Tag Archives: short fiction

Book review: Thirty Indian Legends of Canada

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Thirty Indian Legends of Canada by Margaret Bemister. Illustrations by Douglas Tait. Vancouver, British Columbia: Douglas & McIntyre. 1997. 160 pages.

In her preface to Thirty Indian Legends of Canada, dated September 15, 1912, from Winnipeg, Margaret Bemister notes that many of these stories are printed for the first time, while others are “adapted from well-known authorities.” She mentions one tribal name on her list of sources (“the Okanagan chief, Antowyne”). Other than this single reference and some names (Chippewa, Cree, Iroquois, Osage, Ottawa) and geographical places (Assiniboine River, Manatoline Islands, Lake Huron, Missouri River, Niagara Falls) sprinkled among the stories, there is little to help the lay reader understand where they originated, how, and why. Canada covers a lot of land from east to west and north to south, and embraces many cultures, but that diversity is sometimes lost in this collection.

Not surprisingly, animals and plants—or what appear to be animals and plants—figure strongly in many of the tales. It may be a dormouse, which was “once very large;” butterflies that carry messages from whispering grass (not suburban lawn grass, but tall grass deeply rooted in prairie soil); bears, squirrels, birds, and three animals that evoke the northern wilderness—beaver, lynx, and wolverine. As you would expect, manitous and magicians appear and sometimes disappear.

More notably, a few stories feature giants and fairies. Most of us can picture a giant or fairy as portrayed in western literature, but what were these entities to Canada’s first peoples? One can only imagine from descriptions such as “He saw all around him queer, little fairies, each one with a tiny war club. They peeped from out the bark of the trees, from amidst the grass, and even from out his pouch” and “At the call of Weeng his sleep fairies had come forth, and now with their clubs were knocking their enemies on the head.” Clearly these aren’t the ephemeral winged sprites that a Victorian girl may have doodled in the garden. The problem here may be time and translation. How do you convey ancient, alien concepts in a language that was never meant to express them?

While there are villages and large families (for example, the ten brothers of “The Giant Bear” and the ten daughters and husbands of “The Fairies’ Cliff”), some stories have a lonely, isolated feel. In “The Daughters of the Star,” hunter Waupee (the White Hawk) lives in a deep forest and one day reaches a wide prairie, where “no trace of footsteps was to be seen.” In “The White Feather,” an old man and his grandson are so isolated on an island that the boy “had never heard any one but his grandfather speak.” “The Lone Lightning” evokes shades of the Grimm Brothers’ Hansel and Gretel; a “lonely little boy” is raised by his uncle, who intends to stuff him with bear meat and fat, then kill him. His sad, lonely fate “may be seen in the northern sky on autumn nights.”

Some stories tell of beginnings, like “The Five Water-spirits,” whose play gives rise to Niagara Falls, where in the “sunny spray you may see their sandals and their wings.” “The Stone Canoe” addresses grief, the afterlife, and the idea that you cannot stay in the “Land of Souls” until your work is done and your life is meant to end.

I wish I knew more about these stories, how they arose, and if they were influenced by outside cultures (ponies make an appearance, as does a cabin built and abandoned by white men). Without context, phrases like “laughing like girls on a holiday” (“The Five Water-Spirits”) sound oddly English. What would that simile mean to the people who told it and heard it told? Thirty Indian Legends of Canada left me feeling isolated and lonely and wanting more—more legends and more knowledge of the peoples who brought them to life.

6 July 2017
Copyright © Diane L. Schirf

Book review: Neurotica: Jewish Writers on Sex

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Neurotica: Jewish Writers on Sex edited by Melvin Jules Bukiet. Recommended.

“Witness the people of the book, in bed.” Thus editor Melvin Jules Bukiet invites the reader into the intimacies of Neurotica: Jewish Writers on Sex. In this collection, everyone from Saul Bellow, Bernard Malamud, Philip Roth, and Isaac Bashevis Singer to Woody Allen and Erica Jong gets into the act of exploring sex in its many varieties — heterosexual, homosexual, incestuous, paid, humorous, poignant, intellectual, sadistic, masochistic, costumed — always from a distinctive, wry Jewish perspective. Note, though, that you don’t have to be interested in erotica to appreciateNeurotica — just in good stories.

