Review: 'Bliss Montage'

 ©2022 All Rights Reserved Lynne Perednia

Bliss Montage
By Ling Ma
Literary Fiction
Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Who are we, really? Are we destined to bear the dreams and sins of our families, of our home countries, of our newly adopted homelands? Are we worthy of happiness? What is a facade and what is reality?

These themes are essential to the stories in Ling Ma's new story collection, Bliss Montage. They are sometimes fantastical, sometimes grounded so thoroughly in family that the narrators feel trapped or weighed down. In all of them, the female narrator seeks a way to do more than endure. 

The opening story, Los Angeles, gives the reader a sense of what to expect throughout the collection. A woman, married to a wealthy man, spends her days with 100 ex-boyfriends who live in a wing of their huge home. They go for drives, for shopping, for being out and about aimlessly. When her husband returns home from work, they fly up north for a fancy dinner, then return home, often after their young children have fallen asleep. The husband only speaks in dollar signs.

Two of the wife's ex-boyfriends are opposites, and the ones that mean the most to her. Adam abused her, Aaron loved her. "The wound, then the salve. Maybe you don't always know that you're wounded until you receive the salve." It's an idea that surfaces in different ways in the various stories. What do we deserve? When certain events happen, as they seem to inevitably do, how do we respond? Is there a way to outfox destiny?

The story ends with an attempt to catch up to the past, to capture it. In the following story, Oranges, that is what happens. Coming to grips with having been abused is treated in a realistic, searching fashion as far as the tone of the narrator's journey in catching up to her past. In the end, one character is trapped within themselves while the other goes forward.

The story G, the name of drug that makes its user disappear and able to wander freely, is about working to be oneself while anchored by a childhood friend, anchored to their Chinese-Amerian neighborhood where they were firmly anchored by their mothers. It is a tour de force in how the past can define a person, and how a person can feel unseen.

Do you now how easily the world yields to you when you move through it in an invisibility cocoon? No one looks at you, no one assess you.

That would be a dream come true for the narrator and her childhood friend. The idea is tied to the way the narrator, Bea (which can literally be Be in this story), became herself as her friend Bonnie spent hours of their childhood finding out what Bea thinks and feels. "It doesn't take much to come into your own; all it takes is someeone's gaze."

The transformations to come in the story are completed rooted in identity and being seen.

Another take on these ideas is presented in Returning, in which a young Chinese-Amerian wife goes back with her husband to his mid-European country for a traditional festival that is meant to be life-changing. Her husband talks in his college classes about fiction and identity:

Fiction can be a space for the alternate self ... It often serves as a fantasy space for our other selves.

While his book is a successful novel called Homecoming, the narrator's old college friend has published a graphic novel called Arrival Fallacy, a science fiction tale in which explorers return decades after they have been forgotten. The two stories merge in the trip back to the husband's homeland. The narrator's own novel, Two Weeks, is more about stasis after a missed connection and a plan falls apart. It's not surprising to wonder how that, too, is connected to this story in which it is presented.

There is a similar feeling in Office Hours, in which a college student becomes a professor and inherits her old professor's office. There is a passageway to a different world there, much like Narnia. As she begins to explore this other world, and delivers lectures about the journey in The Wizard of Oz, there is an undercurrent of what kind of life she really wanted to live. As her professor once said:

It is in the most surreal situations that a person feels the most present, the closest to reality.

That is a core concept to the fantasy elements and situations in the stories of Bliss Montage. What is real, what should be real, what do we really want? The yearning is explicitly present in the final story, Tomorrow. Another Chinese-American woman is in stasis again with a job, an ex-boyfriend and a baby coming. A baby with an arm already out of the womb. But whether it's because the baby is already itching to get out into the world or not at home in his first home is unsure, just as so many protagonists in these stories are unsure of where they want to belong.

The penultimate story, Peking Duck, is a meditation on the power of mothers to play a role in their children's lives well past the time they grow up. Although it is tied to the immigrant story of the narrator's family, it is not limited. Like all the stories here, this tale involves making stories one's own story, even if they first were heard from others. The connections are strong as chains, sometimes lighter than feathrers and even occasionally softer than silk.

Review: 'The Angel of Rome'

 ©2022 All Rights Reserved Lynne Perednia

The Angel of Rome
By Jess Walter
Literary Fiction Short Stories
Harper

Any new work from Jess Walter is a cause for celebration. When it's a new collection of short stories, such as The Angel of Rome, every story is reason to celebrate. (I don't know about you, but right now, any cause to celebrate is necessary.)

Mr. Voice may seem to have an odd title at first. The name refers to the stepfather of the narrator, the daughter of a single mother who draws men like flies. Tanya's mother marries an older, not-handsome man who is known as the Voice of Spokane. Things about the marriage embarrass Tanya, but her stepfather, Claude, is kind. And so is his son, an older teen who Tanya develops a crush on. Over the years, the things that happen to the family reflect the times from the 1970s to the present. Although it seems Tanya is telling the story of her life, there are major events that take place which she refers to only in passing. Because the story title is important. This is a portrait of her stepfather, Mr. Voice. And it's a spot-on portrait of the town for which Claude is Mr. Voice. This is a portrait of Spokane that resonates deeply for someone who was born and raised there.

