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20
Jun

Shorts Are In

Posted by Inspire(d)

Mary Gaitskill, “Don’t Cry”: Searching, gorgeous views of women’s lives
Nam Le, “The Boat”: Vietnamese-American: great writing, beyond the hyphen
Wells Tower, “Everything Ravaged”: Deceptively casual, funny, poignant
Antonya Nelson “Nothing Right”: Modern life, seen sideways

By Amy Weldon

Writer Charles d’Ambrosio says, “With a short story, from the first line you’re in the process of shutting it down. It’s got to be efficient – if it’s not efficient, it’s a novel.” A story is a challenge and opportunity in terms of craft – it has to work by sheer force of language, striking a note at the beginning and expanding its small world at the same time it’s shooting toward its conclusion. Writers love stories, citing the grand American tradition of John Cheever, Flannery O’Connor, Eudora Welty, Raymond Carver, Tobias Wolff. Readers seem doubtful, preferring the lose-yourself sprawl of a novel (at worst, the mass-market Grisham SparksKing McVampire genre). Any writer with a story collection to sell (including me) hears the same thing from editors and agents: “We can’t sell stories now… are you working on a novel?” Stories are in danger of becoming creatures of small literary journals and small presses, with the exception of those who can ride a “New Yorker” publication to a book contract and valiant websites like theshortreview.com.

But just when it seems like the whole world is down on stories, along comes a book – or better yet, four – to remind us why this form has persisted so long. Readers say they crave the immersion of a novel, as opposed to the quick dip into a story’s world (a false choice); publishers claim this consumer preference makes stories a bad risk. But in light of four stellar new collections – Mary Gaitskill’s “Don’t Cry,” Nam Le’s “The Boat,” Wells Tower’s “Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned,” and Antonya Nelson’s “Nothing Right” – these attitudes aren’t just timid but willfully blind. Each collection immerses readers in a series of sharply etched, suggestive worlds, as immediate and refreshing as a dip into Decorah’s Dunning’s Spring on an August day. Take a break and go on a trip – fifteen minutes at a time.

These writers are celebrities even beyond the buzz these books have raised: Gaitskill famous for her dark, lovely tales of female psychology, Le a graduate of the Iowa Writers Workshop, Nelson known for her witty, deliberately inconclusive tales of modern life, Tower famous for his immersion journalism (including undercover stints as a circus carnie and Bush/Cheney 2004 volunteer.) But the first thing you’ll notice is the writing. A story has to make its mark quickly and indelibly, bending language to defamiliarize the world and make us see it anew, and these books sing. Tower’s stories bristle with deft, offhand descriptions: “his face was nearly all cheek, with small crooked features that looked like they’d been stuck on in a hurry.” Le’s sinuous sentence mimics his character’s waking from a dream: “Like a shape in smoke, the poem blurred, then dissolved into this new, cold, strange reality: a windblown, rain-strafed parking lot; a dark room almost entirely taken up by my bed; the small body of my father dripping water onto hardwood floors.”

In contrast to the old cliché that art’s removed from the world, these stories are engaged with our lives, insightful about our realities. The narrator of Nelson’s “We and They” observes wryly, “Every four years a new Democratic candidate’s name would replace the faded name of the last loser we’d promoted on our vehicles and in our yard.”  But in her title story, she finds the redemptive heart of a situation few parents would choose – Hannah’s surly fifteen-year-old son, Leo, becomes a father. “[W]hen Hannah dropped him off at the restaurant every afternoon,” she writes, “he never failed to lean through the back window and kiss his son on the forehead.” The baby himself is wonderfully rendered: “His nose was slender, his neck and elbows and hands refined, dexterous and bony as an older child’s, and he rarely smiled, as if the world had taught him to challenge its charms.” Gaitskill’s narrator has a similar moment of clarity when her friend adopts an Ethiopian child, Sonny, considering unseen ties between the Third World and the First: “who or what is the birth mother to him? Is she the earth of Sonny, the sky? The unseeable place the child walks when he sleeps?” Thinking of a girl she’s seen in a market, the narrator thinks of faith: “This word has meaning, I thought. Whatever it has faithlessly been made to mean, it has actual meaning. But it was very little to hold on to: the image of a graceful girl in a dirty store in a hungering, wounded country – so small, so light, so surrounded by darkness.”

These stories also bring the past into the present. Le’s “Love and Honor and Pity and Pride and Compassion and Sacrifice” traces a Vietnamese-American writer’s struggle to set down his immigrant father’s story, which the father refuses to yield. “‘They will read and clap their hands and forget,’” the father demurs. “For once, he was not smiling. ‘Sometimes it’s better to forget, no?’” Tower’s title story – rendered in the pitch-perfect speech of a 21st-century dude – follows a band of Viking raiders: “Just as we were all getting back into the mainland domestic groove, somebody started in with dragons and crop blights from across the North Sea… Some individuals three weeks’ boat ride off were messing up our summer and would probably need their asses whipped over it.” Despite its humor, the story is morally serious, fresh and compassionate.  “I wished Gnut would go ahead and own up to the fact that his life out here was making him lonely and miserable instead of laying on with this warrior-man routine,” says the narrator, Harald. “I could tell just to look at him that most days he was thinking of walking into the water and not bothering to turn back.”

If you’re looking for a great read this summer, give these collections a try. Like novels, they’ll seep through your imagination and into your vision, coloring the way you see the world long after you put them down.

Amy Weldon, an Alabama native, teaches creative writing, literature, and Paideia at Luther College, as well as a class at Decorah’s ArtHaus this June and July entitled “Turning Life Into Fiction.”

Category : Book Review