“Cities I’ve Never Lived In is not a compassionate book, exactly, despite all the sad things in it. From certain angles, it’s a kind of New England gothic, where the lost children and dead women and doppelgängers serve to add atmosphere and meaning to the narrator’s past peregrinations, her dalliances and uncertainties. It turns out in the end that this is in fact a book about an arty person with a complicated personal life. But it’s a lovely one, written in a moving and uncanny register.
All [these stories] provide spellbinding portraits of people in a state of flux or going nowhere fast, and they show Majka as a writer attuned to the depths and complexities of human emotion.
[These stories are] anchored in keenly observed specific details and pivot around deceptively imaginative plots. These are modest-seeming stories that hold deep truths, by a writer of great promise.
Her stories move and undulate across boundaries, intimate like first-person essays, yet enigmatic like fairy tales. This is the book's greatest success: without a distinct form, the stories cannot be held to one; like ghosts, they can travel through walls.
Majka is skilled at these quiet renderings of lonely wandering. She doesn’t portray movement as simple escapism; she examines why movement offers the promise of escape ... the stories give off a very tired energy. It’s not that the writing or the stories are tired, but that the narrator is. Like in a Kundera novel, the weight of all these lives add up, making for an emotional toll I found hard to take in large doses. I’d read a story or two, then have to put the book down and come back to it later. In this respect Cities I’ve Never Lived In is too compassionate toward its narrator—it never lets us forget her deep-down loneliness. But in its best moments, the collection is ruthless, depicting 'what happens when what makes life possible disappears.' Like a homeless cat that must learn to survive, all we can do is move on.
The narration in the stories maintains an anchored and distinct sense of loss, and—in part because of occasional biographical overlaps—it often seems to engage with memoir. The ex-husband Richard feels vivid and continuous each time he appears, as does the runaway father, as does the craving for a baby before it’s too late. But, it’s unclear where or when Majka switches between fiction and nonfiction. Her stories seem to resist those genres.
...quiet intimacy is the kind you’ll find in Majka’s debut. Place is essential—the narrator brings readers to the many places she’s called home throughout her life. In the title story, she travels to city soup kitchens around the Midwest in search of company and comfort. Stories that aren’t told from the first-person act as the narrator’s nod to small town rumors and myths, which carry the same mood as the rest of the collection. Loneliness is always there, along with the difficulty of finding a place to call home.