The anthology begins with a memorable story by Woody Allen, “The Whores of Mensa,” an over-the-top private eye tale that cleverly and humorously reveals what many of us know but some have yet to discover — that sex is less a function of the nether regions and more one of the mind. This theme is continued and expanded in “The Courtship” from The Mind-Body Problem” by Rebecca Goldstein, in which the narrator says, “And I remember too the intensity of my pleasure, which wasn’t at all physical . . . my head sang the triumphant thought: I am making love to this man . . . to Noam Himmel, the genius.” Unfortunately, “The Courtship” is marred somewhat by this ending and the tone throughout, which makes it resemble less of a literary work and more of the author’s personal fantasy, or what is known in fan fiction as a “Mary Sue” story.

Philip Roth adds imagination to the mix in an excerpt from The Counterlife in which a dentist suggest to his new assistant that they play dentist and assistant. She says, “Why is it so exciting when all we’re pretending to be is what we are?” When his physical deficiencies win over his imagination, he plummets to the world that is, not what could be, which he cannot long survive.

No matter the theme, any anthology focused on Jewish writers is bound to include references to Germans, World War II, and the Holocaust. In “Jews Have No Business Being Enamored of Germans,” Binnie Kirshenbaum’s narrator confronts the Jewish self-hatred that could make a Jewish man with a “short and convenient view of history” prefer and seek out Germans and “Aryan intellectualism.” Even the narrator’s parents have succumbed to postmodern sense of tolerance or denial. “‘Oh, none of that concerned us,’ my mother waved off the Holocaust and a world war.”

Michael Lowenthal takes a psychologically richer approach in “Infinity of Angles,” in which a Jewish homosexual connects with a German, only to find his would-be lover identifies too closely with the persecuted and demands an unusual punishment.

While there’s some humour in Neurotica, there is also mental illness. The two are combined in “Elvis, Axl, and Me” by Janice Eidus, who proves that Elvis isn’t dead; he lives in The Bronx disguised as a Hasidic Jew. Mental illness appears again in “The Quality of Being a Ruby” by Cheryl Pearl Sucher, a thoroughly modern tale of a bipolar girl experiencing anxiety neurosis who picks up lovers, drops lithium, experiments with cocaine, and resists the advice of her protective father. “For Ruby, the distillation of the illness was ‘Rubessence,’ the perfect calm of inspired originality, the longed-for union of the desired and the real.”

One of the best stories is “Taibele and Her Demon” by Isaac Bashevis Singer, who brings a fairy-tale simplicity to this complex tale of deception and love. As with any collection, there are several stories I didn’t like, such as “Romancing the Yohrzeit Light” by Thane Rosenbaum, who tries too self-consciously to combine the sacred, the profane, and the silly. My favourite story was by Nathan Englander, titled “Peep Show.” The troubled protagonist asks, “What is a boy raised in a world of absolutes to do when he is faced with contradictions?” The answer is, “You question. That’s what you do,” according to the nude rabbi his imagination has conjured. Despite the humorous and ludicrous situations in which the protagonist finds himself at the peep show, the tone of the story is strangely eerie in its reference to peep show nostalgia — a little like the tone of Ray Bradbury’s Something Wicked This Way Comes.

Although a few stories are set in places such as France, Germany, Italy, and Israel, most take place in the United States and are by Jewish-American authors. All are from the 20th century, which is disappointing since surely erotica by Jewish writers has been around at least as long as erotica by writers from other traditions. I would like to have seen more representation from other countries and time periods.

The location and time period, however, give Neurotica a couple of themes meant to appeal to a broad audience, including assimilation and secularization. In many of these stories, the faith, traditions, and rituals of Judaism are a mystery to the characters, primarily the younger ones. Noam Himmel, the genius, is an atheist ignorant of his cultural past. At one point, his seducer says, “You have heard of the Talmud?” He says later, “Sometimes, especially on insomniac nights, I start worrying that there may be a God, and worse, that he may be Jewish.” In “Romancing the Yohrzeit Light,” Adam doesn’t “really care to go” to that part of the world, and he allows his Swedish lover to extinguish his mother’s yohrzeit light. Like Adam, many of the characters actively seek goyim as lovers. Some of the older people speak Yiddish, but the young people do not. Yet, while religious, cultural, and even social bonds may seem to be disintegrating with assimilation after World War II,Neurotica shows that there is still a literary voice that has not been silenced and that remains uniquely Jewish.