Fran's Friend Has Cancer has a lot going on, and it's conveyed in a sly manner. An older couple are sitting at a New York City restaurant, perusing a large menu for a pre-Broadway matinee show meal. He's peevish, she's peckish. She's headed to Oregon to see her son, although it's ostensibly because her husband's cousin is caring for a friend with cancer. He doesn't want her to be gone long because although his cancer has been in remission, he has a fear of dying alone. And, besides, he's certain his stepson doesn't like him. While they quibble over this, and whether his cousin is a lesbian and whether she's plain and whether the waiter will ever come back, the husband notices a young man nearby writing in a journal. The way he stops and starts writing catches the husband's eye. And for good reason. But what is actually going on may be meta, it may be sheer Twilight Zone, it may also be a clever way to reinforce the idea that the way time passes changes with one's age.

Magnificent Desolation features a 50-year-old seventh grade science teacher who has been coasting on inertia for years. He was born on the day of the moon landing and idolizes Buzz Aldrin, who famously popped a moon landing denier. Aldrin also said of the view from the moon that what he saw was "magnificent desolation". Our teacher is meeting the mother of a student who insists he cannot be taught most of what is in the class because "we don't believe in that". When he sees the recently divorced mother of Jacob, his inertia is gone. How much of his common sense is left the reader will discover, especially when it turns out Jacob's mother has not taught him those things but his father does think the moon landing was faked. That our hero's breaking point regards the Van Allen radiation belt is rather endearing. And while his life has been one that has surveyed desolation, there is magnificence in the ending.

Cancer also figures in Drafting, a story about a young woman recently diagnosed. After chemo leaves her feeling even more ill, she takes up again with a scruffy skateboarder. Even though she realizes his personality isn't half as attractive as he nears middle age, she does go on a joy ride with him, heading for Seattle from Spokane in an old El Camino. Science also features in this story, as Myra recalls what a science teacher told her class once about mountain ranges and river gorges:

The whole world was a clock face with a gliding osprey rising on a secondhand updraft, as if being called to heaven.

It's passages like that which make me wish everyone knew the locations Walter uses as well as I do. Overlooking the Columbia River as it cuts through the buttes and creates coulees on its way to the Cascades and the Pacific, there is both a magnificent desolation and the opportunity to see that clock face. It resonates. Oh, how it resonates.

The Angel of Rome takes place in Rome. A pure Jess Walter hero, an inept young man who wants to leave Nebraska, ends up there on a scholarship to study Latin. His mother thinks he's going to become a priest. He thinks he's going to become someone who is not stuck in Nebraska. He doesn't do well, he is miserable and just as he is about to figure out a way to go back home, defeated, a series of misunderstandings land him on a movie set with an American TV actor and an Italian actress who makes the world shine for him. Yes, he knows it's actually the movie set lighting but it's all because of her. She was nicknamed the Angel of Rome during an ad campaign when she started out as a model, but it's not a name that has worn well over time.

After all, what is an angel but a kind of ghost, untouchable, out of place and time?

That doesn't bode well for any of the characters. Except when it does. The story builds into two perspectives: being one's own true self, or inventing oneself. Seeing how it worked for the various characters makes The Angel of Rome a story that will live with a reader for a lifetime.

Whether in Rome or New York, Spokane or West Seattle, every story in The Angel of Rome conveys what it means to live and to love, regardless of one's past and with an open mind toward the future. These are stories to treasure.

Short story review: Jamel Brinkley's 'A Family'

The best short stories are as rich and complex as any novel. They can contain a universe or a microcosm, a lifetime or an hour. They can be populated with complex characters rich in mixed motives and emotions. Such is the case with Jamel Brinkley's "A Family".

Curtis is back from prison, after hitting a woman with his car one night while drunk. He is watching Lena, who was the woman of his former best friend, Marvin, and her son. However, after 12 years in prison, Curtis is reconnecting to his city as much, if not more, than people. And the past is right with him every moment of his present:

After a while, he got up and strolled along the promenade in the direction of the Brooklyn Bridge. The only other person he saw was a man with an unsettling face. The man's bouts of muttering formed clouds that flowered like visible emblems of his secret language before being pulled apart by the wind. ... Curtis huffed the name of his long departed friend -- my dead friend, he told himself soberly -- so he could see the wind take it, imagining that it too, along with the words steaming from the man's mouth, drifted off and seeded the East River. ... As the man prattled on, now some distance away, Curtis again said Marvin's name, which rose from his lips and hovered there for a moment, clean as an unstrung bone. 

He might also have said the name of the dead woman, the one he had struck with his car, the one who intruded on his dreams. But his life was for other things now, he'd been desperately telling himself, beautiful and wondrous things.

