. In short, speech fails before feeling. This difficulty in naming results, at least in part, derives from a lack of understanding of self, other, and environment. With such lack of command, many characters, realistically, must, at best, live a life of acceptance instead of resolution. As a result, few stories end with clarity or transformation. For some, like Jamie, there eventually arrives self-realization; however, most characters tend to carry on with a slightly altered awareness, sometimes wiser than when the story opened but rarely “fixed” by the end, all of it unfolding within the confines of relationships and friendships. Jamie and Miram’s lives, and others too, posit that growth in life is incremental. Most notably and accurately, this collection emphasizes that friendship is not idealized. It’s a space where comparison and self-knowledge can sometimes arise. Finally, for those studying the craft of writing, Alles’s characters and their relationships reveal, artfully, that silence, miscommunication, and internal narration can matter more than dialogue in a story.
One point of the collection I would love to discuss with the author if given the chance is what I refer to as identity erosion and/or character anonymity. Several narrators are nameless, while others are not, and I found myself wondering whether this seemingly random (though it may not be) anonymity strengthened the stories in which it was used. On the one hand, I can imagine that motherhood, partnership, caregiving, and social roles can blur personal identity, especially for women in transitional stages of life. That said, similar women in other parts of the collection have names, so I wasn’t certain how to gauge the value of the occlusion and wondered if the inconsistent or abundant use dampened the author’s intended effect. That said, I’ll be the first to admit, especially as a male reader, I could be missing something.
By refusing spectacle and centering quiet interiority, these stories validate a form of emotional experience that can be challenging to execute in prose, even for the most veteran writer. New to midlife myself, this collection helps reassure me that uncertainty, drift, and partial understanding are not personal failures but part of being human. This collection is a gentle reminder that dissatisfaction is not always some booming stentorian voice in our mind, screaming for correction. Sometimes, maybe even often as we age, dissatisfaction does not announce itself. Instead, it seeps through our routines and relationships, through how we do and do not see ourselves within the world. I found these stories unsettling sometimes and deeply comforting others. Read this collection to witness how the constant in our lives can cut and teach and how we can, time and again, fail to learn. Read it to understand why that might be okay.