Swimming Lessons

Hudson Review, The, Winter 2005 by Balée, Susan

Swimming Lessons

FROM LATE SPRING TO EARLY AUTUMN, I SWAM IN A SEA OF FICTION. Stroking through dozens of books, some of which were good, a couple of which were brilliant, and most of which were merely competent or worse, I came up for air only to start writing fiction again myself. Consequently, I must give thanks to 2004's summer books-the silly, the scintillating, and the so-so-for spurring me to action.

Awash in books, I paddled indiscriminately among novels and short story collections from many nations. However, when the boxes were empty, I had only 13 books that I felt like saying anything about, and 10 of the 13 were short story collections. Further, none of this Balée's dozen of books were translations: All were originally written in English, nine by American writers, two by English writers, one by an Irish writer, and one by a Canadian writer of Russian descent. The preponderance of compelling story collections indicates that a) the middle third of 2004 produced a bumper crop of short fiction, or b) I like to read what I'm trying to write. Either way, short story collections will be the focus of this review, although three fine novels (culled from innumerable bad ones) merit a moment of recognition and recommendation first.

Three Laudable Novels

The first of these is Kent Haruf's Eventide,1 the sequel to his popular Plainsong (1999). When Euro-pretentious thrillers such as The Da Vinci Code top the bestseller list, it's good to know there are still Americans in the heartland writing down-to-earth fiction with well-developed characters and believable conflicts. In Eventide, Kent Haruf returns to Holt, Colorado, where the lives of the cattle-farming McPheron brothers and the other citizens of this small town cross and occasionally intertwine. Loneliness, compassion, and courage illuminate a roster of likable characters. The prose rings strong and clear and the narrative drives steadily from ignition to denouement. If Sherwood Anderson could have written a decent novel, it would look like one of Haruf's.

A similarly fine novel, this one a generational saga set in the northern woods of Maine, is Justin Cronin's The Summer Guest.2 Cronin develops his characters with skill and love, but his passion for place glows with a holy fire. The harsh and beloved landscape he describes shapes the lives of his main (I almost wrote "Maine") characters:

. . . The frozen lake stretched away from him like a huge china platter, the sunlight blazing so brightly off its surface he could barely absorb it; on the far shore, dense woods marched up the hillsides and away, into ice and nothingness, the very top of the world. The cloudless sky was the color of cobalt, so blue he felt he could suck the whole thing into his lungs, breathe it in and out and become a part of it.

Cronin is a very talented writer. He's also young, so readers can expect many more exceptional books from him.

The last novel I want to mention here kept me laughing from beginning to end. Paula Marantz Cohen's Much Ado About Jessie Kaplan3 is a comic tour-de-force about a Jewish mother from Cherry Hill, New Jersey, trying to deal with her testy daughter's upcoming bat mitzvah; her son's juvenile delinquent behavior; her husband's woes as a gastroenterologist oppressed by managed care; all of which are eclipsed by her own mother's sudden delusion that she's the reincarnation of Shakespeare's girlfriend, the "Dark Lady" of the sonnets. That's the plot outline, but the novel itself is as fresh and pungent as an apple cake. The novel also proves that literary fiction doesn't have to be elegiac in tone to be successful. Admittedly, there are other writers who have taught us that, and one such is the English wit Julian Barnes. Let's consider his latest among a representative sample of 2004's notable short story collections.

Julian Barnes Grows Old, Robert Olen Butler Silly, and Barry Lopez Just Plain Paranoid

Everybody faces the prospect of death differently; Barnes confronts it in The Lemon Table with a rapier. Perhaps not the best weapon for this enemy (see Edgar Allan Poe's "The Masque of the Red Death"), but one that he wields with skill. For example, in the best story in The Lemon Table? "Hygiene," the old soldier narrating is heading up to London for his annual tryst with a prostitute. His wife is no longer interested in sex but "He didn't blame Pamela. Some women just went off after the change. Simple matter of biology, nobody's fault. . . . Old Mother Nature stops lubricating the parts." Alas, when the desired moment of assignation arrives, his beloved paramour is not to be found, and another girl offers to fill her place. It's no go, "the honourable member was temporarily hiding his light under a bushel."

This portrait of an impotent old man finds an echo in other stories where the humiliations of age encroach upon, then overwhelm, a variety of characters. One has a sense of Barnes looking on, rather horrified, as he puts witty words in his characters' mouths. In "Knowing French," an eighty-one-year-old lady in a nursing home begins sending letters to Mr. Novelist Barnes after reading his Flaubert's Parrot. Curiously, she is just as witty as her chosen correspondent, though it's a black humor indeed: