Field Study , by Rachel Seiffert, is a book of short stories written about the trials of love, guilt and personal pain. These stories, reflecting delicately the extraordinary flaws of very ordinary people, sometimes border on the romantic. They also escalate the clichéd tribulations of love and misunderstanding to the height of annoyance.
She writes all 11 of her stories about heartaches or children and tires out already exhausted subjects. Every tale is painful; every tale is set in sadness - either in the lonely backlands of Scotland or in Germany during the early 1990s. Evidently Seiffert named her collection Field Study because it is a so-called analysis of humanity, but the stories within it are clichés, too whimsical to portray human suffering vividly.
Some of the stories are almost unreadable. In “Dog-Leg Lane” the main character, a three-year-old child, is terrified of moving away from his familiar street, and so his father rejects a higher paying job. The child is not spoiled: The reader knows that something is wrong psychologically. But we never find out what it is and the narrator leaves the reader hanging by ending the story abruptly without explanation.
In “Dimitroff,” what could be an extraordinary piece - about a family torn apart by the father's link to the Nazi party as well as by his writings about communism - becomes redundant and mediocre. It ends sadly, but the reader has no idea why. It feels unfinished and tired.
The only piece with real possibility is the last story, “Second Best,” which almost captured the essence of human pain and suffering. Sadly, it falls a bit short, ending with the motif of the husband leaving wife and son for an older, richer woman. While there is more explanation in this story at the end, the reader is still left confused: What's the point of this? So what?
What makes Seiffert's Field Study hard to read is her obsession with writing in postmodern, choppy style, with incomplete sentences that leave out all punctuation except dashes and periods. The writing is very delicate and quiet, strangely like Emily Dickinson's poetry. Unfortunately, Seiffert lacks Dickinson's humor and concision. Instead of ironic and true, Field Study is redundant and self-conscious.
Seiffert has a bad habit of leaving the reader dangling in the mess of her writing. She starts out with reason in her style, but writes herself into a corner in an attempt to provoke the reader's mind. The deeper I looked into her words, the less I wanted to keep reading. I wanted to stop trying to understand the book, and I don't recommend Field Study to anyone unless they love sophomoric, romantic literature.