Frank O;Connor 2013 Short Story Contest: Joyce Carol Oates "Black Dahlia and White Rose"

With all due respect to the honorable judges of the 2013 Frank O’Connor short story contest, I just do not understand how Joyce Carol Oates’ Black Dahlia & White Rose got on the short list. As I have noted here and other places, I have never been an admirer of the stories of Ms. Oates, who I think writes technically proficient, but emotionally superficial short fiction—fiction that is more “pop” than literary, in spite of her protestations to the contrary.  In my opinion, this most recent collection is her weakest to date.

At the outset, I assure you, although Joyce Carol Oates’ stories do not require a “second” reading, I did indeed, as is my wont, read all eleven stories in this collection. Let me quickly dismiss the usual finger exercises.  Oates is the complete professional writer, who cannot resist converting everything she experiences or thinks about into “writing.”  The collection contains at least three little narrative exercises (one hesitates to call them “experiments”) that might she might well have left in her notebook, that is, if she were not determined to write about everything she thinks about and publish everything she writes. 

“Hey Dad” is the first person “voice” of a twenty-one year old man who walks across the graduation stage in front of his sixty-two year old father who is up there to get an honorary degree; he is the cliché prof who got one of his students pregnant, but was not interested in her child.  The story ends with the salutation, “Hey Dad, it’s me.”

In “A Brutal Murder in a Public Place,” the narrator spots a bird in an airport waiting room and so sympathizes with its trapped plight that she “becomes” the bird.  The piece ends with a foreboding that Oates finds irresistible, as the narrator/bird sees men coming toward her with a ladder, a small net, and “a wicked-looking broom.”

“San Quentin,” which is actually a sort of prelude to the following story, “Anniversary,” centers briefly on a San Quentin murderer/lifer named Quogn, who enrolls in a prison Intro to Biology class in order to find out “How you kill a person?  How a person die?  What it mean kill, die?”

O.K. now that those little “pieces” are out of the way, we move on to Oates’ more “serious” stories.  First, there is the title piece (also little more than an extended exercise in “voice”), which features the first person pov of: Elizabeth Short (the so-called Black Dahlia who was brutally tortured and killed in Los Angeles in 1947); K. Keinhardt, the photographer who took the famous “Miss Golden Dreams” photo of a young nude Marilyn Monroe; and Norma Jean Baker (you know who), resurrected by Oates once again, this time, to be a roommate to the Black Dahlia.  The originating energy of the story in Oates’ mind is that the murderer (who has never been discovered) really wanted to kill Marilyn, but, as a result of her aggressiveness, took Elizabeth Short instead).  

This energizing trope is justification for Oates describing in gruesome detail, in the Dahlia’s own voice post mortem, the photos of her mutilated body (which Oates most helpfully hints can be seen in stark black and white at various sites). Short is presented as a street-wise aspirant to stardom, who says things like, “Don’t argue with me, I told Norma—this is the foundation of civilization,” and Monroe is made out to be a simpering baby-girl Betty Boop who says things like, “It was the awfullest—most horrible—thing” or “Oh, gosh I was getting mad at Betty.”  Oh, yeah, it will keep you glued to the page, but the glue begins to stink pretty quickly.

“Run Kiss Daddy” and “Deceit” are typical Oatesian “trick” stories, for both suggest that something more in going on in the stories than appear on the surface.  In the first, a divorced man who has been separated from his older children remarries a woman with two young children.  He buys an A-frame on a lake where he used to take his first family and while there uncovers the body of a small female child. There is no reason to think that he has anything to do with this child, but Oates drops a suggestion that it may have been his own.  In “Deceit,” a mother who takes sedative meds is called to her adolescent daughter’s school because her daughter has bruises on her body. Although the daughter makes it quite clear that the perpetrator is a cliché masculinized girlfriend, Oates ends the story with a sly suggestion that the mother may be the guilty party.  The red herrings in these two stories are so sneaky that the reviewer in Kirkus Review swallows the bait and points the finger at the father in the first story and the mother in the second.

Because it originally appeared in The New Yorker and was chosen for the Best American Short Stories 2011, “I.D.” has the most cachet of these eleven stories.  However, it is hardly more than an excuse for Oates to show that she knows something about the voice and life of an eighth-grader whose mother is a dealer at an Atlantic City casino. When the young girl is brought to the morgue by police to identify a woman who may or may not be her mother, the girl does not or cannot make the I.D. She denies that the woman in the morgue is her mother because she does not recognize her derelict body or her dumpster-discovered purse and coat. Oates purposely leaves the story open as to whether the girl purposely denies the ID or whether she honestly does not recognize this dead “body” as her living mother.  This is all sound enough psychology, but when the girl goes back to school and tells her friend that she is fine—“Why not?” we cannot be sure enough about the voice to identify what this seeming indifference means.

In “The Good Samaritan,” a young woman finds a wallet on a train and decides to take to the address on a “In case of Emergency” card.  We get some backstory of the young woman’s lackluster life, but she seems to blossom when she goes to the house and sees how handsome the wallet owner’s husband is.  The ostensible mystery is that the wife has disappeared earlier that day and the husband does not know where she is, but the real mystery is why the narrator pretends that she is some kind of psychic who might be able to figure out where the wife is by handling her clothing and personal effects and why the husband so readily believes it.  

Although the young woman can offer no help, the husband calls her a Good Samaritan and says there must be some reason God sent her to him.  Thirty years later, the narrator laments that she has never found a man like the husband, although it is certainly not clear what she saw in him except a pretty face.  The story ends inevitably, but ostensibly indeterminately, with the narrator remembering the husband’s saying there must be some reason God sent her to him and sighing, “Yes.  I think that you must be right.”  I have no idea why God sent her to the man; I only wish I knew why Joyce Carol Oates did.

The final three stories—“Roma,” “Spotted Hyenas:  A Romance,” and “Anniversary” focus on pretty much the same woman.  In “Roma,” she is in her fifties and in Italy on holiday with her husband, a supercilious distant type who acts as if he knows everything.  In “Spotted Hyenas,” she is forty-three with a husband who is a successful litigator, but has little time for her.  In” An Anniversary,” she is a retired scholar and academic administrator who is trying “to be of help” by volunteering to be an assistant in an expository writing class in San Quentin after her husband’s death. Children do not play a role in the lives of any of these women; the only question the stories pose is: How can these women find fulfillment?

In “Roma,” which is padded with bits of cultural and art history, the couple are fascinated by views in the windows of apartments across the way, ala, as Oates makes it emphatically, clear in case we are too culturally deficient to know, Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window.  The story focuses primarily on the woman’s sense that her husband is losing his old unexamined sense of himself as a man among men, although she is delighted to take advantage of his vulnerability by uncharacteristically snapping at him. 

As is usually the case in an Oates story, the woman must face something of a comeuppance.  This is achieved here by the somewhat trivial gambit of having her going shopping for expensive clothes and then getting lost when she tries to find the apartment building into which she and her husband have been peeping at night.  Although she is anxious, there is no real threat here, for she is in the vicinity of her hotel; it is just that she becomes unreasonably panicked that she cannot find the building.  “There has to be some explanation,” she ponders.  But, alas there is none.  Nor is there any explanation for her thinking, “This is my punishment now.  For who I am.”  Beats me!

