Not since Alice Munro’s The Beggar Maid has there been a book which so articulately reveals the complex
emotional spectrum of children caught in the adult world. The novella and four stories in Lessons in Another
Language give voice to adolescent protagonists who inhabit rich emotional and sensual worlds as they
navigate the wreckage created by the adults meant to be caring for them. In “Daily Life of the Pioneers,” two
misguided parents send their children to an austere summer camp designed to mimic the lives of the “pioneer
children […] your diet will be raw vegetables which are very tasty and very healthy.” “’Why?’” asks one of
the children, a question that resonates through Staffel’s stories as they present the often-naïve ways we adults
project our lives and anxieties onto our children. Charlotte, newly arrived at a Southern college, wanders into
town and is seduced by a thirty-something guy with a car because “the way he looked at her made her feel like
maybe she wasn’t the only refugee. Like maybe he knew her same troubles.” Lessons in Another Language
weaves evocative narratives of abandonment and confusion, of hope betrayed more often than fulfilled.
Nathan Bogmore, the protagonist of the opening story, “The Linguist,” is literally learning a new language,
studying French verbs in the country, where his artist mother has dragged the family on a “working vacation.”
Likewise, all Staffel’s characters find themselves getting “lessons in another language,” the language of
adulthood, of danger and opportunity. Circumstances—an enforced relocation, a trip home, the arrival of new
neighbors and with them a new best friend—veer these characters towards a trouble they’re one step behind
understanding. In the mind of Sam Sperry, the contemplative voice at the center of the tour-de-force novella
“Natives and Strangers,” “It was a big, complicated mess, and the only messes Sam had experience with were
the simple ones that got cleaned up with angry voices, a slap on the face, or a sink full of dish soap.” Staffel’s
noir stories are exquisite, gripping observations of lives humbled by the power of the rural land that surrounds
them, of people haunted by the enormity of their longings. Their lessons and the language they teach us offer a
new and compelling translation of what it means to be a family in the modern world.
MEGAN STAFFEL is the author of the novels The Notebook of Lost Things and She Wanted Something Else and the story collection A Length of Wire. Her stories have appeared in Ploughshares, The Seattle Review, Gargoyle, and The Kansas Quarterly. She has received a Michigan Council of the Arts grant and teaches at the Warren Wilson College MFA Program for Writers. She lives in rural New York.
