In the winter 2007 issue of Sycamore Review, I review Philip Roth’s Everyman.

I think the cold season is officially over, though I’m not sure anyplace in this country has what you’d term a proper spring. As one of the Lafayette bus drivers noted the other day, “We go straight from the meat locker to the oven.” But since it’s no longer cold, it’s time to get on the “Couch to 5K” plan, a two-month running program that the blog title is linked to. At this rate, you’ll be ready to run a 10K for Octoberfest, just in time to quit running for the winter. (And for those of you in Lafayette, you know that the banks of the Wabash are essentially nonexistent, and that one hour of mist is enough to flood the trail by the river for a week. The trail was still too mucky this afternoon, though it should be clear by Wednesday.)

This October, Joyce Carol Oates is giving a reading at Purdue, one of the big-name readings for next year. She’s written scores of novels, short story collections, books of poetry, plays, essay collections, and children’s books. I just finished Foxfire, subtitled “Confessions of a Girl Gang,” a novel about a group of teenage girls in the fifties who bond together against “the enemy”–men, capitalists, adults. Like everything of hers I’ve read, Oates is fearless in this book, writing with an eye for grit–the violence that surrounds these characters’ lives. One thing I particularly admire is the way she gives agency to–incriminates–teenage girls, people that society often portrays as victims, in need of protection (namely, by men). Craftwise, Oates’s use of point of view is the most interesting thing in this novel. It’s fiction, but she writes it like a memoir by Maddy, one member of the gang. But, unlike the usual first-person narrative, Maddy switches back and forth from “I” and sometimes talks about her past self in third person–”Maddy was there and she was scared”–and then switches into omniscience to record events that she (the narrator) wasn’t present for–”Legs thought this about that.” This technique, this voice, drives the story forward, making it a true tour-de-force.

This story is one of the more interesting I’ve read lately. It’s about the disappearance of three women, and, like Faulkner’s “A Rose for Emily,” it’s told from the town’s perspective, the collective “we.” In choosing that point of view, Spence has made it more a story of people’s reactions to mysteries like this, rather than a story of the mystery itself. The story acts as a kind of chilling critique of our culture. Here is the opening paragraph:

“Three women have vanished–a mother, her teenage daughter, and the daughter’s friend–purses and cars left behind, TV on, door unlocked. The daughter had plans to spend the day at the lake with friends and never showed. The phone has rung and rung all morning, unanswered. Puzzled friends walk through the interrupted house, sweep up broken glass from a porch light before calling the police. Broom bristles, shoe soles, finger pads smearing, tamping down, obscuring possibilities. Neighbors come forward, vague. It was late, they say. A green van, a white truck, seen in the area, trolling. A man with longish brown hair, army jacket, slight to medium build. Down by the train tracks, panties. A single canvas sneaker.”

Note: the title link might require you to create an account with the New York Times. The story can also be found in Best American Stories 1997 and Shreve and Nguyen’s anthology, 30/30.

Jodi Picoult’s eerily timed new novel is about a high school shooter. It came out in the US in early March, but wasn’t released in Britain until the week after the Virginia Tech shooting. The story is at BBC (title linked). On a related note, I’ve heard Peter Ho Davies has a story in a recent issue of Harper’s that’s told from the point of view of a teacher during a school shooting (I haven’t confirmed this yet because Purdue’s periodical section has been closed for three weeks because some asshole decided the end of the semester would be a good time to reorganize the stacks). Since 9/11, a lot of writers have been discussing the value of fiction (and the space reserved for nonfiction in stores and the New York Times book review doesn’t help), so I admire efforts like Picoult’s that act as a reminder of character in a time when politics seems to be all that matters.

One of my favorite authors, Ron Rash, has a new book of short stories out this month. Chemistry and Other Stories is his first book of stories released with a major publishing house, Picador, and it contains several stories from an earlier collection, Casualties. These stories are set in lower Appalachia, and cut straight to the human heart: a grieving mother hires a surveyor so she knows in what county her son was murdered, a boy follows his unstable Presbyterian father as he secretly drives to a pentecostal service, and a carnival woman decides whether to stay with the man who throws knives at her for a living. Rash gives us wisdom and compassion: “Some grief is like a barbed wire that’s been wrapped around a tree,” one character says. “The longer it’s there the deeper the barbs go, the closer to the tree’s heart.” In a retrospective voice, another character realizes, “At eighteen I’d believed love could be like a virus–if you stayed around someone, or better yet married him–sooner or later you’d catch it. And maybe love did happen that way for some people, but it hadn’t for me, or at least the kind of love I wanted.” Using the Carolina landscape, tensions of social class, and the unfulfilled desires of these characters, Rash reminds us why we need stories.