In a class on the novel, my teacher, the writer Douglas Glover, wrote in large letters across the blackboard: The Novel is a Poem. Rejecting the idea that the novel reflects reality only in its plot and characters, Glover  (following his own teacher, Robert Day) contends that the novel additionally operates according to “patterns” that make it less a reflection of reality than an artful arrangement of words—a poem. In Notes Home from a Prodigal Son, Glover elaborates on this thesis, using Nabokov’s works and Anna Karenina as prime examples of such patterned work. But today he could just as easily have used Jenn Scott’s All the Tiny Beauties. 

A fire opens All the Tiny Beauties, and others occur throughout. With the exception of the first, these fires do not further the plot, nor are they directly connected to the novel’s themes. They are simply part of the novel’s texture. As in a poem, such patterned imagery can be interpreted in multiple ways. For me, Scott’s fires not only singe and scar but, significantly, they burn on in memory. In doing so, they dramatize how cruelty—one of Scott’s major themes—also persists in memory. Interestingly, Scott used this technique in her first book, the stunning Her Adult Life (2018), in which knife imagery played a similar patterning role, implying the necessity of carving out an independent self and the pain such carving entails.

All the Tiny Beauties follows five characters—Debra, Colleen, Beverly, Webster (Webb), and Hannah—over six decades, from 1939 to 2001. As befits his name, Webb connects them: Debra is his estranged daughter, Colleen, his neighbor, Beverly, his ex-wife, and Hannah, his roommate. The novel’s central question is whether Webb will reunite with his daughter, but the book unfolds as a series of deep character studies in which Webb’s outsiderness, and his tendency to avoid difficult situations, repeat with variations in the stories of the others.

In this novel as in poetry, guiding metaphors abound. One of them, the metaphor of the neighborhood, represents the social mores that stand in the way of contentment. “Our neighborhood has restrictions on things that might make a person happy,” Debra tells Colleen. She’s speaking of bamboo, vegetable gardens, above-ground pools, solar panels, concrete slab driveways, and garden figurines, all of which are banned by her neighborhood association, but for her, and for the reader, it’s a metaphor with wider significance.

Webb’s father abuses both wife and son, keeping everyone in their stereotypical gender roles. Taken together these roles constitute another “neighborhood” with oppressive rules. Scott conveys the lengths that folks will go to enforce those rules—the cruelties they inflict and the damage that they do, stirring powerful responses of shame, fear, and anger. As Scott puts it:  “It took a mere moment to ruin a thing; it took days, weeks, months to repair it—and if not to repair it to diminish its terrible accompanying emotions.” Subtlety only worsens the injury, a point she repeats with a variation, making a pattern: “I did not yet know the most damning things occur right beneath your nose with little fanfare; you had no idea they were happening.” 

Webb’s mother, who has secrets of her own, tells Webb: “Sometimes we want things that make our lives harder, and the truth is that we often must be very quiet about the things that make us happiest. We must pretend to be the people others want us to be so that we can survive this world unscathed.” In response to his mother’s poor advice and his father’s cruelty, Webb forsakes his love of baking and frilly aprons for football. But he is unable to deny his truth. He maintains a secret cache of pretty clothes, but even this strategy does not permit him or anyone else in Scott’s novel to “survive this world unscathed.” 

Other oppressive “neighborhoods” in this novel include compulsory heterosexuality and traditional femininity as well as respectability in its many guises. Scott’s quite funny on some of these, including those who police others’ language, the conventions of country clubs, and traditional standards for lawns. Here she is on the boorishness of country clubs: “They shouted at waiters, taking drink orders at the opposite side of the pool, men plump with confidence and entitlement as if they had not just shot bogeys on 10 out of 18 holes.”

Juxtaposed with the cruelties of “neighborhoods” are the beauties suggested by the title. Webb’s daughter describes a tender childhood memory of her father: 

I lay beside him, memorizing this moment we would never experience again. We would be forever moving further from it: the scratch of grass against our necks, the slight pressure of my father’s shoulder against mine. Beside me his breath had the slightest incriminating rasp of exertion. Staring at the quarter moon, the stars, the sky, I imagined my mother’s joy over the swing set’s disappearance. I imagined our own pleasure—mine and my father’s, as if it were a singular pleasure—at her delight.

If the novel is indeed a poem—and with this novel Scott provides strong evidence that it is—then this poem is well worth reading for the way its beautiful patterning gives rise to insight. These beauties might be tiny, but they add up to one big, beautiful book.

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Jenn Scott’s debut story collection, Her Adult Life (Acre Books, 2018), was longlisted for the PEN America/Bingham Award. Her work has appeared in Fiction, Gettysburg Review, Cincinnati Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, Santa Monica Review, and Gulf Coast. A native of Pennsylvania, she lives and writes in Oakland, California.

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Mary Lannon’s unpublished novel Tide Girl was a finalist for the 2023 PEN\Bellwether Prize for Socially Engaged Fiction. Her short stories have been published in Story, New World Writing, and The Woven Tale Press, among other outlets. She teaches at Nassau Community College in Long Island, NY, and lives in Queens. More information is at MaryLannon.com.