Marisa Labozzetta
Men Who Walk in Dreams
Guernica World Editions / 2024 / 172 pp / $18.95 Paperback
Reviewed by Julie Delegal / February 2025
Marisa Labozzetta immerses her readers in tales of ambition, loss, and love in her
masterful short story collection, Men Who Walk in Dreams. How her stories consistently resonate with hope is a testament to her craft. The author of three novels, Labozzetta has produced two previous works of short fiction. She was nominated for the Pushcart Prize and is widely published and awarded. Labozzetta deftly pulls her readers in, inviting us to join delightfully idiosyncratic characters as they trek and stumble through twentieth-century American life and into humanity’s twenty-first. The men in Labozzetta’s stories traverse through both the subconscious minds of women and the landscapes of real-world ambition. Their dreams range from farming water buffalo, to repairing boats, to winning the heart of the woman who got away. They pursue their quests, large and small, for the ever elusive something better.
Labozzetta’s tales of the American dream explore both sides of the mythological coin—ambition and emptiness—in the proverbial land of the free. The author also manages to weave in themes of gender balance, skewing and resetting the scales for the archetypal masculine and feminine within and among her stories. Her characters range from the pioneering Italian immigrants who become tenant farmers in upstate New York during Prohibition; to the quest-bound American who drags his female companion to a snake festival in an Italian village; to the woman who signs up for another stint in Antarctica during what was supposed to have been her honeymoon. Labozzetta also gifts us the young Salvadoran immigrant Javier, whose story “Sunrise” occurs a century after the eponymous tenant-farmer tale, “Men Who Walk in Dreams.” Javier observes that his relatives work far too much to ever enjoy their home, which they struggle so hard to afford. Aspiration and alienation are two of the poles on which the author’s stories are strung.
Labozzetta accomplishes her feats, in part, through economical, deceptively simple writing. “My mother was an artist, although she didn’t know it,” is the line that opens “The Woman Who Drew on Walls.” The drawing woman’s son, Charlie, a trans man, recounts his offbeat mother’s difficult life before and after a wallpaper company executive discovers her talent during America’s mid-century marketing boom. Charlie, whose father abandoned the family early on, understood it was his mother’s art that both supported and “penalized” them, as they moved to “smaller apartments” because her medium on their walls was “indelible ink or painted with acrylic or oil.” Charlie, who visits her in assisted living, tells us, “I miss the drawings. She hasn’t made one in almost twenty years.” Here, themes of both loss and fulfillment come through, as well as a peculiarly presented, two-headed sense of balance—a work of her art both mother and son refer to as “schizophrenic.”
Both Charlie and the executive in “The Woman Who Drew on Walls” become different answers to a question that emerges for readers: Who are these men who walk in dreams? Among the walking men in Labozzetta’s work are those who are relegated to the subconscious visions of women like Adela and Kathleen. In the immigrant Adela’s case, in the eponymous opening story, she dreams of men for whom she has lost respect or desire, having been born with “the gnawing between my legs.” The Italian-born woman tires of the shame-filled priest from her village, whom she seduces, marries, and accompanies to America only to begin a similar quest with a bootlegger she comes to know. “He appears in no greater detail than those sketches of men with untraceable pasts, men whose stories I cannot flesh out, whose lives I can no longer mesh with mine.” The pregnant Adela’s literal isolation—on a farm in rural upstate New York—is magnified by these fading faces in her dreams.
The author turns the motif of the dream-only man inside out, however, in “The Intruder.” Kathleen is horrified but mesmerized by a strange French woman in a coffee shop who challenges the American’s dormant sexuality. In “The Intruder,” “Kasleen,” as the French woman calls her, meets a man in her dreams whom she allows to fade for entirely different reasons than Adela does. Each woman, in her own way, embraces a more traditionally masculine, quest-oriented approach to sexuality, calling attention to the gender themes that play throughout the collection.
Readers will recognize men who walk in a different kind of dream—ambition—in the driven, conquering men who have specific chinks in their relationships with women. For example, in “You Can’t Get There from Here,” Thomas is a philandering, hard-drinking man, “but not a self-destructive one.” He has inherited his father’s view of women—one that clouds his perception of their agency in the world. His self-fulfilling view of the women in his life confers a sort of acquired autism as he sets out on his utterly American quest for the next big thing. “Can’t miss this one,” he tells his new acquaintance, Arthur, the innkeeper, on his way to a Bar Harbor bungalow he bought but has not seen. “Got it all figured out. . . . Got it right this time.” The reader is left wishing the innkeeper, Arthur, could share more than his wife’s last jar of jam with his misguided guest.
In Arthur, Labozzetta offers a third type of man who walks in dreams—one who experiences shared hopes with a woman in his life. Not unlike the young immigrant in “Sunrise” who mourns the workaholism of his relatives, Arthur grieves his wife’s early death from cancer, after only two years of enjoying the bed and breakfast together. With both Arthur and Javier, Labozzetta chimes on a center key, somewhere in between the discordant notes of self-absorbed ambition and utter grief: the precious, if time-bound, consciousness of fulfillment. It is no coincidence that the archetypal feminine gets a larger role in Labozzetta’s relative tales of balance, “For the Love of Buffaloes” and “Sunrise.” If “For the Love of Buffaloes” reprises the pioneering, agrarian tale of Adela and her guilt-ridden priest, “Sunrise” provides the flourishing, melodic coda.
At a time when many of us are asking ourselves what is left of the American dream, as we wonder whether we can ever shift our spinning tires all the way through our consumeristic addictions, along comes a writer who seems to promise, yes, we can. Pay attention, Labozzetta is saying, to what fades in dreams and to what remains, to the ways in which goodness still triumphs. Think of Men Who Walk in Dreams as a hope chest, a century-full of lessons gleaned and stowed away for something we have not yet seen—a new covenant which, Labozzetta insists, is on its way, nonetheless.
Julie G. Delegal is an MFA candidate at the Naslund-Mann Graduate School of Writing at Spalding University. A native of Jacksonville, Florida, she has written for Folio Weekly, Florida Politics, and the family law firm. Julie is mother to three adult children and a poodle. She enjoys home design, gardening, and pretending others’ small children are her grandkids, just for a while.