That I wondered at first if the son, Andre, was Curtis's son or Marvin's, and that Brinkley soon answered that question, shows the quiet way in which the reader learns the full picture. Brinkley is not the sort of author to hit the reader with info dumps. I liked filling in the spaces as a reader, especially after realizing Brinkley was not going to leave me in doubt in the long run.

Andre is Marvin's son. Marvin died as well, while he and Curtis were estranged. The reason for the estrangement, who was the one who started it and who resisted reconciling can be seen as major reasons why Curtis is watching Lena and Andre. It also plays into what happens after Lena brings Curtis into Andre's orbit.

What is perhaps inevitable happens, but what happens after that is not. To say more would be a spoiler, but the title is very important. The way Curtis and Lena tell each other the truth, and what they keep from each other, is shown in precise detail. The reader is in no doubt what is taking place, and what the repercussions would be if things were different.

"I'm not somebody you know," Curtis said. "I never was." ...
"You don't know me either," she said, and began to dress.

Curtis has been living with his mother. Life has not treated her well but it has not defeated her. Still, the ways in which it has tried to do that are shown masterfully, and those ways affect how she treats her son and their relationship. It's as much a part of this story about "A Family" as the Curtis-Lena-Andre portions. It's one of the reasons why this story is as rich and complex as a novel. It is a complete world.

But he liked the feeling of being near his mother now -- he liked her when she was asleep -- so he sat with a tall glass of water and forced his gaze onto the television screen.

Later, this scene comes to mind when Curtis and Andre are talking:

"What makes mothers the way they are?" Andre asked one day. ...
"They lose themselves and get all kinds of ridiculous," Curtis said. "Ain't no mystery to it."

The richness of these characters, what happens to them and what they do in this story made this work a wonderful introduction to Brinkley's writing. And it's not just the characters. Brinkley's descriptions put me where his characters are, to see and smell and hear and touch what they do, with no purple prose. Now that's a gift.

I discovered this story in the 2018 edition of The Best American Short Stories, edited this year by Roxane Gay. Finding a story like this is one of the reasons why I buy this collection every year. And because of this introduction to Brinkley's work, I've got the short story collection in which "A Family" appears, A Lucky Man, on my wish list. It's a worthy finalist for the National Book Award (the winner will be announced on Wednesday).

Brinkley's work centers on themes of family, black men navigating their way through life and mass incarceration, and the setting of New York City. The thoughtfulness he put into the title alone shows the depth of care in Brinkley's writing. I look forward to reading what he writes, and hope it is plentiful. It is certainly abundant.

©2018 All Rights Reserved TheLitForum.com Review and reprinted with permission

Review: 'Reader, I Married Him'

Reader, I Married Him: Stories Inspired by Jane Eyre
Edited by Tracy Chevalier
Literary fiction
March 2016
William Morrow
ISBN: 978-0062447098

Perhaps it's a reflection of this summer of anger and fear, perhaps it's a yearning to return to a beloved book, but there are occasions when riffs on a known story provide a rewarding reading experience.

That has been the case with Reader, I Married Him. It's a collection of stories edited by Tracy Chevalier, all based on that famous line from Jane Eyre. Written by a wealth of modern female authors, the stories are far more varied than one might first suspect. Part of this may well be because the idea is not to ruminate on Jane, but instead to take that pronouncement of hers, that she married Mr. Rochester and that she directly addressed her reader, and run with it.

The variety is implicit in Chevalier's forward:

"Reader, I married him" is Jane's defiant conclusion to her rollercoaster story. It is not, "Reader, he married me" -- as you would expect in a Victorian society where women were supposed to be passive; or even, "Reader, we married." Instead Jane asserts herself; she is the driving force of her narrative, and it is she who chooses to be with Rochester.

The choice of a variety of narrators with a corresponding variety of results shows the beauty of Chevalier's choice in determining the focus of the anthology, as well as the beauty and strength of the source material. There is not a single story here that takes away from the power of Jane Eyre's narrative, even the iconclastic stories. They have a power of their own without taking away from the original, something that is at odds with The Wide Sargasso Sea, the Jean Rhys novel about Rochester's first doomed wife.

Among the women writing about this declaration of the determination to choose one's mate are Tessa Hadley, Jane Gardam, Emma Donoghue, Francine Prose, Elif Shafak, Evie Wyld, Salley Vickers, Lionel Shriver, Audrey Niffenegger, Elizabeth McCracken, Nadifa Mohamed and Namwali Serpell.

The mates chosen by their narrators and protagonists range from a mother's lover to a surly neighbor, from a succession of suitors to a favorite companion. Some clearly have happy endings while others lead to heartache, resignation or even a possible victim of gaslighting.

One reason Jane Eyre endures is the strength of the heroine. She is plain, poor and mistreated by her relatives and the school where she was sent. Her only friend is murdered by the cruelty of their so-called protectors. Yet she perseveres and breaks free, choosing not to stay in familiar straits but to get a job on her own with unknown people.