“Spotted Hyenas: A Romance” is a Stephen Kingish tale of a woman who dreams, or fantasizes, or hallucinates, a man who also seems like a wolf haunting her at her home. When she gets an epiphany that the wolfish ghost is a man she knew in graduate school when she was studying biology, she looks him up on the Internet and decides to go visit him where he is a research scientist studying spotted hyenas. The introduction of this particular species gives Oates an opportunity to talk about their most extraordinary feature—that in their matriarchal society the female clitoris o the spotted hyena is masculinized to the size and behavior of a penis, a “pseudopenis,” if you will.  

Furthermore—fascinating stuff this—the female gives birth through this narrow “tunnel-like organ.”  So what’s the upshot of all this Origin of Species (helpfully mentioned several times in the story) stuff?  Well, when she goes home, she dreams, fantasizes, or hallucinates, that she is transformed into a spotted hyena, joining her male hyena ghost, and killing her supercilious husband, before running off into the forest “where the night lies all before them, where to roam.”  My, my, my!

“Anniversary,” the final story in the collection, is primarily an Oatesian opportunity to talk about how much she knows about maximum-security prison protocol. As usual in an Oates story, there is a seeming reality/illusion ambiguity here, for the retired window academic volunteering in the prison to teach freshman composition seems to expect to see someone she knows, although the story never really makes clear who that person is.  It could be her husband, who died two years before, but why would he be there?  And Oates cannot resist using her vast storytelling experience to set up what she takes to be a truly ambiguous ending.  

When carelessly, she and her companion teacher allow a small pencil sharpener (you know, the ones with the itsy bitsy razor sharp blade) to get away from them, a prisoner disgusted with the woman” who had insulted his manhood with her condescension; with her ridiculous female vanity,” slits her throat. The story seems to end with this:  “They would discover Vivianne Geary fallen and lifeless on the wooden ramp behind the entrance to the Education Office, at the very end of the ramp, bled out.”  Indeed,  Randy Boyagoda, in his review, in The New York Times no les, says, “In ‘Anniversary,’ a smug academic seeks new purpose by condescendingly teaching inmates, only to die from a casual oversight involving a purloined pencil sharpener.”

But wait!—as the television pitchmen often shout—on the next, that is, the last page of the story, there is another paragraph—this one explaining how the prison officials had reprimanded the woman and her colleague for their carelessness and that now on the drive home, he is cursing and she is crying. The story actually ends with: “She was exhausted, wounded, like one who has been stricken, her throat slashed.  She was finished, she’d bled out.  She heard herself say:  ‘Next time. Yes.’”

What is this?  Did The New York Times  reviewer just not turn to the last page?  Is this just another bogus Oatesian ambiguity?  Are we really supposed to ask, “Wow, what really happened?” Did she get her throat cut or not?"  Do we really care?  I think not.

I am sorry, esteemed judges of this year’s Frank O’Connor Short Story contest, but I cannot, for the life of me, understand how this book deserves to be on the short list.

By the way, if you have any doubts about the kind of “pop” fiction Joyce Carol Oates cannot help writing and that the New Yorker sometimes cannot resist publishing, check out the July 1 story “Mastiff.”  I rest my case.

Frank O'Connor Short Story Contest, 2013: Peter Stamm's We're Flying

The first Peter Stamm story I ever read was “Sweet Dreams” in the May 2012 issue of The New Yorker.  I liked it well enough that when We’re Flying (which includes new translations of the twelve stories published in Switzerland as Wir Fliegen and the ten stories under the title Seerücken, or Ridge) was published a month later, I was happy to review it for Magill’s Literary Annual.  After it made the short list for the Frank O’Connor Short Story contest, I decided to read the whole book again and write this blog without looking back at my review. The publishers, who own Magill’s, therefore cannot accuse me of violating their proprietary rights.

Reading all twenty-two stories a second time, I sometimes felt the urge to skim the lines, since I already knew what was going to happen, and since rereading a 380-page book was taking more time than I had to spare.  But I found myself compelled to read every word –not because the language was particularly dense with metaphor and complex syntax—indeed the language and syntax is seemingly transparent—but because so many of the characters in the stories seemed ensnared by experiences that they could neither control nor really understand, and because their stories were narrated by a voice that seemed to “know” what has the characters in thrall, but can only stand by and tell their complex stories in a helplessly simple way.

Peter Stamm’s stories make me ask those perennial unanswerable questions: Why do people desire the things they desire even though they know such desires are unwise and impossible to fulfill?  What makes people do the things they do when they know such actions are against their best interests and their better judgment?  Why aren’t people happy with their lives or able to take actions that will make themselves happy with their lives?   Of course, therapists and spiritual counselors around the world are kept busy by anguished people trying to find answers to those very questions. Artists take a different approach.

Peter Stamm does not have any answers, but he certainly knows how to use language to create the complex puzzles of human desire and behavior that simultaneously seem so baffling and yet so familiar. It seems absurd for me to say that I like Stamm’s stories precisely because I am not sure I can articulate what they are about. But even though I struggle to explain what I think they are about, I somehow “know” their secrets because even though Stamm’s characters are different than I am, they are somehow the same as I am, and I seem to know them in the baffling and incomplete way I know myself.

Since We’re Flying is two books in one, containing a total of twenty-stories, I obviously cannot talk about all of them, so I will try to account for my admiration of a few of them.

The first story, “Expectation,” focuses on a single woman named Daphne who meets a younger man in the apartment above her own.  From the beginning, she thinks of him as being like a kid. When she tells him about herself, about her little brother who died four years previous in an accident, he listens like the children in her kindergarten class. Even though he is so young she thinks she could be his mother, she is drawn to him.  He always sounds like he is parroting something he has heard grownups say, and when he accidently knocks over a glass, she almost gives him a smack the way she does with the little ones in her class when they do something naughty.  She imagines putting him across her knee, pulling his pants down and smacking his “naughty bottom.”  

When he finally does kiss her, it is greedy, like a child, but he resists making any sexual advances, although she encourages him. She feels they are in closer touch when he is upstairs and she is downstairs.  The story ends with her lying in bed knowing he is directly above her. She imagines him on top of her, kissing her hungrily, grabbing her hair, slapping her face; she whispers to him, “Come, come! Come,” and he is so close she can almost feel him.

This is not a story about a neurotic woman who sexually desires children, although a psychologist might think so. It’s about the intricate little traps we place ourselves in when we desire something, but do not actually want it.  She want the young man precisely because he is like a child, but then many women are drawn to the little boy behavior of many men.  However, she does not want him actually, but only virtually.  And if we admit it, we know that we often desire someone only in the imagination, even though the power of this desire depends on our feeling that we desire the person in the flesh.  However, the fleshly encounter often falls short of the encounter we are able to create in our imagination.  At the end when she says he is so close she can almost feel him, it is that sense of “almost feel” that constitutes the power of the imaginative snare Stamm creates.

“Three Sisters” is one of several stories in the book that deal with artists.  In this case, the central character is a painter named Heidi; she is currently married and has a child, but much of the story flashes back to when she was a young woman; while on a train trip to Vienna to go to art school suddenly, without planning to, she gets off the train at another station and begins a new life with a young man she meets there named Rainer, who she later marries. The central painterly motif of the story are drawings she has shown to an older woman Frau Brander, who has encouraged her artist ambitions and helped her to get into to art school; Frau Brander tells her that many of the drawings look like a vulva. A woman Heidi meets on the train to whom she shows her pictures also says that what Heidi calls “imaginary shapes” look like cunts to her. Heidi cannot understand that she does not see what others see.  

