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I came to Costa Rica to get away from people like you. I went as far away from you as I could get, and here you are.
I've tried to explain to Josie once why her music was making my ears bleed. It's a complicated, gender-based issue. For exemple, if a young Lemmy Kilmister gets dumped, he is going to write an angry rock n' roll song about booze, titty bars and unnecessary violence. Now, if Sarah McLachlan writes a song for the same reason, it's going to be a quiet, mounrful song about keeping your dignity and moving on with your life into an incertain tomorrow. I don't read nearly enough female readers for that same reason: I don't feel an intimate relationship to what they do. I did, however feel the pull of Alden Jones' fiction. UNACCOMPANIED MINORS is a neurotic, self-sufficient short story collection that highlights the powerful economy of style of Ms. Jones. It's a smart and mature first step ino the literary landscape.
UNACCOMPANIED MINORS is rather short. There are seven stories that clock at a little over than 160 pages and it's entirely by design. Nothing about this collection hasn't been carefully thought of. My favourite story was HEATHENS, a story that depicts the relationship between an expatriate English teacher in Costa Rica and a young Christian missionary. Not only their relationship is about more than just a clash of values, but it's drawn as the underlying issues of their day to day dealing. It's a smart and deceptively complex story. I really liked FREAKS too, despite the alluded body horror (I have a weak stomach for that), a story that captured the complexity of human relationship to tragedy (and to their bodies), without taking shortcuts for narrative intensity purposes.
''She's very mature for her age,'' James said to his parents, with scripted sarcasm. The he took me upstairs and we had sex in his bedroom with the door locked. I let me voice be heard that day, with his parents downstairs, knowing I was matures for my age, wanting them to know. I understood pleasure. I attacked it at the throat and it fought back. I did know more than other girls.
What makes Alden Jones special is the level of control she had over her material. It's normal for authors to want to hit emotional high points, and it's a variable that often derails a story. The stories of Alden Jones don't suffer any emotional overkill. They show a stunning creative maturity and precision. It's so rare to come across an author, male or female, who knows himself/herself enough and understands the purpose of his stories well enough to acknowledge their limitations and use them as a set of boundaries to create their stories. The fiction of Alden Jones will resonate with just about anybody. They are so precise and uncluttered with personal crap that they reveal these traits of human nature that are too complex to be synthesized with words alone and need a narrative frame to be understood.
I had no expectations whatsoever about UNACCOMPANIED MINORS but shit, it was a wholesome and satisfying experience. If you'll allow me to go back to my musical allegory, Alden Jones would be a band anybody can listen to and appreciate. For Josie and I, it would be Sia or Bad Religion. It's a great feeling to stumble upon a new impressive talent like Jones, and while UNACCOMPANIED MINORS is bite-sized goodness, it successfully made me hungry for a novel. For a lack of a better comparison, I thought there was a little Raymond Carver to Alden Jones' short stories. There is a well-studied minimalism and a keen understanding of human nature to UNACCOMPANIED MINORS. If you didn't know who Alden Jones was, this short story collection is a brilliant calling card.