Once at Thornfield, she makes her own way, endearing herself to the people who matter most, in a most unconventional household. When she again has the choice to stay in a familiar setting with less than what anyone deserves, she again leaves. And when she receives St. John's attention, she hears the voice of the one she has chosen and returns to Mr. Rochester.

Although these stories do not all follow this path, they do demonstrate the ups and downs of a main character who does not want to settle for second best, whether that's what happens or not, and whether they live happily ever after or not.

Charlotte Bronte's life failed to follow the path established by her heroine, but she had some things in common with Jane. She fell in love with a married man, Constantin Heger, husband of the headmistress of the school where she worked in Brussels. Charlotte, too, was plain but inside was not a mouse.

As Claire Harman notes in the prologue of her biography, Charlotte Bronte, A Fiery Heart:

...Charlotte was also struggling with the larger issue of how she would ever accommodate her strong feelings -- whether of love for Heger, or her intellectual passions, or her anger at circumstances and feelings of thwarted destiny -- in the life that life seemed to have in store for her, one of patchy, unsatisfying employment, loneliness and hard work. What was someone like her, a plain, poor, clever, half-educated, dependent spinster daughter, to do with her own spiritual vitality and unfettered imagination? How could she live with the painful "consciousness of faculties unexercised" that had moved her to go abroad in the first place, and that she recognised, from the example of her equally brilliant siblings, not as some sort of freakishness, but as an intimation of the sublime?

Although opportunities for women have, to some extent, changed since her days, some things do not change. It is that recognition that has fired the imaginations of the authors in Reader, I Married Him.

©2016 All Rights Reserved CompuServe Books Review and reprinted with permission

Review: 'Almost Famous Women'

Almost Famous Women
By Megan Mayhew Bergman
Literary fiction short stories
January 2015
Scribner
ISBN: 978-1476786568
                                                                                                                                      

Megan Mayhew Bergman's first book of short stories, Birds of a Lesser Paradise, was a highly regarded debut that looked at life from several angles. This time, in Almost Famous Women, she looks at women who have famous names, often because of famous relatives or because they are known for one thing.

Neither of these conditions is anything close to conveying the complete aspect of who or what a person is, however, and Bergman uses both what is known about the women and what may be true about them to create yet more examples of who gets to tell a story about themselves and who owns history. How the rest of the world views these women is an undercurrent throughout the stories, not explicit yet always just there, threatening to drag them under.

The sisters in Pretty, Grown-Together Children, the first story of the collection were called freaks, and appeared in Tod Browning's film of that name. Daisy and Violet Hilton, conjoined twins, lived from 1908 to 1969, and were vaudeville entertainers and grocery store clerks. Right there it's easy to see how any writer would want to wonder about their lives. How do conjoined twins handle the stage and the comedown of being grocery store clerks? How do they live? How do they manage the practical and the more elusive dreams? In reality, they died of the flu, Daisy first and Violet at least a day later.

This opening story sets the stage for the collection: How do women, whether sisters or always on their own, handle dreams when it looks like life doesn't want them to dare hope for full lives? What keeps anyone going? No woman needs to be a conjoined twin to dare hope for a full life.

Looking at the sisters, it's hard to imagine how anything about their lives could be the same as people not conjoined. But the story shows how every woman, every human being, is the same in the ability to dream of more and better, and both how we can fool ourselves and make at least part of a dream come true. It depends on what vantage point the story is being told from.

The Siege at Whale Cay is about M.B. Joe Carstairs and the first to deal with post-traumatic stress for a WWI ambulance driver, although the story does not initially focus on the war. It is instead a complex story about a rich lesbian who owns a small island off the Florida coast, who deliberately closes her eyes to the suffering of another woman on her island. In the role of the conscience of the story is her latest young lover, a young woman who was a mermaid in a tourist trap, now competing for her older lover's attention with a famous, reclusive, cold movie star.

More famous people feature in Norma Millay's Film Noir Period. It is about being the one who serves the famous person, the famous sister, the mother with talent, regardless of what you can or might be able to do. And what happens afterwards when that is all you have. A companion story, Who Killed Dolly Wilde, appears later in the collection. Both also are tied to both The Siege at Whale Cay and Romaine Remains, partly because one or more of the characters knew each other. There also is a connection in the theme of being caregivers to older women whose faded glory is more of a curse or a haunting to both the famous person and to the caregiver. Having once been famous certainly doesn't seem to be worth much.

Romaine Brooks in Romaine Remains, is an paranoid, angry old woman, as is Oscar's niece Dolly. Romaine's younger male nurse realizes when reading letters she will not touch "there is vitality in the world, and he does not have it, he has never even tasted it in his mouth. He has never lived the way he wants to live, never felt in control, or able to express his desire for people and things. For men in new leather shoes drinking wine at the hotel bar, or the boys standing outside the less reputable discotecas smoking cigarettes. He has never been explicitly himself." The talented woman is the one without power, the one who is used. Mario the nurse doesn't seem to recognize how alike he and Romaine are, just at different times of their lives.