After marrying and becoming a mother, she is fascinated by a teenage girl who is training to be a baker.  She imagines her in all sorts of poses, both naked and clothed, and stands in front of a mirror naked and draws many pictures of the girl based on her own body. She and the girl dress up and take pictures and little videos of their masquerades and games. The story ends with Heidi imagining herself changing into the girl, parading up and down, showing off her body, “dolled up for no one except herself.”  She imagines that one day Rainer will find the hundreds of sketches and pictures of her and the girl.  “She’s just a kid, he would say, and shake his head, and not get it.”

So what is there to “get”?  This is not a story of a woman who is a lesbian but unable to “see” it.  Although there may indeed be something narcissistic about homosexuality—that is, that being with one “like” yourself creates something like a “mirror” effect—but this is more a story about the narcissism that exists in all of us—that sense of fascination with our own physical selves and the desire to see that self in someone else.  It is not so much that we narcissistically “love” ourselves, but rather that we long to “know” ourselves, to lapse into ourselves, to see ourselves in the “other.” It makes us parade in front of the mirror; it make us primp and prepare ourselves seemingly for others, but really to make others see us in the ideal way we see ourselves.  It makes us touch ourselves, pretending we are touching others; it makes us want to lose ourselves in ourselves as in the other—all of which is easier with a “kid.” Heidi knows her husband will not understand this.

“The Hurt” is a first-person POV story told by a young man who meets a girl named Lucia, has a sexual relationship with her, and then goes off to college.  He returns to teach in the village school four years later and tries to resume his relationship with the young woman who now works in a bar.  However, she seems different now.  She makes him feel stupid when he tells her he has not slept with anyone since he went away, and she does not want to have sex with him now that he has returned. After she openly flirts with a young ski instructor named Elio in the bar, the narrator takes his television out in front of his house, and puts a sign on it saying, “take me.”  He wants to touch and kiss Lucia so much his whole body aches, and he sees himself a pathetic lovelorn figure.  He begins to rip up his books and burn them, as well as his diaries and notes. He even takes his car up on the mountain and leaves it in the snow. When he tells Lucia that he loves her, she says he is imagining things, that he is crazy and slams the door in his face.  He finally chops up his bed and burns it, after which he gets on a train.  The last sentence is: “Not until the train turned a corner and entered a tunnel did I calm down.”

What is this story really about?   The young narrator is, like many young men, not comfortable with women.  He believes he is in love with Lucia because she is the first girl he has been intimate with.  While he was away at school, he was unable to form relationships with other women and thus--in terms of sexual relationships—has remained relatively immature.  In the meantime, Lucia, who has stayed home and worked at a bar, has become comparatively sexually sophisticated.  The narrator’s acts of systematically destroying all his possessions is an objectification of the lovelorn feeling, “If I can’t have you, I want nothing, I am nothing at all.”  It is childish, but then in many ways feeling you are madly in love is indeed childish, even mad.  Lucia’s calling him crazy and saying he is imagining things is, of course, true. But then, the desperate need to have the only person you feel you can possibly love is, by its very nature, an act of the imagination, not an assessment of reality.

In the title story, “We’re Flying,” a young teacher named Angelika has to take one of her students named Dominic home with her because the parents are late to pick him up. Although she is angry, she also feels oddly proud, as though taking this child by the hand makes him like her own child. When her boyfriend Benno arrives, he also is irritated, but at the same time play games with the boy; she thinks he is like a kid himself, in some ways younger than the boy.  However, Benno says he is not going to let the runt spoil his fun and takes off Angelika’s blouse and begins to kiss and fondle her; she protests but allows this for a time.  When the parents finally show up, they bring her a present to compensate her—a bottle of perfume.  While Benno is in the shower, she dabs some behind her ears and between her breasts.  However, when he comes out, with an erection bulging out of the towel around him, she quickly frees herself from his embrace and goes in the bathroom for a shower, but does not undress.  “When Benno knocked on the doo, she was still sitting on the toilet, with her face in her hands.”

This is another one of Stamm’s stories about the subtle traps of loneliness.  Angelika sits on the toilet with her face in her hands because she is in a situation that does not fulfill her needs.  And what are her needs?  Well, she does not need a man who is like a child with needs much simpler than her own.  She thinks she may need a man who loves her, a child who loves her, a home—all those elusive goals that single men and women may think they need to make them happy.  But then, how do they know?  Is it really true?  Will it work? Is happiness that simple?

In “The Letter” a woman named Johanna is trying to dispose of her dead husband’s belongings and finds a packet of letters from a woman with whom he has had an affair. She begins to wonder if the affair was not in some ways her own fault.  Reading such lines as “Your erotic fantasies turned me on” from her husband’s mistress, she thinks she had never written such sentences to her husband.  She goes back and reads all the letters again and then throws them away, realizing that he did not have an affair because of some lack in their relationship, but from his “excess of love and curiosity and wonder with which he encountered everything in life.”  She begins writing to him, “quickly and without thinking, sentences the likes of which she had never written before.”

“The Suitcase” is about a man whose wife is ill and has been placed in a coma and will probably never regain consciousness.  When he packs up a suitcase to take to the hospital with some of her clothes and toiletries, he is told they are not needed at this time.  So he boards a train and goes to an unpremeditated destination and gets a hotel room.  While there he uses her toothbrush, puts on her cardigan, and washes his hair with her shampoo.  He then goes back to the hospital, finds a picture of a young woman in a magazine, which he tears out and puts in his pocket, and then with tears in his eyes goes to his wife’s room and puts the suitcase under a stand and leaves without looking back.

These two stories are almost parable-like in their simplicity and brevity, but they still manage to capture in a poignant way the subtle connections between people and what anguish the breaking of those connections can cause.

“Sweet Dreams,” the New Yorker story, is about a young couple setting up a life for themselves, complete with IKEA furniture, in a one-bedroom apartment. They both love the little everyday tasks of furnishing and decorating their apartment, but Lara, the young woman, is uneasy about the indeterminate nature of any relationship. She loves him and he loves her, “but was there any guarantee that he would still love her in five or ten years’ time?” She wants a family, but he wants to wait. When he goes out to get a bottle of wine for them and stays so long she has to go look for him, she feels even more unsure about their relationship.  On returning to the apartment they have sex, with her becoming more vigorous and passionate than ever before.  

Afterwards, she makes him promise that if he ever stops loving her, he will tell her.  When he goes to sleep she gets up and watches an interview program on television in which the guest is a writer.  When the writer is asked where he gets his stories, he says “on the street” and tells about that very day on the bus hearing a young couple talking earnestly together; he imagines they have just moved in together and are furnishing their apartment.  “It’s that blissful but slightly anxious moment of starting out that interest me,” he says and adds that maybe he will write a story about it.  When he is asked how it will end, he says he will only know when he has finished it.  He then says the two people on the bus were not even a couple, getting off at separate stops, and thus have nothing to do with the people he might write the story about.   Lara gets up and looks out the window, thinking the writer would have gone home by now even though for a month they will keep replaying the conversation with him in an “endless loop, until he himself had become just as much an imaginary figure as Lara and Simon.”

In his interview with Deborah Treisman, New Yorker fiction editor, Stamm says “Sweet Dream” is his favorite story in We’re Flying.  It is not my favorite because it is more explanatory than the earlier stories, as if Stamm is not sure his readers will “get it.”  And the self-reflexive invention of the writer talking about writing the very story we have just read seems completely unnecessary to the complexity of the story of a young woman unsure of what holds a relationship together—although I can see how The New Yorker might have found it hard to resist.

