Nopalito, Texas by David Meischen, a short story collection, immediately captures any reader who loves short stories. The twelve stories are each titled with a brief descriptive phrase, the name of the focal character, and dates of the story’s occurrence. The first, “Nothing Happens Here—Evelyn Smith—1955-1975,” covers twenty-five years in Nopalito in Evelyn’s life in a sweeping narrative that drops clues to signal events that shape her characters and emphasize themes echoed through various characters in subsequent stories in the collection—sexuality, coming of age, yearning, depression, secrets, and getting away from here.
Here is Nopalito, Texas, a fictional town on the coastal plains of South Texas a hundred miles south of San Antonio and fifty miles inland from Corpus Christi Bay. It’s remote enough to be insular and small enough for everyone to know everyone and to have relatives too near for comfort.
The eleven stories that complete the collection vary in temporal scope, with some lasting a day, others years, with all presented in chronological order. The twelfth and final story in the collection, “Beneath a November Sky—Evelyn Smith—November, 1998,” shows that the collection spans forty-three years.
Each story is model perfect, showing in some way a part of life in a small town during a period of more than forty years in the lives of the characters. Things change, but slowly, it seems. Yet things do change and Evelyn is left wondering what she had gotten wrong all those years. That character’s conclusion might have been enough for me as a reader to say of the collection as a whole, “Excellent!”
However, reading the collection a second time, stories in rapid sequence, the pieces came together for me as a mosaic. Taken as a whole, the collection opens a view of human behavior in an insular enclave, a bit remote from direct influence of the larger culture, individuals influenced by magazines and music, by religion and limited education. Truly the whole of that mosaic is greater than the sum of the excellent parts of this collection. I recommend reading Nopalito, Texas for the whole, not only for the parts—at least twice. –Teddy Jones
Author website: https://meischenink.com/
NOPALITO, TEXAS
STORIES
David Meischen
University of New Mexico Press
224 pages