Reviewed by Lee Rinehart
Skylighting
By Charles Hansmann
Regal House Publishing
December 2025, Paperback, 178 pages, ISBN-13 : 978-1646036301
Mourning opens a new horizon, often an opaque decomposing skyline. An endless grayscale landscape where the past becomes shadow. You’re left alone, scrubbed raw, seeking meaning or, impossibly, a return, wandering in transient obscurity.
Hansmann’s Skylighting opens in normalcy, to “white waves against rolling green headland,” cool and sunny as though wakened “gauzy and fluffed, still sleepy,” with prospects of adventure and discovery. I imagine Nick and Erin’s road trip conversation: Dungunaire Castle, she says. An overlook of Galway Bay at Drumcreehy. Maybe she is wearing a sun dress. The sky is still clear, and no one, reader and characters alike, notices the broiling storm in the distance.
“The crash comes down like a gavel. It is a final verdict, there can be no appeal.” From here, in an instant that barely registers, in three sentences like a numb whiplash, a story emerges, evolves almost unnoticed, then you’re captivated.
Because somehow, you can relate.
Skylighting is written in close first person with a deeply speculative, experiential tone. Impulsively I ask, why do we write, and read, novels like this? Maybe we are trying to get at something fundamental, visceral. Something communal yet impossible to share. The universal experience of loss accompanied by a grasping, an inability to psychologically adjust to an overwhelming absence.
Hansmann’s narrative is descriptive and detailed, because scene setting carries so much weight in the story:
October passes, and the days turn damp and drizzly. I am glad when the trees let go of their colors, the wet leaves plastered to the pavement. I am thankful for the overcast sky, the shortening light, nature in sync with my gloom. The conditions are perfect for suffering.
Here, Hansmann mirrors the character’s mood in the surroundings, accentuating his inner life, his grief. Then, the world shrinks to a singularity, and we are deeper into Nick’s mind, as when he leaves Ireland, alone, bound for an existence entombed in obscurity:
I sink back in the seat with my luggage beside me. I hold the urn in a hug. It feels solid, and I feel my heart knocking, like knocking at a door. Not to gain entrance, just for a sounding, a measure of depth, just to come to grips with the barrier that bars me forever.
Hansmann weaves multiple themes throughout the story. Loss, certainly. But this is a mere compass point, the needle that depicts the limit beyond which Nick cannot pass. Readers will recognize the yearning for freedom and authenticity, as when Nick, a lawyer by training, immerses himself in work that is “manual, mechanical, out in the open for everyone to see. Such is freedom… the honest expression… nothing to conceal and nothing implied.” Perhaps it is anonymity he seeks. An immersion in the mundane, recognizing that anything he does, anyone he meets will never compare to what he has lost. And so, he is always pretending, his outward expression never revealing the deprivation of his inner life.
Of all Hansmann’s themes, perhaps the most compelling is the hyper-real world Nick suffers. What he touches, what he sees and hears tangibly is unrecognizable from speculation. Here is where Hansmann’s speculative writing shines, as when:
From my radio and woofing through the wall from the radio louder than mine comes an existential song of psychedelic paranoia, reality as decoy and disguise…
The reader no longer sees, as with Nick, any clear distinction between where truth ends and fiction begins. Such, one supposes, is the nature of a grieving soul. And readers will likely see in Nick’s life traces of our collective grief; the mourning we all share by virtue of living in a world of spectacle.
If Nick is merely living as a ghost from the past, what is his future? Certainly, his life now is one of liminality. One gets the sense the balm he seeks is annihilation. As if the world he lives in is characterized by a collective resignation to the forgetting. Like, during his visit to the museum of indigenous peoples, it is gone, it isn’t coming back.
Once gets the sense that Nick’s melancholy is taking him somewhere. As with the women he meets throughout the story, women who somehow reflect his transition from fullness to melancholy, to, what? Perhaps Erin’s reflection, dim, in other women? The first woman, young, distant and accusing, carrying her own weight of powerlessness and obfuscation. The second, aloof, like his mother perhaps, but distantly near, hiding from husband and child. “An aloneness that has strayed outside of her.” The German woman and child, the husband quietly near, she intelligent, perceptive, eternally distant, behaving like an aunt to the child, as if she couldn’t hide her own interiority. His own mother, a debilitating wanderlust, her own melancholy horizon:
With my hand-me-down camera I liked taking pictures of my mother’s blown hair. The landscape passed in a blur as the waves of her hair rose and swirled. Each photo was a stroke of futile preservation, as I knew even then, an attempt to hold onto the transience I loved.
Others mirrored Nick’s wounds. The woman who “seems to have come to this world from deep inside it, as if she’d been mined… her face like dry land, etched with erosion and wildlife trails.” Another, who like Nick wished to live a life unencumbered, “a phantom of missed opportunity, of things not done.” And finally, someone who challenged his grief and his inability to connect, exposing what was lacking in his world.
But no one ever made sense of life except Erin. And now, there is a struggle with perceived unfaithfulness. But how can one live out a marriage vow when your partner no longer exists? Perhaps we are unfaithful not because we seek relief or meaning, or the chance to be seen, but because we lose hope.
“I’ve been skylighting, never touching down,” Nick realizes at the end. Reading Hansmann’s novel is vicarious experience. As you read, you realize you are mourning too. You have been a long time. We are all mourning something.
About the reviewer: Lee Rinehart is an educator and writer whose work examines the disturbing intersection of extractive land use policy and ecological wellbeing. He works at a national nonprofit providing educational programs that assist farmers transitioning to sustainable practices. Lee is an MFA candidate at Wilkes University’s Maslow Family Graduate Program in Creative Writing.