Our next book review in June comes to us from Alexis David, who reviews Claire Boyle’s new collection Site Fidelity, out today from W.W. Norton. “Boyles’s book,” David writes, “a collection of stories about people interacting with western landscapes, can be summed up in this opposition: the voiced and the voiceless.” Make sure to check out Boyles’s story “Ledgers,” published on The Masters Review in 2016!
In the first pages of Site Fidelity, Claire Boyles’s character, Norah, comments on her father’s speech. After having a stroke, he mistakenly calls her “Vera.” The speech pathologist has put up a chart on their fridge. Boyles writes, “I could see the whole consonant chart—the nasals and the alveolars, the voiced and the voiceless.” Boyles’s book, a collection of stories about people interacting with western landscapes, can be summed up in this opposition: the voiced and the voiceless. Site Fidelity is, at its heart, stories about speaking humans and the non-speaking, non-human world that surrounds them.