5 September 2005
Copyright © Diane L. Schirf

Book review: The Prussian Officer and Other Stories

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The Prussian Officer and Other Stories by D. H. Lawrence. Edited by John Worthen with an introduction and notes by Brian Finney. Recommended.

In The Prussian Officer and Other Stories, D. H. Lawrence explores in short story form the themes that dominate many of his best-known novels. “The Daughters of the Vicar,” for example, echoes both Women in Love and Sons and Lovers, where one relationship is out of balance and the other shows some promise, and where a son is in near-complete subjection to his mother — even after her death. The question left unanswered at the end of “Daughters” is whether collier Alfred Durant will be any more successful at forming a lasting relationship with Louisa than artist Paul Morel was with Miriam. The answer would seem to be “yes” since he and Louisa are to be married soon — although in the other stories, marriage does not mean a meaningful or lasting relationship has been achieved. It’s up to reader speculation whether they will end up like the couple in “The White Stocking” or the couple in “The Odour of Chrysanthemums.”

Lawrence’s world is focused on dominance and subjection, whether sexual, social, or economic, and the resulting imbalances. For all their social loftiness, the vicar’s family is as poor or poorer than the uneducated colliers whom coal mining (ironically) elevates economically if not socially. As in the mines, there is a going down and coming up of the classes, with the declining rural gentry no better off than the rising class of miners and their managers. Lawrence experienced the mixing of these disparate groups in his own family, with his educated and domineering mother and his ignorant and brutal father. It’s not difficult to find the origins of Elizabeth and Walter Bates in “The Odour of Chrysanthemums.” In this story, Lawrence overtly articulates the alienation the wife feels from her husband, once death has given her the objective distance to realise it.

While compelling, this story demonstrates what I believe is Lawrence’s predominant weakness — a heavy handedness of the author’s voice in the narration of thought. Across all the stories (and the novels), his characters have similar thoughts and reactions, often expressed in similar terms that seem unlikely and unnatural for those particular characters. In many cases, you could lift entire sentences and even passages with little revision and transplant them seamlessly into any of his other stories or novels. While most critics, better informed about Lawrence’s social and cultural milieu and his artistic intent, understand this as part of his “metaphysic,” I find it artificial and tiresome. Reading so many stories together in a compressed time period highlights their similarities in theme, tone, and point of view.

As an example, this passage sounds less like the voice of the wife of a dead collier than that of Lawrence himself: “There were the children — but the children belonged to life. This dead man had nothing to do with them. He and she were only channels through which life had flowed to issue in the children.” At a certain level, many of Lawrence’s characters have no voice that is recognizable as their own — only as his. They are in subjugation to his dominance, which burdens and overwhelms this collection.

Two stories that stand out are set in the military: “The Prussian Officer” (originally “Honour and Arms”) and “The Thorn in the Flesh.” In the former, a young orderly revenges himself on his rigid and sexually sadistic captain, then dies blindly to restore the balance. In the latter, the runaway soldier and his country servant girlfriend find spiritual elevation and detachment from their mundane concerns in their sexual unification. They are free to face the repercussions of their respective transgressions with indifference. “A Fragment of Stained Glass” is memorable for its medieval setting, sadism, and eeriness, but is flawed by a particularly weak ending that adds nothing and detracts from the tale’s previous tone.

The Prussian Officer and Other Stories is a must for anyone interested in Lawrence and his development. Most of these stories are unforgettable, partly because of their symbolism and partly because they integrate pieces of Lawrence’s overarching metaphysic. As a side note, my favourite Lawrence story — indeed, one of my favourite short stories by any author — is not part of this collection: the haunting “The Rocking-Horse Winner.”

6 September 2004
Copyright © Diane L. Schirf

Book review: The Ghost Stories of Edith Wharton

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The Ghost Stories of Edith Wharton. Highly recommended.

