Acts of God

I’m not going to start off with the pretense that this is an unbiased review. I have long thought Gilchrist to be one of the most talented writers of the second pantheon of Southern writers. She stood alongside the likes of Willie Morris, Walker Percy, Shelby Foote, and Barry Hannah and she more than held her own, she thrived. She avoided the pitfalls of success that hobbled so many of her contemporaries and her writing grew in depth and complexity. She won The American Book Award for Victory Over Japan, but that wasn’t my favorite of her books. To me the high water mark came early. In the Land of Dreamy Dreams was so very intense in terms of language and theme that I found it to be the standard for the modern short story, in many ways.

Gilchrist has written in every form, poetry first, short stories, novels, and memoirs are all in her oeuvre, and she is good at them all. But it is the short story that is her strong suit. In this collection she is back in top form. Is it as good as Victory over Japan? I have to say yes. Is it as good as In The Land of Dreamy Dreams? I have to say, perhaps. It is different, it is written by a more mature author in a different time in the world, but it is an analysis of that world that is every bit as sharp and every bit as spot on as In The Land of Dreamy Dreams was when it was written.

I got to cheat on this book quite a bit, we were able to publish Toccata and Fugue in D Minor in the first issue of China Grove and I knew when I first read it that it was Gilchrist at her best. Brave, incisive, and hopeful facing a world plagued by the faces of terror. I got to spend time with her and heard the descriptions of the stories in this collection during our interview that came out in that same issue and then again at the Welty festival at Mississippi University for Women in Columbus, MS. So, I knew what the stories in this collection were about, I just wasn’t sure how she’d write them.

Last night, lying in bed next to my wife, I had just finished reading Collateral.
“My God, she did that just right,” I said. “The way she finished that story. I didn’t know exactly where she was going with this, I just wasn’t seeing it, but she finished it perfectly.”
“I’m sure she was concerned you’d think so,” she answered.
“What do you mean?”
“Ellen is how old?”
“Seventy-eight I think.”
“She is a seventy-eight year old woman, who has spent her whole adult life writing some of the most excellent short stories in the English language. I’m sure she’s just sitting over there in Arkansas, worrying what you were going to say about Collateral. You should call her first thing in the morning. Right when you first wake up, to save her from worrying through another day.”
“I think I will.”
“I think you should.”
“Why do you think she wouldn’t care what I thought?”
“Because she knows more about writing than you know about reading. She has the voice in her head to tell her what’s true. She doesn’t need your voice on the phone.”

Later I read aloud to her from The Dogs.
“I can’t picture Ellen saying that,” I interjected.
“Because, she didn’t, Rhoda said it, the same Rhoda who went hunting with her daddy. It’s exactly what she would say.” My wife answered.

See, this is what I’m trying to get to, this collection is so crisp, it is so clear, it is so transparent that it fits in your life. These are people you know. This is an author who shows you a glimpse into a world that is different and old and modern and good and scary all at the same time and leaves you convinced that it’s worth it. And if we all are facing our own mortality, there is hope even in that, if we do so with grace, honor, and compassion.

Scott Anderson MD
Editor, China Grove