I have four more books to read on the short list of the Frank O’Connor Short Story contest (I have already read and posted a blog on Claire Vaye Watkins’ Battleborn, which I liked very much).  But the collections of Watkins and Stamm are going to be hard to beat.

New Yorker 2013 Summer Fiction Issue: Proulx, Lahiri, Alexie, etc.

I have maintained a subscription to The New Yorker for many years now because I can always count on the magazine to publish some of the best short story writers in the world, and they publish more stories each year than any other periodical.  I also have long maintained a subscription to Harper’s because they continue to publish a usually fine short story a month. I stopped my subscription to The Atlantic several years ago when they broke a grand tradition and stopped publishing short stories, except for occasional, lack-luster special fiction issues that read like slick paper stories from the forties.

While Harper’s continues to designate its monthly short story as “story” in the table of contents, The New Yorker identifies its fiction as “fiction.”  Nowhere is the reason for The New Yorker’s generic term clearer than in the 2013 “Summer Fiction” double issue (June 10 & 17).  The two most important fictions in the issue—“Rough Deeds” by Annie Proulx and “Brotherly Love” by Jhumpa Lahiri—are actually excerpts from novels forthcoming or in progress. 

I call these two pieces most important not because they are the two longest pieces and certainly not because they are chapters from novels, but because the other three “fictions” in the issue are relatively inconsequential:  A predictable bit of pulp unearthed from the archives of Dashiell Hammett entitled “An Inch and a Half of Glory”; a list-story of clever word plays on ATM passwords entitled “Slide to Unlock” by Ed Park; and a brief simplistic throw-away sketch called “Happy Trails” by Sherman Alexie.

And that’s it.  That’s the 2013 New Yorker “Summer Fiction” issue. As a fan of the short story form, I am more than a little disappointed.  I have read everything that Annie Proulx and Jhumpa Lahiri have written—both novels and short stories—and admire their work very much.  And there’s no question that the two novel excerpts in this issue promise engaging experiences for readers who like novels more than short stories. But they just do not read like short stories do. Perhaps I am one of the few readers who care about this, but care I do.

Proulx’s piece about a man name Duquet who ravages forests in Canada and Maine in the late seventeenth century is part of what looks to be one of her thickly textured explorations of the natural world and historical context. If it were a short story, it would be a rather simple revenge story of greed and violence.  When the novel, which Proulx says will be about two young men from France who come to New France (Quebec) and become enmeshed in the deforestation of American native woodlands, is completed and published, I will read it, for I know it will be a better, grittier and more realistic treatment of environmental issues than the pulpy novel Barbara Kingsolver published last year entitled Flight Behavior.  Still and all, being the kind of reader that I am, I prefer Annie Proulx’s short stories to her novels.

I will also probably purchase Jhumpa Lahiri’s novel The Lowland, from which “Brotherly Love” is excerpted, when it comes out in September, for I have always admired her work.  You can already preorder it on Amazon.  Here is the book jacket description: 

“Growing up in Calcutta, born just fifteen months apart, Subhash and Udayan Mitra are inseparable brothers, one often mistaken for the other. But they are also opposites, with gravely different futures ahead of them. It is the 1960s, and Udayan--charismatic and impulsive--finds himself drawn to the Naxalite movement, a rebellion waged to eradicate inequity and poverty: he will give everything, risk all, for what he believes. Subhash, the dutiful son, does not share his brother's political passion; he leaves home to pursue a life of scientific research in a quiet, coastal corner of America. But when Subhash learns what happened to his brother in the lowland outside their family's home, he comes back to India, hoping to pick up the pieces of a shattered family, and to heal the wounds Udayan left behind--including those seared in the heart of his brother's wife.”

The excerpt in The New Yorker deals with the early life of Subhash and Udayan, Udayan’s involvement with a revolutionary group, Subhash’s university education in America, and his return to Calcutta after his brother’s death.  Lahiri says she has been working on the book off and on for several years. The excerpt—written in her deceptively clear, pristine prose suggests the kind of social context and family epic that so many novel reader’s love. The excerpt in The New Yorker makes for good reading, but, as Jhumpa Lahiri would be the first to admit, it is not a short story.  As her two collections of stories Interpreter of Maladies and Unaccustomed Earth, make abundantly clear, she is a master of the short story form.

I don’t need to say anything about the Dashiell Hammett resurrection, for it is perfectly obvious what a bit of simple pulp it is.  I also don’t need to say anything about Ed Park’s little jeu d’esprit about passwords, for it is just a finger-exercise of not-too-clever inventive bits.  But I do have to say something about Sherman Alexie’s “Happy Trails.

I have, sometimes reluctantly, enjoyed Alexie’s short stories over the years.  I say reluctantly, because he seemed to me from the beginning with The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven a bit of a trickster extrovert who, even as he ranted against the exploitation of his “people,” seemed to constantly be exploiting them for his own profit.  Part standup comedian and part soapbox commentator, he has been rivaled only by T. C. Boyle for his self-promotion and his hard-sold popularity.

I began my review of his collection Ten Little Indians (2003)  several years ago, his best book in my opinion, this way:

To tell you the truth, I opened Sherman Alexie’s new collection of short stories with a sigh of liberal-guilt resignation, ready to repent all the cap guns I fired at red men circling the wagon trains of my youth. The sigh was accompanied by a wry wince in expectation of showman Sherman’s predictable barrage of satiric barbs, comic one-liners, and performance posturing. So it was a pleasant surprise to find myself actually liking the man at the center of most of these nine new stories.  Instead of making me feel guilty or making me laugh, he moved me, in spite of myself.

But lately, Alexie seems to have collapsed back on his laurels.  Although his collection of poems, vignettes, and stories, War Dances, won the 2010 PEN/FAULKNER Award for Fiction, to me it seemed to be something of a mix tape made up of a few full-length short stories and a lot of detritus that just happened to be lying around in Alexie’s file cabinet.

And his most recent collection, Blasphemy, although it contains a generous helping of his earlier, stronger, stories, includes over a dozen minor “new” pieces that seem more extraneous stuff he has dug out of his writer’s war chest. “Happy Trails,” (wryly echoing the theme song of the old Roy Rogers television serial) seems like a sketch that just did not make it into Blasphemy.

I know, I know, the very phrase “summer fiction” evokes lightweight books you can take to the beach and continue reading even when distracted by wind and winsomeness.  I guess one should not really expect that much from a “summer fiction” issue.  

And, after all, really good short stories demand more attention than thin sketches or loosely structured novels.  You have to sit up straight to read good short stories; you can’t belly down in the sand and doze in the sun and still maintain the stylistic tension that they often demand.  But if you like novels and haven’t read the Proulx and Lahiri chapters yet, I recommend them; they will prepare your palate for the big books to come later on.

Gilman's "Yellow Wallpaper" and Poe's "Berenice": Two American Fantastic Tales

Each week The Library of America will post to your email account a free “Story of the Week” from a volume in their large catalog.  You can sign up for this at http://www.loa.org

This week, they are featuring “The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman from American Fantastic Tales, edited by Peter Straub.  If you like tales that make you think after you shudder, you might find American Fantastic Tales interesting.