Dolly isn't doing well in her later years either. Like Joe Carstairs, she was a WWI ambulance driver and it still hurts her. Dolly once was popular because of her uncle and her resemblance to him, but now is a drug addict who no one wants around except the childhood friend who still tries to believe in her. It's a story about unfulfilled lives and how war cripples inside as well as outside, and about how caring doesn't always involve the same tasks.

Care-taking at the other end of life's spectrum is the story of a nun in The Autobiography of Allegra Byron. A nun whose own child died years ago finds herself loving the cast-off child of the poet. This story is about learning how to give up what was never yours to begin with, but loving any way, which can be a caregiver's burden.

The child of another famous writer, the daughter of James Joyce, notes a burden on the other side of fame in Expression Theory. In this moody, dank tone poem about creating dance, she says: "I have no native tongue, L. says. What do you expect?" Good question. What should be expected of the child of someone who did so much with language? Or an even better question, why should that child be burdened with expectations?

For some, childhood expectations and that stage in a girl-child's life when crushes come easily can sometimes lead to life changes. A girl at just that stage, crushing on a minister, agrees to go see Butterfly McQueen. The Butterfly McQueen, who is as famous for being an atheist as she once was for a few lines in a big movie that is a central part of the myth of the state where she lives. The 80-year-old atheist turns away the girl sent to evangelize at her door, but opens the child's eyes and mind to wondering and questioning. Unvarnished truth is important to her.

The girl, now a woman studying medicine and conducting her first autopsy in class, remembers:

"My mother's was the first dead body I knew, the first one I touched. ... She wanted a wig and the mortician's makeup for the casket. I didn't pass along her wishes. Does it matter what we do when consciousness has passed? I was the one who had to look at her, and I wanted the real her, even if the real her was hairless and wasted."

Her conclusion is one of those earth-stopping moments in reading. It's a simple statement that is all the more profound for it, and the wisdom of it can be questioned and admired at the same time:

"What I hope, I guess, is that the right kind of callus will form around my heart."

This sort of fearlessness, a type of defiance at what sentimental society demands of its women, is at the heart of a story about Beryl Markham. The title, A High-Grade Bitch Sits Down for Lunch, uses the name Hemingway gave her (which I see as a honor he did not intend to convey). For Markham, living on her own in Africa, channeling that defiance is essential to survival. "She'd always been a cruel person, she knew that, and today it was in her favor."

There is cruelty in the last story in the collection, too, mostly from men, white men, fascinated and disgusted by the women of color in a band traveling through the Jim Crow south. In Hell-Driving Women, that callus around their hearts from the Butterfly McQueen story allows some of them to protect their hearts, not cut them off completely.

The women in these stories would never pass for Harriet Nelson. This leads to wondering whether that's society saying women must not be "normal" to strive to be famous or to stand out, or that if they are not "normal" wives and mothers, can they hope to be anything except freaks? This is something that is not explicit in the stories, however, but is more the kind of thinking that Bergman's stories allow.

The women, according to the way the world usually regards them and treats them, are supposed to be grateful to be in supportive, secondary roles, and to fade away quietly when someone else deems it is time for them to do so.

The moments of happiness are fleeting, but those moments show that living in the moment is the way to find joy. Holding on to it is bittersweet at best. Defiantly going to one's fate is more of a victory than giving in quietly. Loving living is the best revenge.

©2015 All Rights Reserved CompuServe Books Reviews and reprinted with permission

Review: 'Godforsaken Idaho'

Godforsaken Idaho
By Shawn Vestal
Literary fiction short stories
April 2013
Little A / New Harvest
ISBN: 978-0544027763

From a man who has been dead for hundreds of years, trying to capture whole days or moments that made him feel vibrantly alive, to the man who loses his only daughter to fast-talking, looking-in-his-hat Joseph Smith, the men in Shawn Vestal's Godforsaken Idaho both embody and rail against the two things that one of them says turn the world -- greed and vanity.

The stories in Godforsaken Idaho, which this fall won the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for debut fiction, display an array of characters in settings that range from an eternal cafeteria, which is the bleakest version of heaven around, to the living room of an angry landlord whose heart gave up on him out on the street.

That cafeteria is in the opening story, "The First Several Hundred Years Following My Death", a story that brings to mind the fantastical stories in George Saunders's brilliant Tenth of December. The narrator talks in a matter-of-fact way about how whatever you can imagine is what you experience again in this version of an afterlife. But the only things you can experience now are things that you have already experienced. Food, for example, is only food that you remember eating. You can spend as long or as little as you like reliving certain times, certain moments.

