Book Review

There isn’t a hitch or bump on the road of immersion into Grace Spulak’s fictional world in Magdalena is Brighter Than You Think, winner of the 2025 Autumn House Rising Writer in Fiction Prize. Spulak writes with unsparing sharp focus and a matching terse, nearly catatonic register, about precarious lives irreparably scarred by abuse, poverty, dysfunction, dysphoria, and a failed state machinery. Her style and subject—avoiding both affective and pathetic fallacies as stylistic crutches that would make these stories descend into unseemly pathos or sentiment—refuse to look away from human detritus that might have been salvaged had there been the collective social will to do so. Therefore, in Magdalena is Brighter Than You Think, fiction is not reparatory, but choric.

That in the world’s richest “democracy” there is desperation of the sort Spulak depicts would surprise few, but her montage of this precarity unflinchingly avoids sentimentality, apostrophe, apotheosis, or catachresis. Partly subtending the stories’ pileups of damage and despair is Spulak’s understanding that emotional theatricality requires an audience: those already starving can’t go on a hunger strike. In the stories of Magdalena is Brighter than You Think, the characters are so shaped by chronic, deep-seated insecurity and deprivation that crusade and agitation are equally incommensurate expressive registers. Grim stoicism is the only stance when there’s no stage for pushback politics and no ticket buyers for the show—lying low and managing “underdeveloped” lives in the developed world is the only option.

Spulak’s narrative register verbalizes the speechless acquiescence of this alternative underground “normal,” since in America, such lives are either considered nonexistent or, when they won’t stay out of sight, explained by the comforting mythical calculus of capitalism’s protestant ethic—the poor must be “undeserving” of better because they lack the proper work ethic, are criminal minded, or even predestined for damnation and ineligible for seats at the table of three square meals a day.

The way Spulak’s stories will slay the reader is by putting names to faces of the people one encounters every day but fails to notice or remember in menial jobs, in service occupations, in jobs no one wants unless they’ve run out of all options. The stories put eyes on faces that normally run together into one blurry gray scale in daily life, so trivial and weightless their labor on one’s behalf seems to be—eyes that in her pages, however, demand acknowledgment of fellow humanity.  Her almost weightless language does more than all the heavy lifting lush prose can do. Examples of this abound, and powerful ones stand out: “Every place we could drive to was pretty much the same.” “Darryl, I thought, was already dead, so how much else could happen to him.” “She was tired of contenting herself.”

Sound is thus an echo to the sense. The absence of lush prose also symptomatizes the lack of meaningful temporality, significant succession, or perspectival depth in the lives of the characters. Moments of self-realization, success, or even crashing are rare and ephemeral, so chronologies of undulating experience—ups and downs, highs and lows that might qualify a life as being storied—flatline. The characters’ futures come into focus as indistinguishable from their pasts and presents: “past is present. Present is past” (“Literal”). Motion is skidding in place, duration is endurance, and time is static and homogenous. Structure has swallowed event whole, and Spulak’s characters look out of her low-burning prose at curious spectators sampling their annihilation.

Occasional rhetorical flashes, like a transferred epithet or a rare pathetic fallacy such as “the gutless sun,” and the sudden slamming metaphor of a mother feeling “the way her life had . . . digested her from the inside out” as counterpart to her daughter’s anorexia as possibly “her body . . . digesting her organs,” only reinforce the bleakness of life and minimalism of style mirrored in each other.

The one divergence from this style and timbre of the stories is the one near the middle of the collection: “Literal.” A rumination on memory versus history, on living versus being dead, it probes the nature of experience exquisitely: If something isn’t exactly remembered, did it happen? This is a meta-textual nota bene, one might say. Foregrounding the violence mostly kneaded into the backdrops of other stories, the protagonist of “Literal” relives in memory her rape and near-death, unable to let the past die into “history,” a quandary exacerbated by her “lucky” acceptance into a prestigious and competitive MFA writing program where she feels a misfit and an imposter both as economically marginalized and because such programs implicitly demand a mining of the writer’s past as “material”: “At the very least, a writer must remember their life.” In her case, though, this would reinforce her difference from her privileged cohort mates: Memory returns her to a brutal rape and assault that she only fractionally remembers, though, because she was first choked unconscious.

Even before the MFA program, recurring questions have always focused on the validity of her memory: “If she doesn’t remember [the assault], can it really have been that bad?” She has internalized this doubt: “If she can’t scaffold the story with memory, can she really say she experienced it? Can she really say it was the worst moment of her life?” How can someone who doesn’t have total recall of their worst trauma own that experience sufficiently to write it, though another whose “worst moment” was merely embarrassment at the public pool does? After all, the MFA program insists that “it’s the details that matter.”

“Literal” can be read as a meta-text on fiction as dialectic between real and representational, neither “true” nor “false” in a forensic sense. It fingers the age-old question about the relationship of the real and representation, of mimesis and imagination, of “history” and “memory.” If the real must be comprehensively recuperable and fully owned to be representable (whether by art or by criminal law), how is trauma, which intrinsically sinks beneath consciousness, ever “authentically” writeable, with “details that matter,” as the prestigious writing program demands? The answer is because in memory experience is never past, however flickering, though in history it may be. As, for instance, when the titular first story’s protagonist sees her brother in the kitchen, though he’s dead: “I don’t even really know how I knew it was Darryl when I first saw him in the kitchen. There was something about him, I guess, that I still remembered and recognized.”

Fiction is born from this foundational aporia: its “material” is not found in a plenary relationship to “the real,” nor in a claim to exactly “reproduce” the real. It is, in other words,  not “literal.” By its very nature and form, fiction affirms the irreducibility of representation to “what really happened.” It always symbolically leaves open the possibility of knowing “what really happened” in more than one way, or gaps in knowing. It exists to brush off the demand for total recall and articulacy. The assaulted body remembers fragments history buries.

Like “Literal,” Spulak’s brilliant collection of stories about lives broken and tremulous is a literary manifesto on shattering the supposed pact between “literariness” and “literature.” In 1772, teenage black slave poet Phillis Wheatley sat for a test given by eighteen eminent white Bostonians to prove that the contents of her mind were indeed her own, because she was drawing upon an imaginative and creative realm she wasn’t supposed to be able to access. She passed the test. Spulak’s memorable collection Magdalena Is Brighter Than You Think declares plumbing what a writer or their characters “can know” in fiction’s stylistic virtuosity null and void. This debut collection is a powerful harbinger of a magnetic, haunting new voice in American fiction