The Presence of Things Past. - book reviews

Studies in Short Fiction, Spring, 1994 by Marshall Bruce Gentry

These stories reminisce about an Iowa childhood, its wonders, humiliations, loves, failures. Perhaps inevitably, however, because the collection contains 42 stories averaging about three pages - and because the stories present themselves as autobiography - they often concern what is never known or not remembered, whether through mystery or betrayal or forgetfulness. The source of the prevailing mood of these stories comes through clearly in "The View from the Upper Window," the final story. Here the first-person narrator recalls looking out at his friends from his confinement while recovering from polio:

From such afternoons spent at the upstairs hall window came surely

my propensity, to this day, to imagine myself apart, severed from,

removed, to which should be added the enduring expectation of

inevitable evanescence, of inevitable loss, Nancy and the others

fleeing around the side of the house, vanishing....

I am pleased to say the stories avoid sentimentality. The narrator investigates his own cruelties to classmates, recalls his failures to provide help when he knows it is needed, even sees himself hurting the feelings of an old friend in the midst of a reunion fantasy; but his response to such thoughts is analyze them rather than merely to feel guilt. And while the death of his deeply loved mother occasions many of the remembrances, his attitude to her is oxymoronic rather than idealized. In "Every Now and Then," he says his mother exists in "noisy silences," a phrase that describes the messages sent by withdrawals, secrets, refusals - by both mother and son - to bridge the gap between them. In "Homecoming," the son has to ask directions to find his mother's grave. In "My Mother's Slate," the narrator takes home his dead mother's kitchen slate after crying over the poem she wrote there, her last written words; later the slate hangs in his kitchen covered with an old shopping list after he has erased his mother's words. This passage profiles my favorite image of the son's treatment of the mother, whom he simultaneously preserves and erases.

I suspect that ideally one should read John Taylor's stories a handful at a sitting. Take too many at once and the brevity of individual pieces can be off-putting. But some of the stories take much of their effect from their relation to other stories. For example, only after reading other stories will one get the full effect of the two-page story "The Bicycle License." The 10-year-old is terrified to buy a license for the bicycle his parents gave him for Christmas, because he expects to be confronted by the police for throwing a snowball at a taxi. The older narrator reveals only in the final lines that the real story here is in his mother's pain over his inability to confide in his parents, both when he was 10 and much later as he finally tells about the childhood fear.

At times the stories seem to beg to be anthologized in first-year college English readers. I am tempted to assign students to read Taylor and then write a personal narrative about a childhood event they did not understand. While some of the pieces may depend a bit too much on suggestion, many of them would demonstrate beautifully to a writer beginning college how a personal narrative's brevity can work to its advantage.