Seeking out the memories worth going over again wears thin soon. When his ex-wife arrives, he talks to her. He talks to his son, who died at a much older age and who doesn't want much to do with a dad who left when he was young. Trying to gather a nuclear family for a meal in that cafeteria leads to complications that he didn't envision. What the narrator realizes is that:

If you want peace, you have to find it in the life you left behind.

But most of Vestal's characters are not interested in peace. They are restless, they don't believe in anything much, they expect disappointment and are not surprised when any of them make sure that disappointment is what they get. And yet. And yet.

Even in the bleakest parts of the greyest stories in this collection, there are moments that are so clear-eyed "along the trail to Godforsaken Idaho", as it is put in one story, that ground the reader in the experiences of the characters. Such is the case of a new father, who realizes when his baby son runs a fever that "he had become something else entirely, a new being who would only exist as long as his son existed".

Some of the characters, or those who may be the same characters or not but who have the same name, appear in different stories. The father in the first story is a boy in the second, for example. Many of the stories are set in or around Gooding, Idaho, a town of less than 4,000 located between Boise and Twin Falls, Idaho, which is Vestal's hometown.

He was raised Mormon, later leaving the faith, and the history and culture is reflected in many of his stories. But as he said in this Oregon Public Broadcasting interview, he did not set out to write stories about Mormonism. It's part of the prism through which he looks at the world because it's part of how he became who he is.

Bradshaw, that new father in "Winter Elders", left the church years ago but they won't leave him alone. Two elders appear at his door, continuing to show up as the snow piles higher. The reader doesn't need details about why or how Bradshaw left; it's in the way he views these men, especially the more dominant one:

Pope smiled patiently at Bradshaw, lips pressed hammily together. It was the smile of every man he had met in church, the bishops and first counselors and stake presidents, the benevolent mask, the put-on solemnity, the utter falseness. It was the smile of the men who brought boxes of food when Bradshaw was a teenager and his father wasn't working, the canned meat and bricks of cheese. The men who prayed for his family. Bradshaw's father would disappear, leaving him and his mother to kneel with the men.

Those men are in leadership in any faith, and it's easy to see how they could steer a hurting boy away from their institution.

The inability to be able to rely on faith affects Rulon Warren, who has the same last name as the other wandering elder in "Winter Elders" and whose story is told by the spirit of another man who inhabits his body. "Opposition in All Things" describes how Warren wants to terrify his fellow church members after he returns from the Good War and the men who have not seen other men killed want to congratulate him. The other man inside Warren went off the deep end and was killed by his erstwhile brethren. This unsettling story is a strong example of how Vestal's men do not believe in more than a church. They struggle to believe in themselves.

It's the same for Hale, the father in "The Diviner" who loses his daughter to Smith:

We do not live in the same world, my neighbors and I. They live in a world of codes and secrets and the hope that all will be understood, and I live in the world where bafflement and mystery are but the foundation and the condition.

And later:

How shall I understand our world when it becomes absurd, O Lord?

When greed and vanity overcome, what Hale discovers is that belief is not what matters. What matters is being together. It's that, rather than a faith system, that gives any of Vestal's men the power to go on. It's what they believe in.

©2015 All Rights Reserved CompuServe Books Reviews and reprinted with permission

Sunday Sentence: Kevin Barry

As inspired by Fobbit author David Abrams at The Quivering Pen, the best sentence(s) I read this week, presented without added commentary or context:

This is the story of a happy marriage but before you throw up and turn the page let me say that it will
end with my faced pressed hard into the cold metal of the Volvo’s bonnet, my hands cuffed behind my back,
and my rights droned into my ear – this will occur in the car park of a big-box retail unit on the Naas
Road in Dublin.

-- "Wifey Redux" by Kevin Barry, Dark Lies the Island

Remembrances: 'You Know When the Men are Gone'

You Know When the Men are Gone
By Siobhan Fallon
Literary fiction short stories
January 2011
Amy Einhorn Books
ISBN: 0399157204

It rarely pays to go into any reading experience with my expectations already in place. Those expectations might be confirmed. There is the danger, however, that other ideas or insights might be lost or not given their due weight.

That was nearly my experience reading the short stories in You Know When the Men Are Gone. The collection about Army families centers around Fort Hood, and was written by Siobhan Fallon, who was an Army wife staying at Fort Hood while her husband was on two tours of duty in Iraq.
The focus is on the women and children at home, although there also are powerful insights about those who are actively serving. From the opening pages describing how the colors and tone of the base change when the troops ship out, Fallon puts the reader amongst those who stay behind.

I had expected that reading these stories would reinforce my belief that our troops need to come home from Afghanistan and Iraq. And without Fallon being political, my belief was reinforced. Characters go through heartache and harm because the troops are overseas.

But this collection of stories has something else to impart. From the beginning, I had the sense of remembering the few months I spent on base as a tween. I'm the rare Air Force brat who spent most of her life in her hometown while my father spent three tours of duty in Thailand during the Vietnam War era.