I was unaware that Edith Wharton, known for such insightful novels as The Age of Innocence, The House of Mirth, and Ethan Frome (as well as the popular movies these novels inspired), had indulged in writing ghost stories other than “Afterward” until I found this collection. In Ghost Stories, Wharton reveals her mastery of the psychology of horror — where ghosts terrify through their oblique influence on the human mind and emotion — and where these human foibles create their own horrors.

Wharton’s ghosts take many forms — from the loyal retainer in “The Lady’s Maid’s Bell” to the loyal retainers of a different sort in “Kerfol”; from the guilt behind “The Eyes” to the guilt recognised “Afterward”; from the mysterious “Mr. Jones” to the ghostly and ghastly “Miss Mary Pask.” Some of these visitations are not seen, or, in the case of “Kerfol,” even heard. They fulfill various functions: To protect the secrets of the past, to bring the secrets of the past to light, to warn the present about the future, and to remind the living of the dead.

Like the best ghost story writers, Wharton begins each tale with a scenario that seems ordinary enough. Early on, she drops subtle clues that build from a feeling that something is somewhat amiss up to a sense of fractured reality that shatters one’s assumptions. Wharton masterfully creates ironic twists (“Miss Mary Pask”), innocent victims (the wife in “Afterward”), and nontraditional ghosts (“The Eyes,” “Kerfol”). In many cases, the reader is one step ahead of the narrator or protagonist (Hitchcock’s definition of suspense), creating a delicious sense of inevitable, unavoidable doom.

If you are looking for the gore and thrills of today’s tale of horror, you will not find them in Wharton’s work. If, on the other hand, you appreciate the subtle, growing sense of terror that M. R. James insinuates into The Ghost Stories of an Antiquary, you’ll discover the same feeling of the fine line between this world and another that can manifest itself at any time and in any way when the need arises. These are stories to be read, savored, and read again — alone, of course.

28 December 2003
Copyright © Diane L. Schirf

Book review: Victorian Love Stories

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Victorian Love Stories: An Oxford Anthology edited by Kate Flint. Highly recommended.

Coincidentally, I happened to read this collection of Victorian short stories focused on love relationships concurrently with a book of Victorian erotic short stories and George Eliot’s Middlemarch(set earlier in the 19th century). Although there are occasional hints of the erotic or sexual in many of the love stories, most of them are about love and romance disconnected from the physical — love with all the proprieties. It’s almost as if the Victorian erotica fills in the missing pieces in the love stories that would be private and not observable (those things the characters truly think and feel but which is unacceptable to reveal or acknowledge in public, along with the erotic).

The love stories are, for the most part, about acceptable if not always successful relationships, whereas the erotica is largely about questionable or illicit relationships. Middlemarch made an interesting companion, since at least one of the key relationships, Dorothea and Causabon, appear to experience neither love nor Eros. In the end, both the love stories and the erotica may seem unbalanced because each seems incomplete — as though one can have love or sex, but not both. Is the balance as difficult to achieve in life as it is in literature?

Flint’s collection is outstanding in its scope, including stories by authors who are not well known to today’s average reader as well as stories by such authors as Anthony Trollope, Henry James, Wilkie Collins, Thomas Hardy, Somerset Maugham, Rudyard Kipling, and Oscar Wilde. The stories include young love, middle-aged love (a welcome change from today’s focus on youth), deception, fantasy, fairy tale, class issues, religious differences, urban and rural life, changing mores, rejection and pain, and the proper and improper. There is even a touch of silliness in W. S. Gilbert’s “An Elixir of Love” and a surprise ending in Ellen T. Fowler’s “An Old Wife’s Tale.”

The settings range from urban London to rural villages; from rough coastal areas (Anthony Trollope’s “Malachi’s Cove”) to mythical locales ( Christiana Rossetti’s “Hero,” Laurence Housman’s “The Story of the Herons”); from hints of the supernatural (Wilkie’s “The Captain’s Last Love” and Amelia B. Edwards’ “Salome”) to other worlds (Olive Schreiner’s “In a Far-Off World”); from the urban (A. St. John Adcock’s “Bob Harris’s Deputy”) to the bucolic (James’ “A Day of Days”); from the familiar (stories set in the United Kingdom) to the exotic (Ernest Dowson’s “The Statute of Limitations,” Kipling’s “Georgie Porgie,” Flora Annie Steel’s “Uma Himavutee”). The one thing all the stories have in common is love — happy love, unrequited love, frustrated love, deceptive love, miserable love, tragic love — love and what passes for love in its complex facets.

