Category Archives: short fiction

William Gay, Wittgenstein’s Lolita

I ordered this after Gay passed, it being the only book of his I’d not read. It’s kind of an odd book, comprised of two short stories and an essay about the author, published by a tiny local press in Tennessee. Being so short, it’s more of a chapbook, though to me it was well worth the money. I’d recommend the average reader buy Gay’s other works first, though.

The first story, “Wittgenstein’s Lolita,” is about a dude named Rideout, who gets involved with this neighbor woman whose boyfriend is abusing her. It shares all the trademarks of a William Gay story, and is a strong piece except for one copyediting moment where for a page he starts calling the boyfriend Alfred instead of Albert. That really threw me. The second story, “The Iceman,” is short and strange and less memorable than the first. The back of the book describes it as an excerpt from Gay’s forthcoming novel, which I presume is referring to The Lost Country.

What I’m really hoping is that someone will collect all of Gay’s stories into one volume. He’s got several, including “Wreck on the Highway” and “Where Will You Go When Your Skin Cannot Contain You?” that were published in journals but not in a collection. That collection would rank right up with O’Connor’s complete stories (though I think it would be shorter than O’Connor’s).

Alice Munro, “Miles City, Montana”

I read this story this morning and found it interesting for how it handles time. It’s actually a fairly plain-jane story, by Munro standards, but it’s serviceable for a meditation on technique.

The story, told in the first person, opens with the narrator’s father coming out of the woods carrying a boy, the narrator’s friend, who has drowned. The funeral is at their house, and in the crowd the narrator begins to feel some kind of disgust with her parents that she can’t explain: “It could not be understood or expressed, though it died down after a while into a heaviness, then just a taste, an occasional taste–a thin, familiar misgiving.”

After a space break, the story jumps twenty years. The narrator is married to a lawyer and they have two young daughters. The family embarks on a long road-trip from Vancouver, down across Montana, and up to visit their old home in Ontario. Along the way, the narrator and her husband bicker over something small, her not packing lettuce for sandwiches, and they laugh over it. Then this paragraph:

I haven’t seen Andrew for years, don’t know if he is still thin, has gone completely gray, insists on lettuce, tells the truth, or is hearty and disappointed.

That is our only jump forward into the future. Another space break, and we get some back story about their childhoods, enough to know the narrator grew up on a turkey farm, and the husband had a wealthy benefactor, which has created some class friction, both between him and his home and between husband and wife.

They pull over in Miles City, Mont., so the children can go for a swim in a local pool. The narrator thinks about going to a store for a cold drink, but she has a flash of intuition, runs back to the pool and discovers her youngest kid in the deep end while the lifeguard makes out with her boyfriend. The husband jumps over a fence and pulls the kid out–no harm, no foul, though everyone is shaken.

The narrator ruminates on the boy who drowned in the beginning, and comes to define the feeling of disgust as being rooted in the idea that parents sanction death. Once they bring a child into the world, they are sanctioning its death. The story ends with the husband and wife going over the near-drowning, again and again.

What struck me here is that the story could have been written all in the present: road trip, near drowning, safety. It would have been 15 pages and could have made for a lively workshop. Fix this, tighten that. But with the back story of the drowning boy in the beginning, Munro adds another layer altogether, something you would never think to recommend in a workshop discussion. And she bravely jumps from a triggering incident twenty years to a completely different story. The story returns at the end, which gives it some unity (and is perhaps not as bold as, say, “The Bear Comes Over the Mountain,” which I’m remembering makes the same kind of jump without returning at the end).

The heart of the piece seems to have something to do with what the narrator can’t articulate in her childhood, but through an incident later, she gains insight. Unlike the traditional epiphany, the insight here is linked to an earlier incident. Whereas the narrator in Joyce’s “Araby” just needs one moment, Munro’s narrator needs two (at least). I like that complexity, and the further complication of how that insight is related to the narrator’s marriage. We know the marriage is doomed, and we know its downfall is related to unresolved issues from her childhood–maybe something about her inability to connect with people, something about her being cut off. Throughout the story, she looks on life with an ironic remove, and maybe the triggering incident is a way of showing where she developed that ironic remove.

That’s all I really have. Just wanted to note a fine example of an author making a bold leap in time; and to note a story with multiple layers that you couldn’t just inject following a workshop critique. Those layers seem like something you have to discover–maybe you get bored and make a leap, or maybe you have two stories you decide to combine. However it’s done, it seems worth shooting for.

