Book Review: Send Me Work by Katherine Karlin

Katherine Karlin. Send Me Work. Northwestern University Press, 2011.

Reviewed by Jie Liu

After losing her job, her boyfriend, and her apartment, Harriet told her gay friend Izzy another version of Bruce Springsteen’s “Drive All Night”: “I wish God would send me work, send me something I’m afraid to do” (61). The eleven short stories in Katherine Karlin’s debut collection Send Me Work, including Pushcart Prize winner “Bye-Bye, Larry” (2007), center on women’s workday struggles and explore the role of working in their lives.

In all of these stories, Karlin demonstrates the magic of depicting vivid characters. Her characters–even minor characters–seem to live among us; readers can truly feel what they feel.  The secret of Karlin’s success first lies in the rich details she creates, the details reflecting a character’s emotion and personality effectively. In “The Severac Sound,” when waiting for her colleague Peter, Rachel’s left pinkie twitches because she is “practicing trills on an imaginary oboe” (18), which speaks towards her dedication as well as her insecurity: Rachel ends up a permanent second chair; no matter how hard she works, she cannot play the oboe better than Peter. Karlin is also talented in using humor to construct images which make her characters unforgettable. In “Bye-Bye, Larry,” a lesbian refinery worker Gina stole tampons from the executive women’s bathroom and “tampon paper rustled with every step” (7) she took. In “Send Me Work,” Harriet’s feeling of being abandoned is nicely expressed by an image she imagined: it “was like standing at the foot of a well, with a girded, moss-slick bucket dangling over her head” (56). In addition, Karlin is aware of the influence of pop culture and wisely weaves it into the depiction of her characters. In “Bye-Bye, Larry” we get Ann-Margret, in “Underwater” it is Jake Gyllenhaal, and in “Stand Up, Scout” the movie To Kill a Mockingbird plays a critical role. They help readers understand the characters from a different angle.

In Karlin’s stories, readers will see female characters who are not easily found elsewhere. She focuses on women to whom little attention was paid before and reflects on their struggles in male-dominated industries. Having worked in oil refineries in Pennsylvania and Texas, a New Orleans shipyard, and a New York print shop, Karlin shares her unique insights into women’s experiences in those trades. Readers are invited to climb “the walls of a hidden city” (37), where women always look tough. A lesbian refinery worker encountering her lesbian supervisor (“Bye-Bye, Larry”), another refinery worker discovering a crude leak with her colleague (“Geography”), a Hurricane Katrina survivor working in a shipyard (“Muscle Memory”), a rail yard employee (“Seven Reasons”): each of these characters reveals a world that may be invisible to many readers and revises the connotations of femininity when facing unknown challenges in life. In “Muscle Memory,” Destiny, a girl who has lost her father in Hurricane Katrina, decides to support her family by becoming a welder like her father. In her view, a skill represents power and the eye damage resulting from welding is only “a small price to pay” (39). As a beautiful girl, she is proud of the scars on her arms. In such stories, women are no longer delicate beings, to be pursued, protected, and appreciated. They value their jobs, which leave an indelible imprint on their identities.

There is an emotional arc about the father-daughter relationship in Karlin’s stories, probably based on her personal experiences but extended to questioning male domination. Karlin admits that “most of the stories in Send Me Work are pulled from my own experiences in the less rarefied worlds of oil refineries, shipyards, and print shops” but “the orchestra milieu of ‘The Severac Sound’ is an exception”. Another exception is “The Good Word,” the only story in which the protagonist is an old man. If in “Muscle Memory” Destiny succeeds in obtaining power in a masculine world by learning to weld, and simultaneously strengthens the connection between father and daughter, “The Severac Sound” and “The Good Word” show women’s struggles in such a relationship. In “The Severac Sound,” Rachel tries hard but fails to be the favorite student of her teacher Louis Lavigne, a father-like figure (Karlin mentions that this story is about “the men of my father’s generation,” written after her father’s death). The threat is from her male colleague Peter: she realizes that she will never beat him. In “The Good Word,” the father who has written an influential book on usage has a daughter he does not care for who teaches in the New York City public school system. In his memory, she is “an ungainly young woman” (115) with an “ungentle hand” (120), easily irritated. The tension between the father and the daughter, ironically, ends up with the father losing the ability to speak the right words due to a tumor. This story, perhaps puzzling to some readers at first because of its difference from other pieces in the book, may serve as a key for a better understanding of Karlin’s stories about tough women and their struggles. It is still a question whether women can work and succeed like a man in a patriarchal society and “The Good Word” may be Karlin’s answer. 

Katherine Karlin has worked in oil refineries in Pennsylvania and Texas, a New Orleans shipyard, and a New York print shop. She received her MFA from the University of Pittsburgh and a PhD in Literature and Creative Writing from the University of Southern California. She is currently an assistant professor of English at Kansas State University. Her work has appeared New Stories from the South, won a Pushcart Prize, and has appeared in many journals. Karlin has written more than sixty theater reviews and arts features for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and the Los Angeles Daily News. Her short story collection, Send Me Work, was released by Northwestern University Press in fall 2011.