Despite the subject matter, there is little that is sickly sweet in this collection. Love is not always touching or uplifting; sometimes it is deeply bitter. Most of the stories are memorable; some are unforgettable (Lucy Clifford’s “The End of Her Journey,” Hubert Crackenthorpe’s “A Conflict of Egoisms”). No matter how you feel about love, you are sure to find a beautifully written story here that will resonate with your experiences.

16 June 2002
Copyright © Diane L. Schirf

Book review: The Collected Stories of Colette

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The Collected Stories of Colette by Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette, ed., and with an introduction by, Robert Phelps. Highly recommended.

According to the introduction, this collection represents 100 stories taken from a dozen volumes published during Colette’s lifetime. They are categorised as “Early Stories,” “Backstage at the Music Hall,” “Varieties of Human Nature,” and “Love.” Some, like the Clouk/Chéri stories, appear to be fiction, while many, like “The Rainy Moon” and “Bella-Vista,” seem to be taken straight from Colette’s varied life and acquaintances.

Whether writing fiction or chronicling fact, whether writing in the third-person omniscient or in the first person, Colette herself is always a character — rarely as an influencer, that is, one whose actions or choices drive the plot. Colette’s preferred role is as observer — and it is one for which she is well suited.

An inveterate sensualist and a former music-hall performer, Colette integrates her characters (real and fictional) with everything around them — their clothes (costumes); their abodes, dressing rooms, and haunts (sets); and their neighborhoods and towns (theatres). Much of Colette’s writing, no matter how mundane the surface subject, is about art — the art of living and, notably, the art of loving. In “My Goddaughter,” the subject tells her godmother how she injured herself with scissors and a curling iron and recounts her mother’s reaction. “She said that I had ruined her daughter for her! She said, ‘What have you done with my beautiful hair which I tended so patiently? . . . And that cheek, who gave you permission to spoil it! . . . I’ve taken years, I’ve spent my days and nights, trembling over this masterpiece. . . .'”

Colette is attuned to everything, every sense, every nuance. “A faint fragrance did indeed bring to my nostrils the memory of various scents which are at their strongest in autumn.” (“Gibriche”) “. . . set in a bracelet, which slithered between her fingers like a cold and supple snake.” (“The Bracelet”) ” . . . the supper of rare fruits, an orgy of ice water sparkling in the thin glasses, as intoxicating as champagne . . .” (“Florie”) “Peroxided hair, light-colored eyes, white teeth, something about her of an appetizing but slightly vulgar young washerwoman.” (“Gitanette”)

Colette does not pretend to be an objective observer of human behaviour; she does not hesitate to express to the reader her weariness with certain individuals or situations, and her stories of her vain, pretentious, overbearing friend Valentine reveal her jaded and waning affection. She knows this woman so well that she sees her almost as Valentine sees herself — a drama queen acting out stories, roles, and games without depth of feeling for them. “What Must We Look Like?” becomes Valentine’s driving philosophy, to which Colette responds with “a mild, a kindly pity.” In “The Hard Worker,” Colette says, “I can see she does not hate him, but I cannot see she loves him either.” What Colette sees — and does not see — is to be respected.

Some stories, such as “The Sick Child,” are vivid and imaginative and reveal Colette’s amazing ability to think and dream like a gifted child. “The Advice,” with its mundane beginning and premise and twisted, horrifying ending would enhance any collection of gothic or mystery tales. Other stories, like “Gibriche,” several of the other music-hall stories, and “Bella-Vista,” tackle topics that even today remain controversial. “Bella-Vista,” in which Colette’s moods seem to wane with every familiarity achieved with her hostesses, offers an ending that is heavily foreshadowed throughout but is surprising and gruesome nonetheless.

Most of the stories, whether fiction or nonfiction, seem to come from life in one way or another. The quantity of stories and the quality of the collection reveal the incredible scope of experience of Colette, the dry, often weary yet obsessive observer, interpreter, and chronicler of human nature. As Judith Thurman says in her introduction to Colette’s work, The Pure and the Impure, “This great ode to emptiness was written by a woman who felt full.” As well she should.

