The Flannery O'Connor Award: Selected Stories. - book reviews

Studies in Short Fiction, Wntr, 1994 by Christopher Metress

In the spring of 1983, the University of Georgia Press published David Walton's Evening Out, the first volume to receive the prestigious Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction. Since then, the press has published 21 collections as part of the series, including such noted works as Mary Hood's How Far She Went (1984), Tony Ardizzone's The Evening News (1986), Melissa Pritchard's Spirit Seizures (1987), and T. M. McNally's Low Flying Aircraft (1991). The first of these two new contributions to this distinguished series is by Alfred DePew, an instructor of composition and writing at Portland School of Art in Portland, Maine. The second collection, edited by Charles East, stands as a tenth anniversary retrospective representing the work of all 21 previous winners of the award. Both volumes highlight the special merit of this series and the invaluable contribution it has made, and continues to make, to the American short story.

In the 12 stories that compose The Melancholy of Departure, DePew concentrates on fragile people seeking to establish, maintain, or break free from the fragile unions they have made with each other. In the opening story, "Let Me Tell You How I Met My First Husband, the Clown," a woman offers up a sad yet loving account of her first husband, a circus clown she married when she was 19 and whom she left a few years later after two abortions and a miscarriage. After her miscarriage, she tells her husband, "I'm leaving, no matter what you say or how you look, or how much I love you and want to stay, I'm leaving." Her remembrance, however, shows us that her departure from this first husband 13 years before, though final, is never quite complete. When she finally does bear a child, from a second marriage (which has also, like her other subsequent marriages, broken up), she names that child after her first husband. In the end, she concludes that her first husband, the clown, taught her that "God could be worshipped by seeming to make forty-seven Ping-Pong balls appear out of nowhere, and the purpose of living was to make life - all of it - holy."

The departure in this opening story seems as inevitable as it is unnecessary, as if no matter what two people say or how much they love, they must leave each other. Such inevitable departures are part and parcel of DePew's world. For instance, in "Voici! Henri!" an elderly homosexual man worries over the infidelities of his young lover, Henri, who goes to bed with other men who "mean nothing to him": "his going off with them makes me suffer," the elderly man laments, "and yet he does it, though they mean nothing to him, and why would anyone go and do something that meant nothing to him, go and do it again and again? In the final paragraph of this story, the man, lying awake at night, wonders when the evening will come when Henri mill not return, when his lover's inevitable departure will finally be enacted. As the story closes, we leave the man alone in his bed, awaiting "the onset of a life without love." In "At Home with the Pelletiers," a young boy, Howard, watches his older brother, who is on the surface a rough-and-ready Marine, struggle with his fear of being sent to Vietnam. When the order to ship out does come, the older brother dresses out in his camouflage fatigues and begins to smash out every window in his parents' house. When he realizes his mother is calling the police, he flees out the back door, his younger brother in pursuit. But the younger brother cannot keep up, and "as they headed toward the woods, the dark widened and stretched out between them, and the connection Howard felt to his brother thinned and would snap any second. Because it was so thin, he knew it could break, and if it broke, it would be gone forever."

Occasionally, in such stories as "For If He Left Robert," "Rita and Maxine," and "Florence Wearnse," DePew's characters are able to establish or maintain the thin thread of connection that always threatens to break. For the most part, however, this volume explores, as its title suggests, the moment when decisions are made to sever that thread. Unfortunately, the 12 stories collected here are of varying success. "Florence Wearnse," At Home with the Pelletiers," "Voici! Henri!," and "Let Me Tell You How I Met My First Husband, the Clown," tales quite diverse in style and temperament, are the most accomplished pieces in the volume, while "Beauty and the Beast," "Stanley," and "Hurley," though interesting and not without moments of great lyricism and clarity, at times seem more like exercises than stories. All in all, however, DePew writes with precision and empathy about men and women desperate for companionship yet strangely drawn to the freedom - and pain - of departure.

Each story in The Flannery O'Connor Award. Selected Stories is a powerful testament to the strength and, diversity of contemporary short fiction in America. Rarely does one volume contain so many brilliant stories, so many stunning examples of sustained excellence. It almost seems an injustice to single out a few stories for high praise - from first story to last the collection is full of rewards and insights - but of special note are Ardizzone's "World Without End," Philip F. Deaver's "Wilbur Gray Falls in Love with an Idea," Carole L. Glickfeld's "What My Mother Knows," Salvatore La Puma's "The Mouthpiece," Susan Neville's "Banquet," and Daniel Curley's "Trinity." The last of these stories is the most powerful in the collection. Curley's tale of a divorced couple trying to cope with the death of their only child is worthy of Flannery O'Connor herself, not because the tale contains any O'Connoresque redemptive violence, but because Curley both recognizes our desire to discover, in the face of tragedy, a sustaining faith that will give direction and meaning to our lives, and also understands the despair we must face if we cannot ever find that faith. Hoping to give substance to their lives after the loss of their child, Curley's divorced couple returns to each other's arms, and they force "skin against skin in hope of total penetration, trying to drive skin into skin, to mingle their blood, to achieve a more-than-Siamese union. What they wanted was no less than the total permeation of the Trinity. But they succeeded only in mingling sweat."