I am providing a brief discussion of “The Yellow Wallpaper,” as well as a discussion of another story in the book, Poe’s “Berenice,” which is not one of his most popular tales, but certainly one of his most curious.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman, “The Yellow Wall-Paper”

            "The Yellow Wall-Paper" is a story originally published in the late nineteenth century (1892), but which has only relatively recently been anthologized and widely read because of its thematic relevance to the rise in academic feminism in U.S. universities.  The story can be seen as a criticism of the treatment of women in the nineteenth century, particularly the issue of madness as a way men controlled women or else as a way women escaped from, or rebelled against, men.  However, the story can also be read as an interesting use of the technique of first-person point of view and the relationship between writing and reality--especially the difference between traditional male and female texts. 

            The story makes use of a common convention of what has often been called women's fiction--gothic romance.  It opens with the typical hereditary estate, which the narrator is tempted to call a "haunted house," and then introduces the convention, best known in Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre," of the mysterious mad woman in the upstairs room.  However, the primary convention the story uses is the traditional difference between how men and women supposedly approach reality.  The husband, who is a doctor or scientist, has no patience with faith, superstition, or anything that cannot be physically verified and converted to mathematical figures.  This contrasts with the wife's imaginative power and her "habit of story-making." 

            Serving as a background to this tension is the wallpaper itself, which gives the story its title--an image of domestic "woman's things," but which takes on significance because of the nature of the "patterns" that it embodies.  If students isolate all those references to the wallpaper in the story, they will see how the patterns begin to take on an ominous expression of reality.  The nature of the woman's "madness" is projective and thus identified with the nature of writing, for she creates meaningful patterns and then responds to the patterns as if the meaning existed in them instead of being projected on them.  Although this may be at least one definition of madness, it is also a definition of the artist, who creates meaning out of patterns that readers take to be real and significant.  The difference between madness and art, of course, is between allowing the projection to possess one only temporarily or being drawn into it obsessively without the desire or ability to escape. 

            What the narrator does is to transform a "pointless pattern" into a meaningful one by following it to its conclusion or end and thus determining its purpose.  The narrator says she knows little of the principal of design, but that she does know that there is no law or rule that governs the pattern of the wallpaper.  Of course, as the story proceeds and she perceives or projects a woman behind the pattern, the reader knows that inevitability the woman must be herself, for the conventional rule that applies here is that if one projects a pattern, the pattern then indeed reflects the self.  The story thus involves two basic notions of patterns that the reader may need to unravel--patterns created by society itself that entrap a woman and bind her and patterns the mind of the woman herself creates that follow only the law of her own psychic distress. 

            A 1982 film version of this story invents a number of elements to present the story as a male/female conflict in which the male is responsible for the madness of the female.  For example, there is the difference between what the wife writes--her impressions and personal thoughts in a small notebook she keeps hidden in her pocket--and what the husband writes--a schedule that controls her every move and an academic paper.  Thus, the story is about the woman's external life dominated by her husband's schedule and her inner life captured by her own notebook, which her husband wishes to deny her.  In one scene the husband explains that he wants things solid, wants to get at the "reality of things"; he says, for example, that once pollination was explained to him, the mystery of love vanished.         

               A number of other inventions, such as a mysterious young girl who occasionally rides through the landscape outside the house on a bicycle, suggest the possibilities of the wife when she was a young girl herself, possibilities that have been closed off by the patterns that control her.  Throughout the film, the dialogue emphasizes the husband's view that the wife thinks too much, that her imagination is her worst enemy. He argues that to be healthy she must be "calm and pink"; for him the essence of woman is body not mind; as a doctor friend of the husband says to her, "You must put on flesh."

            The woman realizes that she seems to be living in a world of her own, but that the more it becomes her own the less control she has over it.  Indeed, her inner world becomes externalized.  At the end of the film, the conflict between the man and woman is made most explicit by a montage of shots that cut back and forth between the man reading his paper at a professional meeting and the woman tearing off the paper from her walls.  What the woman wishes is to expose what lies behind the patterns, to destroy the patterns themselves, and to free the woman who is entrapped there.  The climactic scene occurs when a hand comes out of the wall and a mysterious woman in a yellow dress kisses her and the two become one. 

Edgar Allan Poe, “Berenice”

        What Poe wanted to evoke in the story “Berenice" (March 1835) was some physical manifestation of identity that was both expressive of the self and suggestive of permanence. And the one last remnant of expression that remains after death and decay of the body would be the teeth. Perhaps the strange and seemingly over generalized first paragraph of the story indicates Poe's realization that his metaphor did not work, for it seems a case of special pleading.  He focuses on the manifold misery and wretchedness of the earth that derives from the fact that beauty results from unloveliness, that evil results from good, and that joy is born out of sorrow. The narrator focuses on a chamber filled with books--"a palace of imagination...the wild dominions of monastic thought and erudition.”  Spending his childhood with books and in reverie results in what he calls an inversion in his thoughts: 

            The realities of the world affected me as visions, and as visions only, while the wild ideas of the land of dreams became, in turn,--not the material of my everyday existence--but in very deed that existence utterly and solely in itself.

This is the most resounding statement in Poe's fiction of the central thrust of his vision, for it reflects the basic romantic mode of presenting the everyday world as strange and unusual and the fantastic world of dream and imagination as the only reality.

            Moreover, this is Poe's most emphatic statement of his idea of the intensity of interest.  Although the disease that falls on Bernice is the disease of epilepsy, which Poe uses as a metaphor for death, the narrator's disease, what he calls a "monomania," consists of a "morbid irritability of those properties of the mind in metaphysical science termed the attentive" (II, 211).  He describes an "intensity of interest" for "even the most ordinary objects of the universe."  However, the objects with which he becomes absorbed are not objects as such, for he singles out such things as a frivolous device in the typography of a book, a shadow falling aslant a tapestry, the steady flame of a lamp, the perfume of a flower, and the monotonous repetition of some common word, "until the sound, by dint of frequent repetition, ceased to convey any idea whatever to the mind.”

 

            This condition, like the condition of the perverse, defies analysis or explanation.  Furthermore, he insists that his "undue, earnest, and morbid attention thus excited by objects in their own nature frivolous” is not to be confused with mere rumination.  It is not, he argues, even an exaggeration of such rumination, but something quite different.  Whereas the dreamer gradually loses sight of the object of his attention in deductions and suggestions deriving from it, in his own case, the primary object of his attention assumes an unreal importance and at the termination of the reverie, instead of disappearing, attains that "supernaturally exaggerated interest which was the prevailing feature of the disease.  In a word, the powers of mind more particularly exercised were with me, as I have said before, the attentive, and are, with the day-dreamer, the speculative.” 

            The narrator is fully aware of his obsession, for he notes that he never loved Berenice as a living and breathing individual, but as the embodiment of a dream:

            not as a being of the earth, earthly, but as the abstraction of such a being; not as a thing to admire, but to analyze--not as an object of love, but as the theme of the most abstruse although desultory speculation.

As Berenice becomes more and more emaciated, that is, as the body wastes away and the face becomes more skull-like, the teeth become more predominant.  Consequently, it is the teeth that become the center of his monomania; "they alone were present to the mental eye," for he transforms them into a metaphoric embodiment of pure "idea" and thus the ultimate metaphor of his desire.  The only twist in the story, a grotesque twist that contributes to its ghastly nature, is the fact that Berenice is not dead but only in an epileptic coma when the narrator pulls out her teeth as she lies in her tomb.