27 May 2003
Copyright © Diane L. Schirf

Book review: The Way to Rainy Mountain

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The Way to Rainy Mountain by N. Scott Momaday; illustrated by Al Momaday. Highly recommended.

Rainy Mountain, a “single knoll [that] rises out of the plain in Oklahoma,” is an old landmark for the Kiowa people. It is a land of bitter cold, searing heat, summer drought, and “great green and yellow grasshoppers.” It is a land of loneliness, where the Kiowa were drawn after a long journey from the northwest through many types of lands.

The Way to Rainy Mountain is about the journey — in myth, in drawings by Momaday’s father Al, in reminiscences, and in historical snippets. All reveal aspects of Kiowa culture, life, philosophy, outlook, spirituality, and sense of self — the beauty and the desolation, how the introduction of the horse revolutionized Kiowa life, the story of Tai-me, and the richness of the word and the past. It is a literal journey as well; Momaday, in Yellowstone, writes, “The Kiowas reckoned their stature by the distance they could see, and they were bent and blind in the wilderness.

This is a small gem of a book, beautifully written, illustrated, and designed. It has moments of insight, beauty, and sadness, as the ending of the Sun Dance, telling as the sun is at the heart of the Kiowa’s soul — a soul that survives in every word and drawing of The Way to Rainy Mountain.

3 March 2002
Copyright © Diane L. Schirf

Book review: American Gothic Stories

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American Gothic Stories ed. and with an introduction by Joyce Carol Oates. Highly recommended.

In this 1996 anthology, noted American author Joyce Carol Oates collects American tales of horror and/or the supernatural, from an excerpt from Wieland, or the Transformation (1798) by Charles Brockden Brown, to “Subsoil” (1994) by Nicholson Baker, so that the 50 stories here represent nearly 200 years of the darker side of the American psyche.

The stories, arranged in chronological order, show some clear trends. In early stories, by Brown, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and even Edgar Allan Poe, religion plays a prominent role. Interestingly, God and his creation are seen as at odds with one another. For example, in Hawthorne’s “Young Goodman Brown,” the forest and the darkness are where Satan meets humanity. “The Tartarus of Maids,” an industrial creation of Herman Melville’s, is set in a remote rural location, contrasted to another Melville story (not included here), “The Paradise of Bachelors,” set in a London gentlemen’s club. Perhaps this conviction that nature is a place of mystery, evil, and fear, explains the early (and current) American drive to conquer it.

Another theme is denial of responsibility for one’s own terrible actions. When called to account for committing some of the most heinous crimes possible, Wieland’s defense is inarguable: He has proved his faith in God by doing that which God desired of him. (Unlike Wieland, the reader will recognise that the “shrill voice” expressing God’s bloody will from behind a “fiery stream” is more likely that of the fallen angel Lucifer.)

A second example is the famous Poe story, “The Black Cat,” in which the narrator, noted from infancy for his “docility and humanity,” becomes a cold-blooded maimer and killer of that which he loves most. To what does he attribute his violence and subsequent fall in fortunes? Not to himself, but to the “Fiend Intemperance,” saying, “for what disease is like Alcohol!” While Poe, a self-medicating alcoholic and bipolar sufferer, seems to have had an early understanding that alcoholism is not a moral deficiency but a disease, his narrator’s choice of scapegoat does not explain the obvious: Most alcoholics do not maim and murder.

In “The Yellow Wallpaper,” Charlotte Perkins Gilman also beats the medical establishment in recognising a pathological condition rather than a purely emotional one: Postpartum depression. Gilman gets her digs in at the predominantly male medical profession — the narrator’s own husband, who makes every misstep conceivable in his attempts to “help” her, is a physician. Feminism and the gothic meet.

As the collection progresses in time, the stores become less religious and psychotic in tone, and some, such as “Snow” by John Crowley and “The Girl Who Loved Animals” by Bruce McAllister, are more science fiction than gothic. “Exchange Value” by Charles Johnson translates the tradition of psychological horror into inner-city terms. “Replacements” by Lisa Tuttle is telling commentary on the battle of the sexes; a literal vampire is preferable as an object of affection, attention, and obsession to the emotional vampire the human male of the story represents.

