Properties of Blood. - book reviews

Studies in Short Fiction, Wntr, 1994 by Andrew Weinstein

The finest of the eight stories in William Mills's second collection feature professional, middle-aged, Southern white men as they endure personal ordeals. Grappling with the impermanence of their marriages and ultimately the insignificance of their lives, they emerge with humbler expectations and greater strength. What empowers them is the knowledge of what really matters to them, gained through introspection.

Contemplation brings wisdom and responsibility to wounded men like Fred, an X-ray technician recently dumped by his wife in the deftly crafted "Sweet Tickfaw Run Softly, Till I End My Song.- When his girlfriend's beautiful married sister Sheila makes advances toward him, Fred is predictably aroused, but he surprises himself by suggesting that her marital troubles come from personal problems that divorce would not solve. "This kind of talk killed any playful flirting that had been going on between Sheila and him. Analysis did it every time. Like an X-ray of Marilyn Monroe." In the delightfully funny story, "An Imitation," a "low-frequency anxiety" together with gonorrhea prompt a divorced playboy named Hawkins to take up with a chaste, born-again Christian. She satisfies his other great desire - to perform on stage-by landing him a role as Christ in her church passion play, where he experiences an epiphany - not religious, but existential. Facing the "immense void" of the universe, Hawkins accepts the moral challenge "to keep this emptiness pure, like a bowl that waited to be filled."

Existentialism informs other stories, whose characters react to their insignificance and ineluctable oblivion in various ways. "The Commuters" explores a college instructor's memories of his "idle remark about some French Existentialist" to a car-pooling colleague who shortly thereafter killed his family and himself, a tragedy that "brought home what bloody instruments ideas are."

If anything can assuage philosophical angst, suggests Mills, it is contact with nature. Nature inspires the author's characters with a Sisyphean courage to embrace the goodness of what they have. While duck hunting in "Bell Slough," a poignant story filled with fascinating documentary details, Adam reflects on the fatal heart attack of a flamboyant old friend who worked as a reporter in order to save money for writing poetry and novels later. With a new carpe diem attitude, Adam savors the taste of the duck he shot and toasts "|to right now' . . . [H]e thought how beautiful the duck's flight had been and how beautiful the duck was now." Another story, "Promise," reveals how Jason's efforts to remove a dead calf from a laboring cow was "work that felt right," unlike working at a nearby chemical plant. Moreover, the cow's suffering infuses him with empathy for a woman he inadvertently offended with an offhand remark about her weight - her belly a possible sign, he deduces, of an unwanted pregnancy.

A few stories gathered here lack the author's sure, comic voice, and seem written instead under William Faulkner's spell. Humorless, interrelated pieces staged on the same rural terrain, they include "Mr. Bo," first published in 1969, in which the eponymous plantation owner lusts after a young African-American sharecropper while his wife is away. Overall, however, Mills excels, often lending a regionalist flavor to his engaging, conversational style - a woman dancing with yet another rogue is "tight on him as bark on an elm tree" in "A Marquis," a story of spouse abuse. As its narrator observes, it is an "old, old story" - like many in Properties of Blood, a correction that unerringly taps the pulse of ageless human wisdom in contemporary scenes.