Book Review : Collection Is Filled With Many Happy Surprises

Buying Time: An Anthology Celebrating 20 Years of the Literature Program of the National Endowment for the Arts, edited by Scott Walker (Graywolf Press: $20)

“Buying Time” is a collection of prose and poetry assembled to commemorate the first 20 years of the National Endowment for the Arts Literature program. It is also a convincing argument that the federal government does better at funding writers than it does with farm subsidies at home or with covert political operations abroad.

All 36 men and women whose work is represented here have had some endowment funding, buying them the time to produce additional writing. Many have gone on to win other awards: Pulitzer Prizes, the Obie, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the PEN-Faulkner Award, even the Nobel laurel; all have had significant publication.

An Impressive List

The table of contents is a laundry list of recent power in American fiction and poetry. While some selections are less than riveting--John Gardner’s clangorous “Nimram” and John Hawkes’ gouty “The Traveler” come to mind--these are more than mitigated by the lucid, haunting and often musical visions of Rita Mae Brown, Carolyn Forche, and Tess Gallagher.

My particular favorites begin with Stanley Elkin’s mordant tale, “The Conventional Wisdom,” which depicts the travails of Ellerbee, owner of a much robbed liquor store in Minneapolis. “Who are you?” Ellerbee asks a man who has helped him after a hold-up in which Ellerbee is shot.

“I’m an angel of death,” the angel of death said.

“I’m dead? . . . You mean there’s really an afterlife?”

“Oh boy,” the angel of death said.

In “Faith in a Tree,” Grace Paley’s protagonist sits, feet swinging, on a tree branch in Prospect Park, participating in the clamor of mothers, children, and the racing passions of life.

Listening to the conversations of owls and nightjars and tree frogs, Kenneth Rexroth notes in “On Flower Wreath Hill”:

This world of ours, before we

Can know its fleeting sorrows,

We enter it through tears.

Do the reverberations

of the evening bell of

The mountain temple ever

Totally die away?

Ntozake Shange, in “Sassafras, Cypress, & Indigo,” evokes the strong, vibrant images of a young girl’s spirited, primal beauty:

Where there is a woman there is magic. If there is a moon falling from her mouth, she is a woman who knows her magic, who can share or not share her powers. A woman with a moon falling from her mouth, roses between her legs and tiaras of Spanish moss, this woman is a consort of the spirits.

Indigo seldom spoke. There was a moon in her mouth.

She makes dolls, talks to them, and in the process captures our hearts.

“Flesh and Blood,” the Louise Erdich excerpt from her novel, “Love Medicine,” is as personal and moving as lovers’ secrets, whispered on dark, rainy nights:

There was surely no reason I should go up that hill again. For days, for weeks after I heard Sister Leopolda was dying, I told myself I was glad. I told myself good riddance to her puckered mind. Boiling jars that morning, pouring syrup, I told myself what she deserved. The jars were hot. She deserved to be packed in one alive. But as soon as I imagined that, I pitied her in that jar, balled up in her black rag, staring through the glass.

Mary Oliver’s poem, “Humpbacks,” set the spirit throbbing with its evocation of whales; May Sarton’s story, “The Silent Minister,” is layered with deft irony; and Tobias Wolff’s story, “The Liar,” becomes a glorious shared secret.

A fine, well-balanced collection, “Buying Time” is filled with happy surprises; it is a book of matches to be struck in the existential night, illuminating as good literature should the places where we are most likely to bark our shins or, worse, get lost.