Other highlights include “The Veldt” by Ray Bradbury, which combines gothic sensibilities with science fiction; the unforgettable “Cat in Glass” by Nancy Etchemendy, in which the narrator’s implausible reality is the only one that makes sense; and “In the Icebound Hothouse” by William Goyen, where erotic elements predominate.

A personal favourite, “The Lovely House” by Shirley Jackson, succeeds in evoking the surrealism of that most tangible and ordinary of places — a home.

In some cases, I wish Oates selected more obscure works of equal quality by the same author; for example, I wonder if there are any H. P. Lovecraft short-story alternatives to the oft-anthologised “The Outsider.” Still, it is innovative of Oates to include “The Enormous Radio” by John Cheever, who is not traditionally seen as a gothic writer — although “The Swimmer” might have been an even better choice.

With the exception of a handful of selections (most notably Oates’ own “The Temple,” which is unoriginal and uninteresting), this is a rich, diverse collection. In the end, it does leave one wondering, What exactly is gothic? As helpful as some of the information Oates provides in the introduction may be, she offers few if any insights into the nature or history of the American gothic or the authors whose works are found here.

One quibble: I would like to have seen each story’s year of publication included at its end, as is the case with many anthologies. Although the authors’ birth and death dates are part of the contents page, some dates are mentioned in the introduction, and there is a permissions page with copyright dates, there is neither a comprehensive nor an elegant way for the interested reader to place each tale in its historical context — a serious deficiency in an otherwise excellent collection.

13 May 2003
Copyright © Diane L. Schirf

Book review: Nothing But You: Love Stories from the New Yorker

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Nothing But You: Love Stories from the New Yorker ed. by Roger Angell. Not recommended.

Earlier in 2002, I had read Victorian Love Stories: An Oxford Anthology edited by Kate Flint, a wonderful, imaginative anthology that covers the gamut of love, from earnest and longing to the impulsive and painful, from gritty realism to the fantastic and the supernatural. I had had Nothing But You for a while, and it seemed natural to read it as a follow-up to the Victorian anthology. This proved to be a mistake; the contrast between the two highlights the shallowness of the New Yorker stories.

There are a few gems, such as “Marito in Città” by John Cheever, “The Diver” by V. S. Pritchett, “Eyes of a Blue Dog” with Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s magic surrealism, “The Kugelmass Episode” with Woody Allen’s characteristic offbeat humour and angst, and “Here Come the Maples” with a touch of irony by John Updike. One story by a lesser-known writer, “In the Gloaming” by Alice Elliott Dark, stands out for beautifully conveying the tragedy of loss and alienation, not through death, but through the chains and barriers that life erects to prevent insight and truer love between the mother and son and between them and the distant, unloving father. Impending death finally begins to break down those barriers and reveal the humanity of mother and son to one another.

For the most part, however, these highlights are overwhelmed by the blandness of the rest of the selections. Somehow, this collection about “love” seems to miss many of love’s elements — affection, depth of feeling, passion (depth of emotion of any kind), perception, dedication. Instead, many of the stories read as pointless, plodding, surface tellings of things that happen, with an amazing attention to mundane and unrelated detail, and revolve around featureless, interchangeable characters with no depth and no interest. “The Nice Restaurant” by Mary Gaitskill, with its generic yuppie characters Evan and Laurel, their meaningless relationship, and endless detail such as “Evan picked at his pork-chop bone. He downed his glass of wine” and “Laurel shifted in her chair” that is meant to convey the flat emotions of these flat people contrasts badly with the underlying passions and conflicts subtly portrayed in Lucy Clifford’s “The End of Her Journey” and Hubert Crackenthorpe’s “A Conflict of Egoisms” from the Victorian anthology. Later, the same cardboard characters, with different names, will appear in “Ocean Avenue” by Michael Chabon, where, nine yawning pages of yuppie angst over coffee later, the predictable happens.