            Poe's obsession with the Ideal and his abhorrence of body is less likely to be a result of his own psychological anxieties and fears, as some readers have assumed, than an inevitable implication of his metaphysical and aesthetic theories that true reality was purely pattern rather than merely physical.

Puzzle the Prof: Rick Bass's "The Hermit's Story"

In the dwindling days of Short Story Month and my “Puzzle the Prof” contest for 2013 , Richard Pangburn has asked my opinion of Rick Bass’s “The Hermit’s Story.”  I am happy to oblige, for I like the story very much.  For those who have not read it, let me provide a brief summary before I comment on it.

“The Hermit’s Story,” a magical tale about the entry into an alternate reality, begins with a sort of poetic overture about the blue color of an ice storm.  The narrator and his wife have gone to the home of Ann and Roger for Thanksgiving dinner.  The power is out, and after the two couples eat pie and drink wine before a roaring fire, Ann tells a story about an experience she had twenty years before up in Saskatchewan with a man named Gray Owl who hired Ann to train six German shorthair pointers.

After Ann has trained the dogs all summer and into the fall, she takes them back to Gray Owl to show him how to continue to work them.  She and Gray Owl take the dogs out into the snow, and Ann uses live quail to show Gray Owl how the dogs will follow the birds and point them.  They work the dogs for a week until they get lost in a heavy snowstorm, drifting away from their home area by as much as ten miles.  When they come to a frozen lake and Gray Owl walks out on its surface and kicks at it to find some water for the dogs, he abruptly disappears below the ice.

Ann decides to go into the water after Gray Owl, for even if he is already drowned, he has their tent and emergency rations.  However, when she crawls out on the ice and peers down into the hole where Gray Owl disappeared, she sees standing him below waving at her.  When he helps her down, he says that what has happened is that a cold snap in October has frozen a skin of ice over the shallow lake and then a snowfall insulated it.  When the lake drained in the winter, the ice on top remained.  Ann goes back to the shore and hands the dogs down into the warmth created by the enclosed space beneath the ice.

The world under the ice is a magical one, the air unlike anything they have ever breathed before. The cold air from the hole they made meets with the warm air from the earth beneath the lake to create breezes.   Although the ice above them contracts and groans, they feel they are safe beneath a sea watching waves of starlight sweep across their hiding place.  When they build a fire from cattails, small pockets of swamp gas ignite with explosions of brilliance.

The two head for what they hope is the southern shore, the dogs chasing and pointing snipe and other birds.  They finally reach the other shore and walk south for a half a day until they reach their truck.  That night they are back at Gray Owl’s cabin, and by the next night Ann is home again. The story ends with the narrator considering that Ann is the only one who carries the memory of that underworld passage.  He thinks that it perhaps gave her a model for what things are like for her dogs when they are hunting and enter a zone where the essences of things. 

When  “The Hermit’s Story,” appeared in the 1999 Best American Short Stories collection, Rick Bass said in his contributor’s note that as soon as he heard about a frozen lake with no water in it, he knew he wanted to write a story about that.  Because he was trying to train two bird dogs at the time, he made up a bird-dog trainer as a sort of wish fulfillment and had her go up to Canada and fall into such a lake.

Such an event alone, as dramatically potential as it might be, does not, of course, make a story.   What makes the event a story is Bass’s exploration of the symbolic significance of the magical world into which the characters enter.  That magical world is presaged even before they break through the ice with the blue world of the ice storm described by the narrator in the opening paragraphs in which the blue is like a scent trapped in the ice.  It is further emphasized by the fact that the storm has knocked out the electricity, creating a world of darkness.  In the midst of this cold, blue, dark world, the two couples sit before a fire, creating the classic setting for a story to be told.

When Ann and Gray Wolf work the dogs in the snow of Saskatchewan, they travel across snowy hills, the sky the color of snow so that it seems they are moving in a dream.  Except for the rasp of the snowshoes and the pull of gravity, they might believe they had ascended into a sky-place where the entire world was snow.  All this is preparation for their descent into the improbable, magical world underneath the frozen lake.  When they look up, the ice is clear, and they can see stars as if they were up there among them or else as if the stars were embedded in the ice.

The closest the narrator can come to articulating the meaning of the experience is to suggest that it perhaps was a zone where the appearances of things disappeared, where surfaces faded away and instead their very essence was “revealed, illuminated, circumscribed, possessed.”  Much like a magical journey in a fairy tale, the experience under the ice is a journey into a realm of dream and desire, which suggests that the world is a much more magical and mysterious place than we usually think.

Style is especially important to this story, for without Bass’s poetic descriptions, his rhythmic prose, and his suggestions about the mythic significance of the experience it would be merely an interesting anecdote, depending solely on the unusual nature of the frozen empty lake.  The opening paragraph, by repeating the reference to the color blue and the fictional metaphoric phrase “as if,” sets up the entry into the fairy tale world.  This “as if” metaphoric quality also is used to refer to Ann’s transformation of the dogs from wild and unruly pups into well-trained hunting dogs, “as if” they are rough blocks of stone with their internal form existing already, waiting to be chiseled free.  If the training is neglected, they have a tendency to revert to their old selves, “as if” the dogs’ greatness can disappear back into the stone.

Although often metaphoric, Bass’s style is not flowery, but rather simple and straightforward.  He does not tell the story in Ann’s words, but rather has the narrator retell it, thus filtering the story through two points of view.  Neither Ann nor Gray Owl talk much during their experience, and when they do it is in the simple straightforward language of people reduced to basic states.  In telling Ann about the lake, he says “It’s not really a phenomenon; it’s just what happens.”  And when she asks if he knew it would be like this, he says, “No.  I was looking for water.  I just got lucky.”  Although there is no indication, other than his name, that Gray Owl is Native American, his dialogue reflects the common literary convention of having Native Americans speak in short declarative sentences. 

Bass, a naturalist who has written nonfiction books about the Yaak Valley in Montana, also devotes much of the story to his fascination with the natural world of, as well as the dogs and the birds they hunt.  For example, when the birds flush out snipe from the cattails underneath the ice, Bass spends at least two pages pondering the presence of the birds, wondering if they had been unable to migrate because of injuries or a genetic absence. 

With the curiosity of the naturalist, he wonders if the snipe had tried to carve out new ways of being in the stark and severe landscape, holding on until the spring would come like green fire.  If the snipe survived, the narrator reckons, they would be among the first to see the spring; they would think that the torches of Ann and Gray Owl were merely one of winter’s dreams.

The fairy-tale, folklore nature of the story persists throughout, with the narrator considering at the end that Ann holds on to her experience as one might hold on to a valuable gem found while out for a walk and thus containing some great magic or strength.

Puzzle the Prof: A Few Words about Annie Proulx's Stories, especially "The Great Divide"

      For my “Puzzle the Prof” contest, I received a request to talk a bit about Annie Proulx’s story “The Great Divide” from her 2008 collection Fine Just the Way It Is.  However, for some reason, this “comment” disappeared from my blog.  I cannot remember who sent the request, but I do recall that the sender liked the story very much and wondered what I thought about it.  Before I comment on the story, let me put it in context.

     Proulx bookends the stories in the third volume of her “Wyoming Stories” series. Fine Just the Way It Is, by citing the book’s title in the first and last tale, thus locating them in time and space. In “Family Man,” Ray Forkenbrock, wasting away in a home for the elderly, tells his granddaughter about his past, which she records for posterity.  Even though his life was marred by hardship and a secret betrayal by his father, he is adamant that “everything was fine the way it was.” In the heart-scalding final story, “Tits Up in a Ditch,” which focuses on Dakota Lister, who loses more than her arm while serving in Iraq, her grandmother’s husband Verl dismisses outsider criticism of the state by insisting that “Wyomin is fine just the way it is.”

