New Story Collections From T.C. Boyle, Andrea Barrett and Others - The New York Times
Let's get the bad news out of the way first: T.C. Boyle's I WALK BETWEEN THE RAINDROPS: Stories (Ecco, 272 pp., $28.99) is a train wreck of telegraphed punches, labored jokes and liberal sanctimony passing itself off as satire. The turgid, sloppy prose reads as though it was composed with autocomplete enabled. So many sentences rely on constructions such as "That was when," "That was the day," "Then there was" or "suddenly" that the stories grow hard to tell apart, a problem compounded by the fact that all the characters speak in the same quippy vernacular, irrespective of age, race, gender, nationality, education or epoch.
Many of the stories address hot-button issues — Covid, incels, climate change, self-driving cars — but evince such cursory interest in their subjects that one wonders whether the author clicked through to read the articles whose headlines apparently set him off.
"Dog Lab" and "Big Mary" are both set in the 1970s. The former concerns a med student who becomes emotionally attached to the dog he's using for surgery practice; the latter, a musician's halting discovery that a fat woman can have a sex life. "SCS 750," a story about social credit scores, is set in a near-future United States where the dominant corporations are WeChat, Tencent and Alibaba, and people sure eat a lot of Chinese food. These insinuating details are presented without comment in a story whose ostensible message is about tech-abetted totalitarianism, but my takeaway was that Sinophobia is the last socially acceptable bigotry of the center left. Though the title story is the best one by far, I'd have named the collection for another entry: "Asleep at the Wheel."
It's not every day you come across an octogenarian's literary debut, and it's not every day — or every year — that you encounter a debut as fresh, assured and fun as Jane Campbell's CAT BRUSHING: And Other Stories (Grove, 245 pp., $26) from a writer of any age. Though her stories are frequently explicit enough to bring color to your cheeks, Campbell maintains a cool, commanding tone that enhances the effect of her limpid prose.
The stories are varied in approach without being showy about it, and consistently draw novel insight from a few major themes: aging, sexuality, memory, loneliness. Her work merits comparison with that of Edna O'Brien or Muriel Spark, while an uncanny streak running through several of the pieces ("Lacrimae Rerum," "183 Minutes," "The Kiskadee") might bring Daphne du Maurier to mind.
The narrator of the title story notes that "these days I have to hold onto the edge of the counter to get to my feet but I tell myself it is good exercise for my thighs. And then, inevitably, the other exercises my thighs once got involved in come to mind." A little later she offers up what might be taken for the book's motto: "I own nothing now, except, I suppose, my body and my mind, such as they are after so many decades of use. Ill-use, sometimes. But at least, thank God, they have been used and I did not waste them." It cuts directly against the spirit of this excellent, pathbreaking collection to reduce an elder to a vending machine for wisdom, but with apologies to Campbell, these strike me as words to live by.
Andrea Barrett's NATURAL HISTORY: Stories (Norton, 192 pp., $26.95), a confident, quiet, richly imagined collection from the National Book Award-winning author of "Ship Fever," contains six stories featuring characters who will be familiar to readers of that book, as well as her collections "Servants of the Map" and "Archangel." As a first-time Barrett reader myself, let me say that I felt entirely comfortable in the world of her fiction despite my belated entry. (A family tree in the endnotes helped get me oriented — and piqued my interest in the other books.)
Barrett's protagonists include teachers, writers, historians, aviators and scientists who are also sisters, mothers, aunts, caregivers and lovers. They struggle to preserve their autonomy and make their mark in a world where a woman's work all too often conflicts with the obligations and limits of "women's work." "Wonders of the Shore" is an intimate portrait of friendship and rivalry between two self-taught naturalists in the late 19th century. In "The Regimental History," set not long after the Civil War, we see one of those women, Henrietta Atkins, as a young schoolteacher.
Barrett is bold yet deft in handling timelines, lifetimes and points of view. Each individual story feels complete, even as the connections between them and my newfound awareness of her greater oeuvre reinforce the collection's central conviction that there is no such thing in nature as self-containment; everything is part of something bigger than itself.
The very existence of Peter Christopher's CAMPFIRES OF THE DEAD AND THE LIVING: Collected Stories (11:11, 261 pp., paperback, $16.95) is a big surprise and a small miracle. Christopher, a Gordon Lish protégé, published his debut collection, "Campfires of the Dead," in 1989, during the latter days of dirty realism. In the '90s he left New York for the University of Florida, where he studied with Padgett Powell and Harry Crews. He eventually finished a second collection, but the small press he sold it to folded before putting it out and then Christopher died of cancer in 2008, at the age of 52. Now both Christopher's out-of-print and previously unpublished collections are gathered together in a single volume with an adulatory introduction by his former protégé, Chuck Palahniuk.
"Campfires of the Dead" is uneven. Some of the language has aged poorly, and though it's obvious why Lish was so pleased with Christopher, one sometimes wishes Christopher had worked a little less hard to please Lish. Still, the book has such ferocious energy — think Barry Hannah or Mary Robison — that it's easy to overlook its obvious limitations for the sake of its considerable achievements in image, voice and line.
The new book, "The Living," demonstrates a quantum leap forward in range, style, heart and sprezzatura. From the simmering strangeness of "Lost Dogs," to a bonkers sequence of flash autofictions that are like Lydia Davis by way of Larry Brown, to the elegiac closing story, "The Visitor," in which a boy glimpses "the fire-lit faces of his loved ones in the long splendor of our dying," there's lots to love and barely time to catch your breath. The full compilation is a double heart attack of vitality and violence, of American poverty and male wretchedness, of broken beauty and hope against hope. It's a book worthy of being called a life's work, which is exactly what it is.
Justin Taylor is the author of three books of fiction and the memoir "Riding With the Ghost."
Comments
Post a Comment