How modern authors have reduced one of humanity’s deepest, most elemental, and disturbing emotions into a painfully superficial detailing of everyday functions is, perhaps, a reflection of modern love and life. I would like not to think so, however. I would like to think that we are still capable of passion, even cartoon characters like Evan and Laurel and Chabon’s California counterparts, Lazar and Suzette.

At the end of the Victorian collection, I felt elated, disturbed, empathic, inspired, and despairing. At the end of the New Yorker collection, I felt nothing but bored.

3 November 2002
Copyright © Diane L. Schirf

Book review: The Stories of John Cheever

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The Stories of John Cheever by John Cheever. Highly recommended.

John Cheever has long had a reputation as the quintessential American writer of the 20th century, and this collection, which he edited, is illustration of why he is a favourite of the American literati.

Cheever’s stories are populated by mostly mundane people in mundane settings — the corporate executive and rising stars who go home every night to an affluent suburb like Shady Hill, with its unforgettable recurring cast of characters (the Beardens, the Farquarson, the Parminters) who live on such unforgettable streets as Alewives Lane; the New York City elevator operator whose life consists of going up and down all day and whose mind and imagination never leave their comfortable paths; other apartment building workers, half of whose lives are spent on the fringe of luxury and the other half in grimy poverty; the thoughtless affluent who cannot conceive of any other life; the downwardly mobile who have no choice but to lower their level of existence closer to that of their former servants and who cannot seem to grasp that things will never be what they once were; the social outcasts, like Mrs. Hewing, who is “kind of immoral”; the former duchesses and other members of the old European elite who wear their rags with grace while their estate homes crumble around them; the expatriates who fit in neither where they come from nor where they live; and the travelers who find tragedy awaits at the end of the trip with the death of their child — or even the beginning of the journey of their doomed marriage.

What sets the stories and the characters — and Cheever — apart is the surreal nature of so much of what happens in the course of these vignettes. Instead of addressing an addiction like alcoholism directly, Cheever tells of an ordinary woman who cannot stop listening to her neighbours as their lives, their arguments, their loves, and their passions are voiced over a new radio her husband has bought for her in “The Enormous Radio.” The birth and course of the affliction are seamlessly revealed through Irene Westcott’s inability to withdraw from vicariously living through her neighbours’ conversations.

“The Five-Forty-Eight” reveals how an ordinary event — sexual relations between executive and assistant — can lead to the humiliation of a confident, secure man, who finds himself falling into the filth, while the disturbed and wronged ex-assistant is finally free of the demons he helped to feed while ignorant of their existence.

In “The Swimmer,” which takes place on a Sunday where the recurring refrain is, “I drank too much” can be heard at every home, Neddy Merrill decides to go home from a party by swimming across the county through all the pools in between his host’s home and his own — a novel idea taken to its surreal level as the weather and the trees change, and Neddy finds himself lost in a world where he knows what has become of himself but not how or why.

The world of John Cheever is primarily male; the vast majority of the stories are told by a man in the first person. The women whom they encounter range from their tired wives to their enigmatic lovers — and, in the case of the third of “Three Stories,” an enigmatic wife. Sex is central to many of the tales; the happily and the miserably married are in many cases equally open to sexual adventure and excitement if occasionally afraid of the consequences. It is the rare protagonist who would voice the thoughts of one incidental character: “After sixteen years, I still bite her shoulders. She makes me feel like Hannibal crossing the Alps.” (“The Country Husband”)

It is fascinating to watch Cheever’s subjects and style evolve from the 1920s and ’30s to the 1960s — from an era of elevator men, fedoras, ubiquitous cigarettes, Martinis (with a capital “M”), and “affairs” to a time when “Artemis, the Honest Well Digger” can refer to the sexual act by its most unacceptable term and be whisked off to Washington, D.C., for making the mistake of falling in love in the U.S.S.R.

The surfaces here are untroubled, but the depths roil with repressed thoughts and emotions that are typical of Shady Hill and its ilk — but are neither acknowledged nor acceptable. Nearly everyone, whether they live in New York, Shady Hill, or Rome, is desperately seeking something — love, sex, passion, something — anything — to lift them above the towers of the city skyline where they work and the chimneys of the suburban trap they cannot — and really do not wish to — escape. An empty life is still a life of social acceptability.

1 September 2002
Copyright © Diane L. Schirf