Author: Edwidge Danticat
Where I read it: Tales of Two Americas
Elsie, a Haitian immigrant who works in the U.S. providing home health care, gets an urgent call from her ex-husband. Apparently, his girlfriend has been kidnapped in Port-Au-Prince. Elsie has already been betrayed by her husband and his girlfriend before, so she could just hang up on him. Instead, she hears him out and agrees to help.
As an immigrant, Elsie would have hoped to find a community she can rely on, with people she can trust. But she's pretty much on her own. In the course of her job, she helps another Haitian immigrant suffering from renal failure, but he's wealthy, and any sympathy he or his daughter feel for her is limited. Already, she has suffered profound betrayal in her personal life. Maybe she's willing to risk a lot to stay connected to people, because the alternative, a life of mistrust and loneliness, isn't bearable to her; she's already profoundly lonely. By the end of the story, she seems like someone baring her neck to vampires. And there are true vampires in this story, draining her.
Title: Family Man
Author: Annie Proulx
Where I read it: Fine Just the Way It Is: Wyoming Stories 3
What's the legacy you've been left with, and what legacy do you leave to others? The main character is spending his final years in a nursing home, among people who watch a lot of TV and paint their faces. He comes across people he once knew, or thought he knew, but they've changed from how he remembers them. Who were they, and who is he?
In the course of the story, his granddaughter visits him and expresses an interest in his life. What he shares with her isn't inspirational, not the kind of story you're eager to pass from one generation to the next. His past contains a deep betrayal by his father. I don't want to spoil it all here. Suffice it to say that he had discovered a shattering lie that showed him how little he was seen as a person worthy of love and respect, and how much he had missed of the father-son bond a boy craves – to be uniquely his father's son and carry his father's name proudly.
Title: Mama
Author: Dorothy Allison
Where I Read It: Mothers & Daughters
I am my mama's daughter, her shadow on the earth, the blood thinned down a little…There are visceral depictions of a mother-daughter relationship in this story, and when the mother betrays the child, it's as if the child's body is betraying itself. She has absorbed her mother into her, and must live with all of her mother's decisions, especially the continued presence of an abusive stepfather. The lies and betrayals feel like flesh wounds.
Push it down. Don't show it. Don't tell anyone what is going on.She tries to live the way her mother seems to want, which means pretending that she doesn't feel pain and that she doesn't hunger for uncomplicated closeness to her mother, without the ruptures of abuse. This story seems like something the daughter might have wanted to write to her mother, if they could have spoken freely and honestly with each other. The daughter is a mix of toughness and wounds. In the story, love is mingled with grief and anger and sometimes hate.
Title: The Mourning
Author: William Trevor
Where I Read It: The Hill Bachelors
Liam Pat, a young Irishman working as an unskilled laborer in construction, thinks about going to London for work and to possibly advance himself. In London, the foreman at his job picks on him terribly, and he misses home. But he also befriends some fellow Irishmen, including a man named Feeny. And he comes to realize that he's being roped into a deadly plot.
The background for the story is The Troubles, the violent conflict over whether Northern Ireland should remain a part of the U.K. or join Ireland. Liam Pat discovers that he's been set up, and that when it comes time for him to make a crucial decision, he won't be able to tell anyone about it afterwards, though what he finds out will haunt him.
Title: Mulholland Dive
Author: Michael Connelly
Where I read it: Los Angeles Noir
The kinds of twists and double-crosses in this story remind me of a 1940s film noir plot.
Clewiston is an investigator who specializes in car accidents. When a car goes over the edge of a famous roadway in California and crashes into a swimming pool, he gets called to the scene. I liked the interesting details in the story about how an investigator might determine if a crash was truly an accident or something more sinister (for example, considering road surface conditions and the efficiency of the brakes in a particular vehicle).
Title: A Piece of Ground
Author: Helen Nielsen
Where I Read It: Hard-Boiled: An Anthology of American Crime Stories
A farmer who's married with kids heads to the city to earn more money for a new farm. The narrative of a naive country-dweller getting corrupted by city folk so that he betrays his own principles before being betrayed is a popular story plot, and it's done well here. This is a short, bitter tale.
Title: Rebecka
Author: Karin Tidbeck
Where I read it: Jagannath
One idea I took from this story is that when people truly want to destroy themselves, they destroy another person. Especially if it's someone close to them who at the very least expects to be treated decently.
The story also raises the question of how people would act if they all knew for sure that a divine being exists and is involved in the world of humans. Of course, it would depend on the deity. In this story, a woman who survives severe brutality at the hands of her husband keeps trying to kill herself. Can she find meaning in what she went through, or is the horror too much? To escape from the horror, she might become a part of it and spread it to another.
Title: A View of the Woods
Author: Flannery O’Connor
Where I read it: Everything That Rises Must Converge
Mary Fortune Pitts is a young girl caught between her father, Mr. Pitts, and her grandfather, Mr. Fortune. The story's focus is on Mr. Fortune, a domineering, vindictive man who favors his granddaughter because she resembles him. Through her, he has found yet another way to pick at Mr. Pitts. Mr. Pitts, in retaliation, beats his daughter. (O'Connor doesn't take the easy route of portraying Mr. Pitts as a gentle, kindly man.) The child is truly seen and loved by no one. She's a fierce girl, but reduced to an object in a vicious tug-of-war. I think she accepts the beatings as a way of "atoning" for perceived disloyalty to her father; she's in a position that no child should be placed in.
As in other O'Connor stories, a conflict enacted outwardly is really a conflict within oneself. Mr. Fortune is battling with his own terribleness, though he doesn't know it. When his granddaughter disagrees with him about a piece of land that's important to her and her siblings, Mr. Fortune takes a stab at understanding her point-of-view, but dismisses it too quickly and for petty reasons. And when he gets angry with his granddaughter for opposing him, he decides that he should have disciplined her more. However, a lack of discipline isn't the problem. The problem is he doesn't love her. He gets a glimpse at one point of the consequences.
He saw it, in his hallucination, as if someone were wounded behind the woods and the trees were bathed in blood.
Title: Wash
Author: William Faulkner
Where I read it: The Oxford Book of the American South
Wash Jones may be white, but he's poor and has no land. To have any kind of status in the South, he attaches himself to Colonel Sutpen, a plantation owner. Wash glorifies Sutpen and derives pride from Sutpen's position in society. When Sutpen returns from the Civil War a bit diminished, Wash hopes to ally himself more closely to him. His strategy is to push his young granddaughter at Sutpen and hope this will lead to the families merging.
Sutpen does take advantage of Wash's granddaughter, and she becomes pregnant. He also treats her with contempt, asserting his superiority by stomping on her and, by extension, on Wash and his ambitions to rise in stature.
As in some other Faulkner stories I've read so far, a woman or girl may appear on the margins of the story, not as a main character but sharply drawn, her condition illuminated starkly as by a flash of lightning filling a dark room. Wash's granddaughter gets treated as an object for barter and as a stand-in for Wash's own honor. But she undeniably has humanity, and the ways in which she is profoundly betrayed by both Wash and Sutpen are central to the story's tragedy.