      In her powerful 1999 collection Close Range: Wyoming Stories, one of Annie Proulx’s narrators says ominously, “Friend, it’s easier than you think to yield up to the dark impulse.”   Well, if that book painted the desperate side of rural big sky life, then her second collection, Bad Dirt: Wyoming Stories 2, is largely a light-hearted companion volume.

        Made up of six very brief tall-tales and five longer stories, Bad Dirt (which refers to rough country roads) is, by and large, a snort-out-loud hoot.  For example, in “The Wamsutter Wolf,” Buddy Millar moves right next door to Cheri, an overweight hellcat from high school, and the bully who once broke his nose.  Well, things just go from bad to worse, culminating with Cheri sneaking over to Buddy’s trailer and climbing into bed, late night runs to the emergency room, fear of jealous reprisals, guns at the ready, and so on and so on.  Great fun.

        In the third volume, Fine Just the Way It Is, although Proulx depicts a Wyoming that many of the natives like just the way it is, the way it was, and often still is, is often unforgiving and vicious.  The five strongest pieces are perhaps better characterized by the title of the final story, “Tits-up in a Ditch,” which refers to a cow that tried to climb up a deep slope and slid back down in the ditch and died.

         Whether the story takes place in the late 19^th century or the early 21^st, one slip-up in the rugged outback of Wyoming can kill you.  In “Them Old Cowboy Songs,” one of my favorites, Archie and Rose try to make a go of it on a modest homestead. However, the winters are bitter and jobs are few and Archie’s decision to leave pregnant Rose in their rough-hewn little house to find work results in disaster.

            In “Testimony of the Monkey,” a silly argument over whether to wash the lettuce splits up Marc and Catlin, two rugged outdoors enthusiasts.  When in anger and spite, she takes an ill-advised trip into harsh territory alone and catches her foot in the crevice of a rock, the rest of the story, which alternates between her painful efforts to free herself and her hallucinations about rescue, is predictable, but none the less agonizing.

            Proulx indulges herself in this third collection in a couple of playful fables about the devil in “I’ve Always Loved This Place” and “Swamp Mischief” and a couple of more serious legends about a Bermuda Triangle sagebrush and an early Indian buffalo hunt in “The Sagebrush Kid” and  “Deep-Blood-Greasy-Bowl.”

However, the most powerful stories are those that reverberate on the final page of the collection when Dakota Lester tells the parents of her husband, who has lost both legs and half his face in Iraq, “Sash is tits up in a ditch.”  And so are they all in this scrupulously written Annie Proulx collection.

“The Great Divide” covers a twenty-year period—from 1920 until 1940—in the life of Hi Alcorn and his wife Helen, and thus has the temporal “feel” of a novel, albeit recounted within a brief span of twenty-five narrative pages. The story is located in the area of Wyoming where the Continental Divide—that line that separates where water flows either West toward the Pacific or East toward the Atlantic—is located. If you drive on Interstate 80 through Wyoming, you will cross the Great Divide twice—first about 5 and a half miles west of Rawlins, Wyoming and then again about 58 miles west of Rawlins.

The young husband Hi Alcorn has succumbed to the sales pitch of a man named Antip Bewley who is selling plots for a so-called colony he has named The Great Divide.  Helen met Hi only a few months after he had returned from The Great War.  He is nine years older than Helen, who is nineteen, and has suffered from mustard gas and a wound in his leg, leaving him with a limp.

Failing in several attempts to make a go of it, Hi decides to throw in with Helen’s brother-in-law, Fenk, capturing wild horses, but gives it up when he cannot tolerate the fact that the horses are sold for pet food.  He gets work in the mines in Rock Springs, but his son gets polio from the school children in the town and has to be put in an iron lung.

By 1940, Hi feels the pull of the wild desert and takes up with Fenk again catching wild horses.  The story comes to a rapid close when Hi is pulled off his horse and breaks his leg, which necessitates his being taken into town to a hospital.  When the doctor examines him, he discovers that the kick of the horse has caused a blood clot that has killed him.  The story ends when Fenk goes to tell Helen:

Her mind snarled like a box of discarded fiddle strings.  Civilization fell away and the primordial communication of tensed muscle, ragged breath, the heaving gullet and bent fingers spoke where language failed.  She knew only what Fenk had not yet said and didn’t need to say. And shut the door in his face.

I can understand the appeal of this story’s straightforward narrative flow and language style.  However, it seems to me that a summary of the story pretty much sums it up.  Compared to what I think are more stylistically and thematically complex stories, such as “Them Old Cowboy Songs” and “Tits Up in a Ditch,” I find it novelistically ordinary and flat.  It has the classic simplicity of a young couple trying to make it during the Depression in the rough world of rural Wyoming, but for me it lacks the complexity of other stories in the collection.

Puzzle the Prof: The Voice of Edward P. Jones's Stories

In response to my “Puzzle the Prof” contest, Keith Hood writes that he would like to hear what I have to say about Edward P. Jones, noting that I cited Jones’s Aunt Hagar’s Children as one of my favorite collections of the twenty-first century so far and his story “Marie” as one of the 200 stories from Boccaccio to the twenty-first century that I most admire.  Keith quotes from Garth Risk Hallberg’s review of All Aunt Hagar’s Children about Jones’s “omniscient voice, detached yet curiously intimate, plainspoken, quiet,” adding that the voice “wraps itself around characters, good guys, bad guys, men, women, and children, and loves those characters, and makes them live."

Indeed, I have admired Jones’ stories since the publication in 1992 of his first collection Lost in the City.  Let me comment briefly on that first collection before taking a look at “In the Blink of God’s Eye,” the opening story of All Aunt Hagar’s Children.

Convinced that most readers had only a narrow idea of what Washington D.C. was like, because they were familiar with it only through novels that dealt with downtown power, and politics, Edward Jones has said that in his first book he wanted to create a collection of stories that, like James Joyce’s Dubliners focuses on ordinary people in various African American D.C. neighborhoods.  Lost In The City, published in 1992, was short listed for the National Book Award and won the PEN/Hemingway Award.

Jones has said that he spent the next 10 years thinking about a story of black ex-slaves, who became slaveholders themselves.  The result was The Known World, his first novel, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 2004 and the Lannan Literary Award. The following year, Jones won the MacArthur Fellowship, the so-called “genius award.” All Aunt Hagar's Children, a second collection of short stories, several of which featured characters introduced in Lost in the City, was published in 2006, and was short listed for the PEN/Hemingway Award.

Widely praised by reviewers and critics, Jones represents a new wave of African American writers who write about individuals rather than about race and about the personal rather than the political.

The fourteen stories in Lost in the City, patterned loosely after Joyce’s Dubliners, are about people of various ages who face challenges of growing up, surviving, and succeeding in African American neighborhoods in Washington, D.C. Some of the stories are brief lyrical pieces in which characters face loneliness and loss.  For example, “Lost in the City” is about Lydia Walsh who, while at a hotel with a man, receives a call that her mother has died in the hospital.  She does a line of coke and calls a cab, telling the driver to get her lost in the city so she can postpone accepting her mother’s death.

