Painter, swan, weaver: no sameness here

Literary Review, Fall, 2002 by Thomas E. Kennedy

News from the Volcano is a powerful addition to the still growing body of Swan's work, a voice to sing the tales of the great American Southwest--the circuses and rodeos, miners, ranchers, cowboys, merchants, migrants, and Indians who have made their homes in that mysterious expanse of earth.

Unlike the stories in either Painter's or Swan's collections, the eleven fictions in Gordon Weaver's Long Odds--his ninth story collection and thirteenth book of fiction--deal largely, though not exclusively, with middle-aged, midwestern, middle or lower-middle-class male characters trapped in a desperate loneliness of one sort or another. The presentation of the loneliness is leavened by ironic humor, enhanced by the strength and richness of the language, of the telling, and the desperation is often, though not always, counterbalanced by a respect for the determination of the protagonists to confront their fates, an unwillingness to embrace despair even in the teeth of an isolated and low-grade hopelessness.

The body artist of "Mannequin" who refuses commercial success even when it is handed to him; the conman medium of "Ed Stein, Ed Stein, Speak to Me," himself conned by a spirit of his own imagining; the abandoned soul of "Viewed from Lanta & Wally's" excluded from the one stable central point of his existence--a table in a local diner; the daily walkers of "The Divorced Men's Mall Walkers Club," proceeding indefatigably about their empty days in a mall which is a microcosm of contemporary society with its failure to provide succor of any significance; the Vietnam vet of "On Watch for Big Red" caught in a voyeuristic limbo he is unable to breach, even given the chance: all are studies of burnt-out cases that illuminate five of the faces of the contemporary American landscape.

In "Long Odds," a man is driven from the warm vision of family in which he seeks to withdraw when he involuntarily discovers some unwanted information about the past of his beloved wife, while Kenneth Mullins of "Without Spot or Wrinkle," a white southie Bostonian attends the funeral of his estranged brother to discover that he had been married in his later years to a black woman and is given an opportunity for a revelation that might crack the shell of his bigotry, a powerful if disheartening view of American racism. Quaid of "Q: Questing" is another Vietnam vet who, though he has seen no action, is unable to resume his life as a college teacher and spends his days on a meaningless quest for meaningless sexual experience until it is within his reach and he withdraws to sink into stasis.

Weaver, whose stories are well known to readers of American literary journals has published more than a hundred short fictions in the four decades of his writing life, has had short and long fictions adapted for screen and television, has taught at many writing programs. Two of the pieces in this collection with a barbed pen describe the writing life. "Solidarity Forever" is a nouvelle-a-clef lampooning MFA program politics and plots to corner the market of creative writing textbooks, readings, reading lists, and subsidies with a comic depiction of a plot by the "serious" literati to wrest power from the commercial literary faction. There may be some pink cheeks among the writer-readers of that story. "Gilded Quill: The Story of Jones" chronicles the life of a writer's group that meets monthly in a room beside the toilet of a fast-food restaurant--a painfully hilarious portrait of an organization not so much of wannabe writers as pretenders hiding inside their turtleneck sweaters.