"A Trio Pressed, Shaped, and Sculpted: A Review of Mandira Pattnaik’s Glass/Fire" by Dave Nash

Books like people can come into our lives through chance or circumstance or with purpose and meaning. In either case, they challenge us to find common ground, to open ourselves up to their experience, to understand the characters’ struggle. It’s my hope that by tackling that challenge I can grow my humanity just a little.  

Mandira Pattnaik’s Glass / Fire threads three girls through hard luck, bad odds, and worse parents. Pattnaik weaves the narrator, her sister Lily, and Jo against a backdrop of natural elements, like rain, tide, and the night. She stretches their stories from suburban New Jersey to a seaside Indian village. All the while Glass/Fire’s Novella-in-Flash format pushes the reader to find the proper perspective to view this beautifully braided tapestry. 

Fire plays catalyst for glass.  Glass lays the protean foil for the girls — brittle at times and fluid at others. “I silently watch: his room glows like fire, his body like sculpted glass. I know— Glass is a malleable liquid that can be pressed, shaped, and molded to perfection.”(1) Glass shifts shapes across settings. And Pattnaik forms her flashes like a glassblower. 

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(1)Asking to Be Married to a Dress. Pg. 68

“In the mood we were in, fire could be liquid, could be sand, or molten like lava, or flames, licking the last of us. Inching closer, Annabelle, red as henna, as cinnamon, as coals in the oven, the color of syrup, asked if until evening was too long.”(2)

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(2) Glass/Fire. Pg. 11

The artist shapes the girl’s desire, like glass, to fit the circumstances of the characters. The characters' circumstances change from thriving to struggling, from full of family to alone. And what do these three characters want? Like most of us, it’s easier to find what they don’t want (e.g. an outsider’s life) than what they do. The girls spend their time as Glass/Fire’s trinity of protagonists searching for that want, hoping to find meaning. 

Is that power? From the first two flashes Glass/Fire links control with power. Power is agency for the girls. Agency to determine their lives, even when the situation slants severely against them. If in the first flash they are insiders in control of their true selves, then the next flash flips them. “We’re forever outsiders. Forever lonely. We chip off, we shatter, we scatter like Bone China, dropped.”(3) As glass changes from molten and malleable to chilled and fragile, Pattnaik shows us how place shapes character and sets story. 

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(3) Un-Broken p. 13

Is that freedom to choose their own place? Characters can change place, but trauma can’t be chased away so easily. Like us, there are some things they can’t just get over. Trauma is real.  Dealing with the wrongs we’ve been dealt and felt is part of the universal experience. In subsequent flashes misfortune unfolds for each member of the trio. Responding to it provides the protagonists opportunities to exercise agency. How they respond builds their character. It’s the unique response that makes fiction worth reading: empathizing with the struggle. Empathy leads to engagements, new connections, metaphors, similes, and ever widening, layered work.

“We’re never quite the same. However much the cracks are glued.”(4)

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(4) Ibid.

Reading about samosas, brown Sahibs, and jamun trees opened me up to a new world. To help navigate Glass/Fire contains cosmological constants like the night sky, tides, and the pressure that forms diamonds from carbon.  My life hasn’t been what I expected or dreamed of either. I’ve gone from groom to diaper changer, from high school golden boy to unemployed liberal arts graduate. I’ve led an industry conference and have just been happy to pick up a paycheck. Acceptance and rejection. Cringey first drafts and fully formed finals. Life isn’t what we expect, it’s what we make of it. How we find agency in the worst of situations. Like Glass/Fire, we may look to science for metaphors and meaning or dive into our shared language for the voice to shape the stories we tell ourselves to survive. 

Pattnaik dedicates Glass/Fire to the girls of underprivileged backgrounds who must make the best of their circumstances to survive. After disenchantment and brooding, there’s a chance to pick up the pieces and uncover meaning and purpose in life. If you can find one flash in this novella that puts you in the shoes of one of those girls, I think you can find something for your own story and a better understanding of the human experience.

Dave Nash (he/him) does his best writing in the tunnel between New York and New Jersey. His work appears in places like The South Florida Poetry Journal, Bulb Culture Collective, and The Hooghly Review. You can learn more at https://davenashwrites.substack.com/