Miriam Gershow’s latest novel, Closer, begins with the death of a high school student named Livvy in the college town of Horace, Oregon. Woody, the school’s guidance counselor, delivers news of this tragedy to Lark, another student. “I wanted you to hear it from me,” he tells her. 

‘Livvy,’ he said, and Woody would misremember what came next as eloquence, he kind and wise in unthinkable circumstance. He would forget his broken stammer: ‘She died from killing herself.’

It is important that this information is delivered in dialogue. Closer is a novel in which speech is of the utmost importance, as it is in life. Gershow relies heavily on dialogue. Voices proliferate throughout the book. It is a way of emphasizing the plain fact that what we say matters, of reminding us constantly that, because words carry more weight than we may realize, they must be handled responsibly.

Closer puts its author’s adeptness with dialogue to great use. After that brief opening chapter, in which we learn of Livvy’s passing, the novel leaps back a year, from 2016 to 2015. In that brief span, another terrible thing has happened. No one is dead, but someone is hurt. Woody calls Stefanie Fenning, mother of Baz, the student involved. He says:

‘I don’t know if you’re up to speed on the recent events here with Baz and the peer tutoring, I oversee the peer tutors, there have been a few incidents.’

‘Incidents?’

‘There was an unfortunate joke between a few boys and Baz several weeks ago, where it sounds like some boys, boys receiving the peer tutoring, got carried away, I think, with some Obama jokes directed at Baz.’

‘Jokes? I heard about the incident. It didn’t sound like a joke.’

With one speaker audibly bewildered, the other flustered, the pair of them stagger toward the revelation of the problem, Woody saying, “‘Someone wrote a picture, of what was supposed to be a marsupial, and Baz’s name.’” 

Baz, Stefanie’s son, is Black, and the graffiti does get mentioned, prior to this moment. Students see the custodian removing it that morning. In a chapter titled “Emergency Faculty Meeting Notes,” Gershow conveys the attitudes of the school’s teachers toward the racist incident. They range widely: one is alarmed, while another, with a kind of verbal shrug, says, “We should be thankful it wasn’t swastikas.” But it is in that dialogue between Woody and Stefanie that the impact of the incident becomes palpable. The bad news stuns its distracted listener, its significance creeping up on her; it rattles the messenger, to be the one to deliver it. In their words, and how they say them, the story being told becomes immanent.

Much of what is significant in this novel is overheard, rather than stated directly. The narrative advances as the characters speak to one another, and the conversations are masterfully composed. Woody talks with Susan, Livvy’s mother, who’s at work and hiding in a bathroom: 

‘My boss is on a rampage.’

‘Against you?’

‘Me insofar as I’m someone with a heartbeat in his general proximity.’

Woody suggests crouching on the toilet seat, remarking, “that’s what kids do during bathroom sweeps.” She says that he sounds “like you work in a prison.”  He replies, “If it walks like a prison, and talks like a prison…” Susan laughs, and Woody reminds her to be quiet. “You’ll give yourself away.” Through conversations like these, each speaker charms the other, as well as anyone who might be listening, as they slide headfirst into an affair that only further complicates things. 

The high school students, meanwhile, are talking all the time. Their speech is clipped; they talk the way young people do, in bursts: 

‘I’m not good at sports,’ Lark confessed.

‘So what?’ Monique said. ‘I’m not good at lots of stuff.’

‘Like what?’ Lark said, really wanting to know.

‘I don’t know,’ Monique said. ‘Cursive? And calligraphy. That’s like some crazy cursive shit.’

Making teenagers sound, in fiction, like teenagers, is no easy task. Making the lives of young people interesting is even more difficult, and Gershow makes both of those things look easy. But their conversations are constant negotiations, as the best dialogue so often is, and their problems are as heavy as those of the grownups. The reader knows, from the beginning, that one of these young people is in grave danger, that Livvy won’t survive to the end of the novel. The rampant bullying is not confined to Baz; someone has started a Facebook group that is devoted to humiliating Livvy. The reckless use of language will have consequences, and all the while, in the distance, but not far enough for comfort, Donald Trump is barreling his way to the White House.  

As it is set in 2015, the novel depicts a harrowing turning point in our recent history. It matters, in this obscure part of the United States, that Barack Obama is president. His prominence gives the race-baiting students ammunition to use against Baz. Soon to replace Obama, Trump appears on the margins of the novel, the characters mostly reluctant to consider the threat he poses, the speeches by which he will propel himself into power. Closer echoes a time before the most hateful among us took the country’s reins, reckoning with the way everyone could hear what was coming, if they had only listened. It was in the speech that was at all times increasing in volume, which we can hardly hope to tune out now.

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Miriam Gershow is the author of Closer, Survival Tips: Stories and The Local News. Her writing is featured in The Georgia Review, Gulf Coast, and Black Warrior Review, among other journals. She is the recipient of an Oregon Literary Fellowship and a Fiction Fellowship from the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing.

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Robert Long Foreman’s most recent books are Weird Pig and I Am Here to Make Friends. He lives in Kansas City and at www.robertlongforeman.com.