In town, we were sometimes looked down on; in stores, for example, we weren't regarded as reliable customers. I remember a particularly embarrassing episode at the local department store when the clerk somehow found out Dad was in the Air Force and not employed at a regular dad job in town. She looked us up and down while Mom was having us try on winter coats and wondered aloud whether Mom could afford to buy the coats.

This was Mom's hometown in addition to her children's hometown; she was visibly affected. Her shoulders slumped and she seemed to become physically smaller as she quietly told the clerk that yes, we could pay. It was the only time I saw my mother shamed.

The characters shopping at the commissary took me back to our marathon monthly shopping sessions on base, trudging up and down endlessly long aisles and looking at loads of things we never put in the cart -- whatever we bought that day, including milk and bread, had to last the month until next month's money came through. There were nights we had creamed hard-boiled eggs over toast and didn't realize that was the only food left.

The characters at the base hospital took me back to other corridors that also seemed to never end and always being sent here, there, up and down and around whenever we went -- check-in here, records there, X-ray over in that wing, the examining room in another area.

Just as my mother had to cope and make do while Dad was off on the other side of the world, the women and children in Fallon's stories, decades later, do the same. A mother, uncertain if her cancer has returned and due for a doctor's appointment, leaves the hospital when her angry teen-age daughter trots off with her kindergarten-aged brother. Calling the MPs brings an ineffective youngster whose report may reflect on Dad's record, Dad is on base but can't leave because of trouble in the Green Zone, the doctor is ready to tattle on her because she missed the appointment when the schools' secretaries called about the kids.

Many of the characters are on the edge; their lives could fall apart if they let them, if they believe something other than the best of their mates (regardless of the truth), if they fail to hold on any longer. When the worst that can happen does, the character most affected is not left alone to fall apart.

Most of the characters at home don't reach out for institutional help, and it's not primarily because of possible strikes against the active duty soldier. It's because of pride, of not wanting to be looked down on for not coping better, of not being shamed in front of the others also going through hardships, of not being pitied by the others when they talk about you.

That's when it occurred to me. These huge institutions such as the military will not and, as they exist now, cannot, serve the individual. Yet the individuals and their families are required to give and give and give.

An individual can rarely give enough and the least failing, the smallest inability to go above and beyond because of other circumstances, the least attempt to bring different thinking or acts into the mix, are deeply frowned upon. The repercussions can be out of proportion to the action taken or not taken, in order for the institution to continue to function as it has.

It's not that this is new to me; I've seen it happen during the course of three different careers. But the impact of the calm way in which Fallon describes the lives of the dependents of those in active service (imagine how impersonal it is to be called a "dependent" and not even a wife or child or, gracious, a human being in one's own right) brought it into sharp focus.

And that's especially true for someone who believes some institutions need to exist because of the possible benefit they can provide to individuals in a more perfect society -- public education, improved infrastructure, public safety and health care. How can institutions continue to function in a personally stifling way when their existence came about in order to improve people's lives?

It's not like I have an answer, but it is something I'm going to continue to consider. But I'm also going to continue to be proud of the families who wait for their service members to return home.

©2013 All Rights Reserved CompuServe Book Reviews and reprinted with permission

Review: 'The Color Master'

THE COLOR MASTER

By Aimee Bender

Literary fiction short stories

August 2013

Doubleday

ISBN: 978-0-385-53489-5

Magic realism is a tricky thing. Go too far in one direction and the result can be either fantasy or an inability to keep that disbelief suspended. Go too far the other way and the result can be so close to the real world that the reaction is: Why bother?

Aimee Bender, like two characters in the title story of this collection, knows how to mix the ingredients together just right.

Her stories are filled with yearning. Some characters do outrageous things, daring themselves to push past acceptable behavior. Even the thought of doing outrageous things, dangerous things, changes the world or the characters, and there is a sense of loss.

Other characters dare themselves to discover, and the result often is a finding of themselves, or love, or both. Often, the stories have healing qualities. Characters are saved or come to new realizations about themselves that make their lives better. They learn to create colors so garments reflect the sun, the moon and the sky. They learn how to mend tigers and why the tigers need mending. A cake that was created to replenish itself learns how to overcome the darkness of the never-ending need to please. A man with a perfect face learns how to find the love of his life. A family that receives unexpected presents learns to cherish what they have.

Some of the stories defy easy explanation. And that’s all right. The moods, the emotions, the journeys that the characters undertake are worth savoring and being allowed to steep into memory. They should not be rushed through. They should be enjoyed.

©2013 All Rights Reserved CompuServe Books Reviews and reprinted with permission

Review: 'Battleborn'

BATTLEBORN
By Claire Vaye Watkins
Literary fiction stories
August 2013 (paperback edition)
Riverhead Trade
ISBN: 978-1594631450 

One of the reasons I'm drawn to fiction set in the West is that the good stuff, the really good stuff, brings this part of the world to life. It is a vivid, harsh, beautiful place that rarely nurtures but often rewards anyone who can handle it.

