BOOK REVIEW : Grim Tales Inhabit Special Dark Reality
A Place of Light by Mary Bush (Morrow: $16.95; 258 pps.)
“I had four sisters in my life, but Maude is the only one alive,” a boy in his teens tells us in one of these stories. That’s because his mother has the nasty habit of killing off her babies when they cry too much. All of the short stories in this sober, brilliant collection are set in rural, poverty-stricken, Upstate New York--deserted backwaters where there are no jobs. The land is played out; the smart, enterprising people have left, and the collective gene pool is something you wouldn’t want to dive into.
What are “we”--and, by that pronoun, I mean the educated, the orderly, even the “enlightened” readers scanning this review right now--to make of stories like these?
My feeling is that having lived through the so-called “holiday” season, many of us have had to notice once again that human emotions are often irrational and base; that maybe 50% of all parents wish devoutly that they’d never had their children; maybe 75% of all children--even in these “enlightened” times--grow up in terror of their parents, and, if they live long enough, are able to turn the tables on those creatures who have been so penurious with their affection and so prodigal with their insults and their dreadful threats, their pledges of undying hatred. The child has no recourse but to live long enough, stick around and make his or her abusive parents miserable and afraid! Something to live for, in these trying times.
This collection deals with several levels of terror that (perhaps all) children have to deal with at one level or another. “Underground Railroad,” with its baby-slaughtering mother, is only the most extreme example here. Some of these tales seem comparatively innocuous: “Muskrat” and “Rude Awakening” are both gender-oriented, coming-of-age stories: In the former, two small boys set out to trap muskrat and end up with something large and alive that isn’t a muskrat, already suffering terribly from the cramped iron trap on its leg. Too fearful to let it loose, too fearful to admit their fear, the boys finally suffocate the animal by burying it alive in stones.
Harmless, maybe, “Boys will be boys,” and all that, but this stolid indifference to suffering comes back to haunt the reader in another story as two adult hunters carelessly terrorize a young couple in the woods. In “Rude Awakening” a young girl, cordially detested by her mother, is forced to put aside her overalls and don a white veil for her First Communion. She gets sick, and after long and horrible minutes, finally spits out the Host. Again, no harm is done, all little girls get sick, but her alienation from her family, her sense of being totally alone in the world, is confirmed forever.
Some of these stories emerge from poverty, so that, if we own a microwave and an automatic coffee pot, or are saving our money in CDs, we may be able to persuade ourselves that they are not our stories. In “Difficult Passage,” a little girl wheels her legless grandpa to the circus to see freaks, realizing in the process that the poverty-stricken people in her own town are not just the audience, but freaks as well.
In two separate stories, incest (or plain child molestation), may be blamed on unemployment: If Uncle JoJo in “Outlaws” or the repellent Robert in “A Place of Light” had decent jobs, perhaps they wouldn’t spend their waking hours trying to have sex with small girls. But I don’t believe money fixes everything, and neither does the author. In two stories, unexpectedly, sanctuaries appear, out in grim woods, where, people manage to live in harmony with their surroundings and with self-respect. Just seeing these places, these people, heartens other characters, trapped in their own misery. Maybe it is possible to live another way, in a decent way.
Always, with stories like this, there is that lame editorial attempt at distancing. In a downright pitiful blurb of this book, someone writes, “. . . Harsh lives make for compelling drama.” Maybe. But I have a feeling the world is made up of those who know these stories are reality, and others, who peek into these pages, play dumb and say “Yum yum! Look at all these harsh lives and all this compelling drama!”
Those who know this grim reality will take these stories straight to their sad hearts: “Not one other family looked like theirs,” one lost little girl thinks. “No one was making a scene. No one else was miserable.” But a lot of other people--even with Dad hauling in the bucks and Mom wearing a giant gold necklace--are starving, right now, for love. Or, dry as a bone, they know themselves unable to give that love. That’s not “compelling drama.” That’s reality. Mary Bush reminds all of us that, paradoxically, in our terrible isolation, we’re not alone.