The stories in Meat Eaters and Plant Eaters by Jessica Treat offer very little meat: her simple and tight prose is all appetizer, her sharply-wrought characters and settings sparking my hunger for more.  But more — journey, challenge, transformation — is never delivered.  Every single one of these stories hooked me but then left my flopping like a fish, without the simple mercy slap across the head to knock me out before filleting.  Food metaphors aside, Treat’s stories set up what should be (and could be) magnificent stories about relationships, loneliness, and connection but Treat stops them before they can move beyond their opening premise.

Treat uses simplistic language and structure in many of her stories, belying the  complexity of the relationships she portrays.  The contrast becomes wearying and even annoying.  Her simple style is most effective at rendering the situation of children in very adult and messed-up scenarios of love, manipulation, and abandonment, and works less well when used to present an adult in the same type of dysfunctional relationship.  Her longest story, the one that moves beyond setting and character to add plot, and the one with the most mature sentence structure and word usage (and not coincidentally, the most satisfying of the stories) is “Little Bitches”.  In that story, a young woman faces her obsession with another woman and changes, becoming older in the process if not necessarily wiser.  There is challenge and transition in that story, a realization of the starting premise that obsession is a mask for identity confusion.

In the story “Meeting M”, the narrator is a novelist, struggling with her writing, who  lunches with another woman novelist, perceived of as more successful. The narrating woman is trying to catch a spark of the other’s drive and creativity, and if that fails, hopes for a shred of approval or acknowledgement.  But hope “obscures reality” and her reality is that she is the same woman after the lunch as she was before.  To return to my opening metaphor of food, we could all change after dining on Treat’s writing, given her gift of character and setting, if only she would take her writing further by following a story — and premise — through to the end.  The hope of a good meal could then become a reality.