No Frills, But Strong Short Fiction

Hugh Nissenson’s 1959 collection of short stories A Pile of Stones should be more widely read.  Each story is outwardly simple, but carries complex messages of divided loyalties and conflicting impulses. 

 

Take “The Prisoner” a story set in Poland in the early 20th century.  A rabbi is charged with visiting a Jew in prison, accused of Socialist activities. The rabbi’s son realizes that the prisoner is tortured.  Not by his captives, not by remorse over his ideas, but because even in prison, God reveals to him that everything is beautiful, and joy pervades the universe.  The prisoner pleads “Why can’t He leave me alone?”

Or “The Well,” set in Israel in the early 1960s.  During a drought, a socialist Kibbutz member offers water to a nearby Bedouin camp whose well has run dry.  But he realizes, as the women are drawing water from the Jewish well, that they will be taxed by the clan chief for the use of the water.  Socialism, feudalism, Judaism, folk Islam, and the rights of the land, all collide on one overwrought moment, with awful consequences.

This collection should be read.  For writers, it shows how to get in and out of a story, leaving messages and meanings for the reader to unfold.

Writing the Unwritten

Joan Didion is known for doing her homework.  Her non-fiction is well-researched, and this, hand in hand with her penetrating mind and incisive use of the language, provide pleasurable reading like few other living writers can provide.

This is the case with The Year of Magical Thinking.  But here, the focus is on the inexorable process of grieving, and Didion takes it on like a case study of how the mind works as it tries to wrap itself around the unthinkable.  This makes the book a bit maddening.  Didion moves around the same topics, picking them apart, breaking them down, reenacting them again and again like thought experiments.  

Yet the effect is mesmerizing. Didion comes very close to getting down in writing an experience that makes every effort to escape from our ability to capture it in writing; to conceptualize and understand its immensity.

In the Reign of (Thin) Peace

There is something fundamentally thin in Hugh Nissenson’s collection of short stories In the Reign of Peace.  It was published by the venerable FS&G in 1968, and the stories appeared, variously, in Harper’s Magazine, Esquire, Midstream,  The New Yorker.  So why are the stories so wafer thin?  Why is the book out of print, and the copy I read in the Cornell Annex, not read since 1972?

Part of the problem is Nissenson’s set up.   Most of the stories take place in Israel in the 1960s, and most of his material was culled from his far better non-fiction book about Israel during this time, Notes from the Frontier, which has an immediacy these stories lack.  It was as Nissenson was having difficulties translating real life into fiction; or more accurately, non-fiction to fiction.  He also creates  an Israel that non-Jews can understand, giving the stories a water down, far from the mark feel.

Regardless, don’t let this book throw you off.  Nissenson is a talented writer, with a broad range and great reach.  But these stories fall far short of his talents.

A Novel of Frames

Koch’s The Year of Living Dangerously is a cleverly structured novel, using the time honored, modernist technique of frames to tell the story.   

At first, we are unsure who is telling the story of Billy Kwan, Guy Hamilton, and Jill, until about half way though, when we realize that a journalist close to Hamilton is in control of the narrative.  “Cookie” is much like Marlow in Conrad’s novels, a man close to the action, but also detached.  He is moved by events, but able to keep his distance, and hence his cool.  He can tell the story from his own viewpoint, but also that of conversations with Billy, Hamilton, and also Billy’s strange and contradictory files.

The Year of Living Dangerously is a simple story, but Koch adds dimension and complexity to it with his clever use of frames, and his gentle touch in doing so.  Rather than taking us through wild rides of shifting view point and orientation, the material is organized for us, with a thesis to be advanced.  And we, the readers, are given the data.  And we can either accept the conclusion or not.

Geneology - poem Eric Maroney

Dragging down, down

Far beyond the last pavilion

Where a wicker chair is

Rotted, tumbled

Far away, away

Passed secret recesses

Dream depots

Where I sing

A Song of My Impotence

Before a curtain of mile high stone

They all knew I would not last long

He knew from the awful grimace

She from the swipe of her hand

On the frosted pane of glass

Mother and Father knew

From the genes inscribed

In me and him and her

A hieroglyphic missive

To awe and electroshock and SSRIs

And I know from his tics

His throat clearing

And the stuttering

Which only ended yesterday

Here: I tell him.  Here is

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