Catholicism is a religion of things. Medals, scapulars, holy water, ashes, relics under altar stones, a rosary worn smooth at the decades — the faith has never been embarrassed about matter. So a story collection with a Catholic substructure and a title like Useless Things raises an obvious question. Which of its objects are holy, and how do they get that way?
The answer the stories give is stricter, and stranger, than a reader might expect. Nothing in the collection is holy on its own account. Not one object.
Consider the ones that matter most. A piano stands in a knotty pine basement and makes grief audible, but it is a piano; it does no work when nobody is playing it for anyone. A photograph is quickly hidden when someone comes into the room, and later a hand rests on the glass — and the age spots on those fingers belong to the scene as much as the face beneath them does. A mint comes out of a handbag and consoles for exactly as long as a mint can console. What these share is not sanctity. It is relation. Each is a thing pointed at a person.
Consider the photograph more closely, because the sentence that carries it is doing something exact. The grandmother is looking at an old picture of herself: “‘I was quite the looker. Not like now.’ She glanced at her obese body. I noticed age spots on her chubby fingers when she touched the glass.” Three bodies occupy that moment — the young woman in the image, the aging woman looking, and the hand between them. The relic here is not the photograph. It is the touch: the glass is the only thing keeping the two selves apart, and the narrator notices the hand rather than the picture. An object becomes charged at the point where somebody reaches for it.
Set against this is a shop. Its window holds “a display of crystals and gemstones, silver and pewter jewelry, chalices, glass skulls, and crystal balls.” Note the sequence. A chalice — the vessel of the Eucharist — is listed fourth, between the jewelry and the glass skulls, with no more emphasis than either. That flattening is the judgement. The sentence does not attack the shop; it simply declines to rank its contents, and in declining, shows that the shop has already declined to. Inside, a gift is pressed on a customer with the language of pastoral care: “It’s good for healing grief. Please take it.” Every devotional gesture is present in that room. Nobody is served by any of it.
That contrast is the collection’s real argument about objects. A relic carries a person’s presence. A fetish stands in for the person and lets you stop attending to them. The shop is full of consecrated-looking merchandise and empty of anybody to consecrate it for. The difference is never the object. It is whether anybody is on the other end of it.
The same rule governs the bodies, which the stories handle with more nerve than the objects. A daughter reaches for her mother’s face: “I touched her face and smeared the colored powder. She winced. ‘I’m sorry, Mom.’” The gesture is tender and it is also an exposure — the cosmetic comes away, the bruise it was hiding does not, and the apology that follows is for the touching rather than for the injury. Nothing is healed. What the moment establishes is that the body under the powder is still owed the truth, and that telling it costs something. Elsewhere there are dentures in a street, there is urine, there is decomposition, there is the ordinary indignity of being old and needing help. If the phrase about the body as a temple is being tested here, the test comes out qualified: the flesh in these stories is not inviolable, and it is repeatedly violated. What it never becomes is disposable. Degradation does not cancel a person’s claim on someone else’s attention, and that claim is the nearest thing to a doctrine the book has.
The care that answers the claim is unglamorous and always compromised, and the prose is careful not to ennoble it. When a corridor is littered with glass, the response is this: “All business, Ms. Jackson finds no humor in the situation. She squats down to pick up a big piece of glass.” All business. No humor. The narration withholds every word that would make the act beautiful, and then lets her squat down anyway. That refusal is the point: the gesture has to be worth something without being decorated, or it is not worth anything. Elsewhere a man puts the wipers on high and clears a windshield before he apologises. Neither gesture cures anything. Nobody is healed of death, or violence, or dementia, or abandonment. The gestures matter because they refuse to treat another body as rubbish, which in these stories is the whole of what a person can actually do.
What keeps this from sentimentality is how much the collection declines to redeem. Spoiled cream is handled in one flat movement: “‘Mary, the cream’s gone bad.’ She poured it down the sink and ran hot water. ‘We’ll just have to have our coffee black.’” No pause, no image, no second meaning — the sentence disposes of the cream and moves on, and a writer inclined to make every object sacramental would have found something for it to mean. Meatloaf on a floor stays meatloaf. A smashed vending machine and the sweets scattered around it are not sanctified by anyone noticing them. An empty pill bottle beside the pale rectangle where a photograph used to hang is residue, not revelation. A Christmas tree sold as an heirloom cannot supply the descendants it was meant to be passed down to, and ornaments carried out of a house are theft rather than reverent salvage. Almost nothing in this book is resurrected.
Which is what makes the title honest. “Useless” is a transactional word — a verdict about function and resale and what a thing will fetch. The stories keep setting that verdict beside a different one and letting the reader watch them disagree. Worth here is not price, not rarity, not religious packaging. It is relation, and relation is perishable. A piano makes grief audible while someone is listening. A mint helps for a minute. A carer protects an exposed body until she cannot.
That is a modest spirituality, and deliberately so: lay, bodily, and temporary. Attention without guarantee. It is also, on the evidence of these stories, the only kind that survives contact with an actual life.