Painter, swan, weaver: no sameness here

Literary Review, Fall, 2002 by Thomas E. Kennedy

In recent years one has heard claims that the proliferation of writing programs in American colleges and universities are turning out writers cut from common molds, charges that American fiction is becoming characterized by a "sameness" bred in the workshops. Fads in fiction have always been evident--the experimental 1960s/70s, the 1980s "dirty realism," minimalism and K-Mart tales, the 1990s voracity for the multicultural and politically correct.

But such movements tend to be promoted not by writing programs so much as by publishers eager for sales-promoting trends and "newness," the hungry presentation of that which is new and now valid to replace that which is now old and therefore no longer valid.

Recently published collections by Pamela Painter, Gladys Swan, and Gordon Weaver--all writers who have taught the craft of writing for many years in various settings; in fact at one point during the 1980s and 90s all working in the same MFA program--are good examples of the lack of "sameness" found in such settings. The only similarities between these three collections are the high degree of professionalism, the careful attention to technique, craft, and the language in which their stories are cast. But there is no sameness of style, form, content, or approach. Each collection is distinct.

The average length of the twenty-five stories comprised by Pamela Painter's The Long & the Short of It is between about five and ten pages. Kurt Vonnegut once confessed in an essay that somewhere about a third through a great many books, he finds himself thinking, End end end! This is certainly not a problem with Painter's fiction. There isn't time for boredom or impatience. She exhibits deftness with the shortest of forms, skill at knowing what does not need to be said.

How else could she manage to tell complete stories like "The New Year," in which a man progresses to invisibility in the course of about three hundred words, or "Dud," a tiny gem of how expertise and the pursuit of excellence can become a vice in about a thousand words.

Painter's prose is short and brisk, and she lets her metaphors fall where they may, content that in the surface of her literary world lies the window to its depths--the Christmas bonus of a smoked ham as the summation of a life ("The New Year"), the gold ball inlaid in a girl's pierced tongue making others aware that something is missing in their own lives ("The Kiss"), the anxiety of estranged lovers trying in vain to claim back by legal means what they have given of themselves to their mates ("Custody").

These are stories of compassion (a tailor refurbishing a suit for a young man's court appearance in "Murder One"), confusion (an aging childless couple with an ageing dog, "Confusing the Dog"), and wicked humor (an aged scholar's "tempestuous affair" with a dead novelist in "The Last Word"). "The Real Story" tells the tale of life in a family of writers who steal each others' experiences as a comic contemplation of the sources of inspiration and motivation in art. Painter particularly excels at the depths possible in a delicately handled metafiction ("Island Tales," a touching, fascinating, disturbing story of the isolation of memory in even the closest of human relations).

While one or two of the very short pieces are light as O. Henry ("Cuts," a hairdresser taking revenge on her husband's mistress) albeit polished as mother-of-pearl ("Dangerous Waters," sophisticated hankypanky in a French restaurant, originally published in Mademoiselle), her light touch can equally evoke the dreamlike, real-yet-surreal archetypal experience of a piece like "The Bridge" or the terrifying, comic-but-not-funny alienation of a broken family ("Feeding the Piranha," "Divided Highway"), debunk the romantic myth of lost innocence ("Inside Her, In Heaven"), or set up a game like my family is more fucked-up than yours that you're lucky if you lose ("Family Car").

The Long & the Short of It is a showcase for Painter's impressive ability to go broad and deep in a very short space. The longest story in the book, "The Second Night of a One Night Stand" is a twenty-three-page novel, engrossing, emotionally frightening, and deeply moving.

Although Painter's stories are widely published in leading periodicals, this is only her second collection; yet the years she has dedicated to her craft are evident in this fine book of many, varied, engaging, amusing, moving and memorable tales.

If with Painter's stories one plunges on with brisk enthusiasm, eager to know what happens next, one reads Gladys Swan's stories slowly, to savor the taste of each moment and what it adds to the slowly accumulating mass of the story. If a writer works with words, a painter with pigments, a sculptor with stone or clay and shape, Gladys Swan is a writer who paints and sculpts as well and her prose is rich with sound, color, and shape. Where Painter's stories give access to their depths through their surface details, Swan's come up from the shadowy depths where the forces that shape us drift like the movements in a dream.