If any of you have read it, this story reads like one of Rebecca Lee’s short stories from her collection Bobcat. It is strange and unnerving, from the rooms without doors, to the surveillance, to the disappearance, all of it is very strange. Not strange like Atwood’s Stone Mattress — there’s nothing fantastical going on here –but it’s unlike any of Strout’s work we’ve read thus far. The characters in “Cracked” — Yvonne, Karen-Lucie, and the Cornell-Petersons — have the same dark, hidden inner lives present in Strout’s other characters, but for some reason, they are more unfamiliar, less…quotidian.

Initially, the link is unclear, and even at its first mention, it is blurry and hazy. After a phone call with her daughter, Linda reminisces about her youth, the fresh green of the landscape and the “fields and fields of corn and fields of soybeans” (84). I had noted this soybean field in other posts because it appears again and again. And then it all becomes very clear: Linda is one of the Nicely girls, a sister to Patty Nicely. She’s experienced the same heartbreak and trauma connected with her mother’s affair and she’s, somehow, reliving it in her own marriage. While Patty has spent most of her life alone, with a brief marriage, Linda decided she’d rather be married to Jay, allowing and almost condoning his voyeurism, than be alone and “ostracized” like her estranged mother.

We’ve talked about these linked stories and their ability to stand alone, and this one seems to be more independent than the others. Knowing Linda is the daughter of an adulterous mother seems almost insignificant compared to her husband’s crime. This story is made even more complicated by the fact that Linda has chosen to stay with Jay, she isn’t forced, isn’t even necessarily uncomfortable. The title “Cracked” also seems to have more metaphoric meaning, especially with Karen-Lucie’s line “I have thrown stones at a glass house, and I am sorry.” That house has not cracked but shattered.