Dactyl Review

Joe Riippi’s second book, The Orange Suitcase (Ampersand Books, 85 pages) is a linked collection of literary fictions which reads with just as much heart as his previous novel Do Something, Do Something, Do Something. If possible, The Orange Suitcase
is even more of a lamentation on the world, in general and specific, while being a writer, filtering like a writer. “A story can still wake you in the middle of the night seventeen years later, telling you how even though it’s been on its own for seventeen years, now it’s in trouble, and now your own story has its own story about how it got pregnant one weekend in Vegas…”

Coming from the school of realism in fiction, the magic in Riippi’s case can always, without fail, be found in his surprising moments of instinct. When they show up, he really has “got it.” No question, no further explanation needed. “It didn’t take long before we realized we brought out the worst in each other.” Riippi, when he’s on, is on. When he’s off, I don’t really care. But when he’s on, he reads like he read a lot of Carver. He mentions Carver, briefly in this collection, which earned him points with me further. There are two kinds of people in this world, those who love Carver, and those who don’t. If you don’t love Carver, I will still give you a chance as a human being, but you’re down some pegs.

“She would be beautiful, drop-dead-gorgeous if I didn’t know her.” Riippi’s short lamentations on life,  simply put, provoke an honest chuckle. The man is a charming writer — in a good way. He can write, and he has a nice mix of heart,  but The Orange Suitcase does not read ickily nostalgic nor clichéd in its nostalgia. Toward the middle of the collection, we go into a sort of reverse-time coda where we rise above the writing and enter a discussion between Riippi and Riippi regarding a novel he’s previously written. It almost reminds one of the moment in It’s A Wonderful Life when the stars are having a discussion regarding the heroes below them. Riippi is a person who has lived and is human and faulty but has a wit about him, a calmness steaming up from a cup of coffee, or the Monk’s Blend tea Riippi makes reference to specifically. (Monk’s blend is a black tea infused with a vanilla grenadine that gives off a comforting deepness one looks to in time’s of winter.)

He was carrying an orange suitcase when we met. Wearing his crisp green dress uniform and carrying this absolutely hideous suitcase. I remember it clear as day. He approached me in Point Defiance Park, rose bushes and daffodils around us, bees, and blue sky, Mt. Rainier. I was on my lunch break, and he invited me for an impromptu picnic under a white gazebo. Such a handsome man. He just appeared out of nowhere and asked if I would do him the honor of joining him for lunch-it was quite scandalous in those days, let me tell you. Anyway, I remember sitting there with him and thinking to myself, Now what kind of a lady would fall for a man like this? A man who carries a sandwich and coffee thermos around town in an orange suitcase? No kind of lady I know! But later my mother told me: You can hate the suitcase, Bernice, but still love the man who carries it. And that’s just what I did, and he carried the damn thing for the next 63 years.

So he isn’t dead. That’s what i thought when I saw Ben Jenses today. It happened on the bus, the 14D. I was sitting with my feet against the back wheel-well and trying to read someone else’s poems. I kept getting distracted-there was a paper sac on the floor next to me, of beer and the frozen turbot filets I would make for dinner later. I kept picturing the bottom of the bag getting wet. We would brake to a stop and I would stand and lift the bag by its brown paper handles, not thinking to lift from the bottom. The fish and beer would spill out across the floor, fizzing and spitting, ruining everything while everyone stared. Even now, having just eaten, drinking this beer, the thought gets my eyes pinching.

–Nicolle Elizabeth, author of Read This Sh*t Out Loud (forthcoming).