Strength of character in the face of disappointment and disillusionment is the motivating force of Jones’s stories. Typical of his proud and capable characters is the young mother in “The First Day,” a brief lyrical piece about a woman taking her daughter to her first day of school.  The story is told in first person by the child, who is learning things about her mother, for example that the higher up on the scale of respectability someone is, the less her mother will let them push her around. 

The strongest character in Jones’s collection is eighty-six year-old Marie Delaveaux, living alone on social security. When she is condescended to and ignored by a young employee at the social security office, she slaps the girl.  Two weeks late, a young university student comes to interview her for an oral history project.  When he sends her copies of the tapes, she plays them and then puts them away, saying she will never listen to them again, even though they recount a history of hardship and courage.

The central themes of Jones’s stories are dependant on the trials, challenges, and triumphs of his characters.  When Lost in the City was first published, many critics noticed immediately that although all the characters were African American, the stories did not focus directly on racial prejudice or adversity resulting directly from white oppression.  In fact, there are very few references to color in any of the stories.  Instead of being about characters suffering as a result of their race, the stories were about characters who just happened to be black, facing the problems of living with very little money in small neighborhoods in a large American city. 

This does not mean that the situations the characters confront have nothing to do with their color.  It does mean, however, that Jones writes stories that are not narrowly limited to issues of race.  If there is a central theme, it comes from a warning that an old man tells his five-year-old grandson:  “Don’t get lost in the city.”  This is repeated in a variation in another story when a father warns, “Never get lost in white folks’ neighborhood,” and echoed when the young woman in the title story tells a cab driver to get her “lost in the city.”  Finding one’s way in the city by identifying with one’s neighborhood is the driving force of many of Jones’s stories.

“All Aunt Hagar’s children” is a phrase Jones says that his mother often used to refer to black people.  He originally planned to use the phrase as the title of his novel, which he finally decided to call The Known World.  Hagar was the female servant of Sarah in the Old Testament, a kind of iconic mother figure for African-Americans. W. C. Handy once wrote a song called “Aunt Hager’s Blues.” You can hear Louis Armstrong play and sing it on YouTube.

“In the Blink of God’s Eye,” the opening story in All Aunt Hagar’s Children, may be a fairly representative example of the “voice” that Keith Fort refers to.  It’s also an example of how Jones echoes characters in his first collection by referring to them in the second collection.  A minor character, Miles Patterson, in “The Girl Who Raised Pigeons” in Lost in the City shows up in “In the Blink of God’s Eye” as the baby that Ruth Patterson finds hanging from a tree in Washington, D. C. “So this was Washington,” the voice says, “where they hung babies in night trees.” 

The baby hanging in the tree may be an allusion to the famous 1930s song, “Strange Fruit,” written as a poem by a Jewish high school teacher after seeing a photo of two lynched African Americans, and then made famous as a song by Billie Holiday.

Darryl Pinckney, in his March 29, 2007 review of All Aunt Hagar’s Children in The New York Review of Books, says that Jones’ attitude toward his characters has much to do with what he calls “the gentle caressing tone” of the stories in his second collection.  Pinckney says that Jones is the “shepherd of his invented world; protective toward his flock, his people.” He calls Jones is an “historical lyricist,” using language to shield and elevate his characters.

Whether you call it “voice, style, or tone,” the magic of a writer’s language to create a certain musical rhythm is difficult to describe, even more difficult to account for how language can “elevate” characters.  The two central characters in “In the Blink of God’s Eye,” the young newlyweds, Ruth and Aubrey Patterson, are indeed described in something other than a realistic or naturalistic way, and the result of the lyrical, folklorish word choice and rhythm of the language does indeed make them seem characters in a traditional folklore tale rather than characters in a realistic story.

The story takes place in 1901, just after Ruth and Aubrey have gotten married and moved from Virginia to Washington, D.C.  It opens with Ruth “hearing” the old song of the night the way she did in Virginia and “ever mindful of the wolves, would take their knife and pistol and kiss Aubrey’s still-hairless white face and descend to the porch.” The verb “descend,” and the reference to wolves and the song of the night prepare the reader for Ruth’s seeing in the glow of a gaslight a “bundle suspended from the tree in the yard, hanging from the apple tree that hadn’t borne fruit in more than ten years.”  The appearance of the bundle is strange enough to make her fear something “terrible and canine” to burst from it and to create a supernatural aura around the experience:

 An invisible hand locked about her mouth and halted the cry she wanted to give the world.  A wind came up and played with her coat, her nightgown, tapped her ankles and hands, then went over and nudged the bundle so that it moved an inch or so to the left, an inch or so to the right.

 The simple device of repeating the phrase an inch of so to the left, an inch or so to the right adds to the sense of an otherworldly moment.  The ballad-like nature of the story is echoed throughout.  For example, when Ruth learns that Aubrey has decided to move to Washington, she does not want to leave her generations of family in Virginia, but knows she is a married woman pledged to her husband.  “And God had the baby in the tree and the story of the wolves in the roads waiting for her.”  In one of the few references to race in the story, the Voice situates the couple in the folklorish world of their heritage: 

They were the children of once-upon-a-time slaves, born into a kind of freedom, but they had traveled down through the wombs with what all their kind had been born with—the knowledge that God had promised next week to everyone but themselves.

However, as the book title reference to the Old Testament slave Hagar suggests, Jones locates their heritage even more primally in the Judeo-Christian folklore of the origins of human life itself.  The sermon the preacher gives after coming back from burying his mother emphasizes the storytelling rhythm at the heart of “”In the Blink of God’s Eye”:  “I’m next in that long death line that started with our Daddy Adam.  And with Mama Eve.  O Mama Eve, we forgive you for pickin that fruit and biting into it with not a care for all of us what was to come after you and face death.”

Because the plot of the story centers on the conflict between Ruth’s desire to keep the baby found in the tree and Aubrey’s desire to father a child of his own, the story must, in ballad fashion, end with a resolution to this conflict; Jones presents the resolution in the tone and rhythm of an otherworldly tale. 

Aubrey has gone to Virginia to bring Ruth back, but when he sees her chopping wood in the snow, he also sees the “grey smoke rising from the chimney with great energy, and it was, at last, the smoke, the fury and promise of it, the hope and exuberance of it, that took him back down to the horse.”  Aubrey’s decision to turn back and give up hope of reclaiming Ruth because of the smoke rising from the chimney is a device typical of fairytale rather than realistic narrative.  The metaphor “In his mind, Ruth’s husband shrugged” is based on something inchoate and intangible.  In the terms of the folktale, he is no longer Aubrey, but rather “Ruth’s husband.”  His trip back to Washington on a horse through the snow ends the story in fairytale fashion.  “The dank smell of the horse rose up and held fast like a stalled cloud before his face.  Ruth’s husband smiled and told the horse he forgave her.”

When Aubrey reaches the bridge across the Potomac, the story ends this way:

The horse stepped onto the bridge to Washington, her white breath shooting forward to become one with the white of the snow.  Ruth’s husband patted her neck. The top button on his coat came loose again and he rebuttoned it, thankful that he hand had not yet stiffened up.  His heart was pained, and it was pain enough to overwhelm a city of men.”

What Jones succeeds in doing in this story, and many of his other stories in All Aunt Hagar’s Children, is  transforming--by the Voice of the storyteller-- mere people in the world into characters in universal stories—not just individuals who live and die and are forgotten, but rather characters who embody the desires, wishes, dreams, and fears of all of us.