Alice Munro, “The Ottawa Valley”

Can you even express amazement at Alice Munro anymore? It’s such a cliché, but I think I’ve been cast under her spell. What triggered it was a series of craft essays by Michael Byers, which you can check out at his University of Michigan faculty page. (If he were to flesh these essays out, they’d rank right up there with craft books by Charles Baxter, James Wood, or John Gardner – seriously, that good.)

Byers’s reading of Munro is that her stories express a sense of unknowing. Words such as “seems,” “appeared,” and “perhaps” qualify the narrative so that the stories become a search for understanding. In a college poetry class, my professor talked about doubt being related to the heart of a poem. The example I remember most vividly is Bishop’s “Under the Window,” a poem in tercets about a narrator observing a town water pump in Brazil. At the end of the poem, we get:

[Oil] flashes or looks upward brokenly,
like bits of mirror – no, more blue than that:
like tatters of the Morpho butterfly.

With that dash, the self-assured narrator stumbles, tries to become more precise. That doubt entering an otherwise confident voice is the heart of the poem, because it raises all kinds of questions without answering them.

Munro’s stories seem to work the same way. Byers explicates “The Beggar Maid,” “Lichen,” and “Material,” all good stories. Here I’ll apply Byers’s reading to a different story, “The Ottawa Valley,” which is about a narrator remembering a trip she took with her mother and sister to visit the mother’s old home in the Ottawa valley. The narrative is retrospective; the narrator is now around 40, which was her mother’s age at the time of the trip. Back then, her mother was just beginning to develop a tremor which would eventually turn into Parkinson’s disease.

We get a sense of unknowing in the very first line: “I think of my m other sometimes in department stores. I don’t know why…” After a retrospective, ruminative paragraph the main story begins with the train ride out to the valley. Early on, we get a description of the aunt: “A man’s hat without a crown was shoved – for what purpose? – on her head.” Again, not knowing. Later, another relative is described: “Aunt Lena was stiff all the time with what I now recognize as terror.” That’s one of the few places where we get explicit retrospection, which shows the narrator now knows more than she did then. Part of the story’s project is a movement from unknowing into knowing.

In one memorable scene, as they arrive at the old home church, the narrator’s underwear snaps, and she asks her mother for a safety pin. Her mother objects, but eventually gives her the safety pin holding up her own slip. The narrator is in a state of not knowing: “Turning my back – and not saying thank you, because I was too deep in my own misfortune and too sure of my own rights.” But she moves into a state of knowing: “I could see that [my mother’s] gray slip had slid down half an inch and was showing in a slovenly way at one side.”

A more serious movement into knowing is the way the narrator becomes aware of her mother’s shaking arm, and what that means about her future health. Nevertheless, the story is not a mere coming-of-age, coming-into-awareness story. Munro ends on a note of complexity: “If I had been making a proper story out of this, I would have ended it [at a moment of awareness]…I didn’t stop there, I suppose, because I wanted to find out more, remember more. I wanted to bring back all I could.” The story itself is a process of digging, and though the narrator as a child has grown into the awareness of an adult, there is still the sense of doubt pervading the whole piece. Like Bishop’s “No, more blue than that,” you can see Munro refining her vision, again and again, but not arriving at an answer.

New Stories from the South: 2005

In continuing to catch up on the stories in this anthology series, I read through the 2005 issue this week. I’ll probably slow down and try to start working my way backward with the Best American series, or maybe I’ll go back to novels, but in the mean time, here are a few highlights from 2005:

  • Dennis Lehane, “Until Gwen” — a dude’s father picks him up from prison, and the two revisit a West Virginia fairgrounds where some stolen jewels might be hidden. The two men and dude’s girlfriend had been involved with a robbery gone south. Everyone’s a villain.
  • Judy Budnitz, “The Kindest Cut” — the narrator reads Civil War letters about her ancestor amputating limbs and cracking up.
  • Moira Crone, “Mr. Sender” — a girl pities this man who lives next door to her, because the man’s daughter ran off, but the man probably been abusing the daughter and took up with the girl next door. Very spooky tale.
  • Rebecca Soppe, “The Pantyhose Man” — an entertaining story about a woman who works at a hotel switchboard and develops a relationship with a pervert who keeps calling to ask her about her pantyhose.
  • Kevin Wilson, “The Choir Director’s Affair (The Baby’s Teeth)” — Wilson hasn’t missed yet that I’ve read; this story is about a guy whose friend is stepping out on his wife and using the guy as an excuse. One day the protagonist gets saddled with his friend’s baby.