Many of the characters can handle it in Claire Vaye Watkins's brilliant stories in Battleborn, which are set in Nevada and Northern California. They just don't know they can handle it until circumstances point it out to them abruptly.

That's certainly the case in "The Last Thing We Need". Thomas Grey, who lives out in the Middle of Nowhere, finds the debris of what may have been a wreck and writes to the man whose name and address he finds on some prescription bottles. Even though he has a wife and two children, he lives mostly with his thoughts. And, because the man he is writing to has not answered, Thomas Grey begins to relay his thoughts.

This is our old joke. Like all our memories, we like to take it out once in a while and lay it flat on the kitchen table, the way my wife does with her sewing patterns, where we line up the shape of our life against that which we thought it would be by now.

I'll tell you what I don't tell her, that there is something shameful in this, the buoying of our sinking spirits with old stories.

And later:

On second thought, perhaps sometimes these things are best left by the side of the road, as it were. Sometimes a person wants a part of you that's no good. Sometimes love is a wound that opens and closes, opens and closes, all our lives.

Grey finds out that there is something he cares very much about besides the past. He can handle where he is and what he has.

Other characters need to leave to reach that epiphany. One leaves a brother to his own devices after his sibling is enthralled by something else out in the land where gold was hunted and where gamblers still believe they will come out on top. Another has been depending on her sister and reaches a point where, perhaps, her sister can now depend on her.

Others are not so successful. Not all attempts by the men to be heroic succeed, as one old-time miner discovers. Not all attempts by the women to let go of the past succeed.

For all of them, the men and the women, the ones who thrive and the ones who barely survive, promises matter. In a story, "The Diggings", set during the Gold Rush, a 49'er explains:

A promise unkept will take a man's mind. It does not matter whether the promise is made by a woman or a territory or a future foretold. ... Because though I was afraid and angry and lonesome much of the time, I was also closer to my own raw heart there in the territory than I have ever been since.

©2013 All Rights Reserved CompuServe Books Reviews and reprinted with permission

Review: 'Tenth of December'

TENTH OF DECEMBERBy George Saunders
Literary fiction short stories
January 2013
Random House
ISBN: 978-0812993806

Many of George Saunders's characters in Tenth of December live in complex worlds they have imagined. Even when those worlds bump up against reality, Saunders makes us believe in both the worlds that his characters have imagined and the ones that they inhabit.

The imaginations begin in the opening story, "Victory Lap", in which both a young teenage girl, Alison, imagines herself a princess or the belle of the ball, and her neighbor Kyle suddenly finds himself in a situation where he gets to use his imagination.

Alison's teacher, Mrs. Dees, is a bellweather in Saunders's writing. She isn't fooling herself, but she is the kind of person who carries on. Her husband is cheating on her, but she still comes to her Ethics classes every day and tries to get the students to care. She "still obviously found something fun about life and good about people, because otherwise why sometimes stay up so late grading you come in next day all exhausted, blouse on backward, having messed it up in the early-morning dark, you dear discombobulated thing?"

This is the kind of thinking that propels Kyle when Alison is grabbed by a stranger who comes to her door. Kyle is the son of ultra-controlling parents. Every thing must be just so. They wouldn't be thrilled if he intervened to try to save Alison as the stranger drags her across the yard. What if something happened to him? But Kyle is near his father's prize geode, which he wants placed just so, exactly right, in the yard. And it's too much to resist.

There are three characters whose POV we see things from: Alison, who is nearly 15 and imagines herself a princess; neighbor Kyle, who runs cross country and whose extremely controlling parents expect perfection from their son; and the would-be rapist who abducts Alison from her house and who is spotted with her by Kyle.

Saunders is masterful here at the shifting POVs, the shifting "what if" scenarios and still lets us know what actually happened and what did not, and the ways both parents and children can relate to the parental expectations.

Review: Neil Gaiman's 'Stories'

STORIES
Edited by Neil Gaiman and Al Sarrantonio
Anthology
June 2010
William Morrow
ISBN: 978-0-06-123092-9

Speaking with clarity and heart about the worlds that open up with the telling of tales, Neil Gaiman lays down the genre wars gauntlet with "Just Four Words", his brilliant introduction to the brilliant anthology, Stories.

And what tales these are in the collection edited by Gaiman and Al Sarrantonio, from authors known for their work in literary and genre, all addressing those four important words in the introduction. "...and when what happened?" is what draws readers into a story and keeps them going, and Gaiman is one of the masters today in knowing this. People are missing out on stories they may love because of genre boundaries, which Gaiman calls frustrating. Instead of serving their initial purpose "to guide people around bookshops", Gaiman notes genre boundaries "now seemed to be dictating the kind of stories that were being written".

So readers who think they only like certain kinds of stories are the ones who could get the most from browsing Stories. There is definitely something for everyone. But more importantly, these stories are highly successful at answering the question posed by those four words. Even the ones that are not stellar winners are still interesting, which is rare for any anthology.