Heart on a Sleeve

In Heart On A Sleeve, Austin-based writer Mark Lamb continues his dive into the sordid, sensitive, and sometimes hopeful deep end of everyday social and family life. A master of riveting psycho-dramatic portrayal, Lamb focuses his clear-eyed social dissections on the ways families injure their members internally, especially those whose sensitivities make emotional wounds difficult or impossible to heal. Lamb's first (2013) collection of short stories, Do As I Say And Not As I Do, was a brilliant debut, with a distinctive, sui generis authorial style which impressed itself upon Kirkus Reviews, who described the book as: "A collection of seven curiously crafted tales of malevolence and melancholia... Lamb's imagination runs dark, and his stories of haunted lives, repressed memories and sordid pasts creep into the psyche like spiders." Well, it's safe to say that the spiders keep on crawling in Heart On A Sleeve. By offering us a haunting, five-stage novella tracing the multi-generational transmission of alienation, Lamb again permeates the reader's psyche with his shadowy but familiar worlds. Lamb's inherent word-economy, winnowed plotlines, and tight narratives create a happy paradox: a book with a long time-span that is nonetheless a quick read and ripe with both explicit and hidden layers of possibility and implication. It's the sort of book one re-reads in short order, to soak up more of the tenuous ambience, simmering conflicts, historical oddities, and other little details of lives that carry big but hazily visible stakes. Readers experience a pathological yet common family dynamic as it germinates, then metastasizes, over several generations. Lamb somehow musters our primal identifications with even the most deplorable or off-road of human variety. He knows instinctively that "normal" is a myth, and that all closets are choking full of skeletons. He makes us empathize with some pretty cruddy people, all right, maybe to remind us that but for the grace of God...and, in this, Lamb consistently emphasizes in his work how much a product of our circumstances and of dumb luck we all are. With Heart On A Sleeve, Mark Lamb has also developed a unique format. Each of the chapters can actually stand alone nicely as a short story. Read front-to-back, it is a novella, a short novel that carries an inherent organizational logic and temporal and thematic unfolding. The "feel" of it is noir - Nelson Algren. There is some seedy stuff going on. But there also is dignity in the most unlikely corners. Lamb takes us at times to the edge of magical realism in some stories; and yet, his narrative is matter-of-factly empirical, a "just the facts ma'am" presentation of life in its weirder moments. Who doesn't think they're nuts, see things, hear voices sometimes, believe in ghosts or elves or angels, experience déjà vu; who doesn't have carnal ideas about the people in their lives, or want the world to just go away? Perfectly ugly, in a beautiful way, because it's how things are. By loosely connecting his generations of struggling people in a family along an axis of cascading ennui, Lamb leaves plenty to our imaginations, and this makes for a compelling mental dialectic with a provocative writer. What he doesn't say seems to loom larger than what he does say. Indeed, Lamb has begun his writing career with a perhaps unintended, yet very wise and writerly stratagem: he always leaves you wanting more.