New Stories from the South: 2010

They got Amy Hempel to edit the collection this year, and she picked quite a few shorter stories than you normally see in this anthology. For instance, Padgett Powell’s “Cry for Help from France,” is a two-page plotless rumination on courage, an interesting read but a kind of bizarre story. I didn’t love everything in here — in fact, I was having trouble stomaching some of the more blatant “southern” pieces, and wondered if I was losing interest/faith in southern literature. Fortunately, Elizabeth Spencer came in near the end and restored my sensibilities. Some highlights:

  • Ann Pancake, “Arsonists” — Pancake is a relatively new Appalachian writer, and this story, about a man cracking up in West Virginia strip mine country, takes on an important political topic through its characters, who have their own private drama within the larger system. A very good read.
  • “Aaron Gwyn, “Drive” — This story is about a guy who, after a fight with his girlfriend on the road, speeds up and cruises into the left lane, nearly killing them in a wreck. The action cures their relationship, temporarily, and they embark on a series of reckless “drives.”
  • Kenneth Calhoun, “Nightblooming” — A 20-year-old drummer joins a jazz band with a group of partying septogenarians. Need I say more?
  • Tim Gautreaux, “Idols” — A few years ago, some editor asked a bunch of favorite southern writers to write an O’Connor-inspired story, which has led to several fun stories. Gautreaux takes a couple of O’Connor like characters — Julian and Parker — and puts them to work on a decaying mansion in Mississippi.
  • Brad Watson, “Visitation” — Watson has two stories in this anthology, but this one was my favorite. It’s a simple story about a divorced guy visiting California and staying in a motel with his kid, but the psychology of the story is spot-on, including the guy waking up at 3 a.m. from the whiskey he drank to put himself to sleep.
  • Elizabeth Spencer, “Return Trip” — This is the second of Spencer’s stories that I’ve been really, really impressed with. This story is about a husband and wife living in a borrowed cabin near Asheville, and they have two surprise visits — their son from college, and the wife’s third cousin, with whom she has had quite an ambiguous past. The only other writer I can think of to compare Spencer to is William Trevor, in that both authors take fairly simple stories and knock you out with the results. I don’t say this lightly: Spencer is an effortless writer. In just a few paragraphs, you know these characters and care about them. And it all starts with such an innocuous sentence: “It was during a summer season Patricia and Boyd were spending together in the North Carolina mountains that Edward reappeared.” You know Edward spells trouble, and boy does he.

Samuel Ligon, Drift and Swerve

These stories, by the editor of Willow Springs, are about a series of hard-luck characters on the verge of some major change, be it a divorce or abandonment or murder. The prose is vigorous, and reminiscent at times of Gordon Lish-edited Carver. For instance, the title story is about a family trying to avoid a collision with a drunk driver. The narration is so detached that the characters hardly have names, predominantly referred to as “the mother,” “the father,” “the sister,” and “the brother.” This objectivity is the right tone for these stories, which could easily have become sentimental or melodramatic. I read the book in two sittings, however, and reading it that fast the tone is a bit overpowering — some of the stories are a bit too spare for my taste, and left me wanting more. But several of the stories are about a recurring character, Nikki, and those stories were terrific. Nikki, a 17-year-old runaway, knocks around in Providence for a while, living with a drug dealer and washing dishes at a lesbian bar. Then she catches a bus for Austin and takes up with another set of bad-luck characters. I’d love to read a whole novel about Nikki, and hope Ligon continues her story in future publications.

Thom Jones, The Pugilist at Rest

Whew, Jones is a wild writer. Many of the stories in this collection are told from the first person about a similar character (not sure if it’s meant to be the same character over and over, though it could be), a reconnaissance Marine during Vietnam and afterward. The man is a boxer whose father committed suicide when he was younger, and the stories spiral around that childhood loss and the loss of innocence in war and explores the violence in this character’s core. The character is an erudite womanizer, who holds his girlfriends at arm’s length and who waxes poetic about Schopenhauer and Nietzsche. My favorite stories were “The Pugilist at Rest,” “Break on Through,” and “The Black Lights,” a trilogy of hallucinatory, drugged out violent stories set in Vietnam, as strange and punchy as anything out of Denis Johnson. For instance: “As I moved out of the jungle again with my new pack, I sounded like a couple of skeletons fucking on a tin roof and had to stop and repack it.” I also liked some of the post-Vietnam stories, especially “Wipeout,” where through humor and sharp insight he captivates you with a really unlikeable character. If I have a qualm with the collection, it’s that Jones doesn’t let his guard down much. These are dark, tight stories, and the heart is there, but it’s buried behind a tough-guy front, so I could only read so much at a clip before I needed to take a breath and regroup. Kind of like listening to a rock ‘n’ roll album loaded up on distortion and drum solos — I have to be in the right mood.