A Companion to the American Short Story
Page 106
by the wind through the village ” (239). Indeed, when we fi rst meet George, we see
immediately his desire to wander, as he often ventures to the outskirts of town to
visit the local outcast, Wing. Though he continues to be pulled in multiple directions,
George remains focused. In “ Mother, ” George is pulled between the desires of his two
parents. George ’ s father wants him to succeed, to perhaps become one of the “ chief
The Short-Story Cycle
491
men of the town ” (28), something his father only pretends for himself when he is
away from his wife. On the other hand, George ’ s mother, bowed from disease, prays
earnestly for her son to do what she could not, perhaps “ joining some company and
wandering over the world, seeing always new faces ” (30).
Though the reader spends the most amount of time with George – which is why
most critics view him as the “ primary protagonist ” (Nagel, Contemporary 6) – he devel-
ops little, so obsessed is he with his goal of leaving the town. That leaving Winesburg
is necessary is George ’ s immutable truth, which also puts him in danger, according
to the anonymous author/narrator ’ s beliefs in the framing story, “ The Book of the
Grotesque ” : “ the moment one of the people took one of the truths to himself, called
it his truth, and tried to live his life by it, he became a grotesque and the truth he
embraced became a falsehood ” (6). George is not so much the protagonist in a novel-
istic sense as a window through which other Winesburgers view their own frustrated
efforts at communication and forward progress. While George ’ s “ struggle for self -
realization and growth, ” Nagel writes, “ creates a paramount line of development for
the volume ” ( Contemporary 6), the lives of the other Winesburgers are intricately con-
nected to and perhaps even as important as George ’ s own story. After all, not only is
George Willard not the protagonist in every story, he is not even in every story (he
has no part in “ Paper Pills ” as well as the four - part “ Godliness ” or even, perhaps, the
introductory story “ The Book of the Grotesque ” 9 ). In fact, he appears as the primary
character in arguably only four of the stories (the second, “ Mother, ” and the last three,
“ Death, ” “ Sophistication, ” and “ Departure ” ). Elsewhere, George Willard is either the
“ sought - out listener, or observer ” (Dunn and Morris 53) or something even less, a
character mentioned only in passing, a connective device. George may be the most
important grotesque in the book, but he remains a grotesque.
Evolution of Genre and Nation: A Contemporary Example
Though many still question the existence and/or relevance of the genre, the strength
and popularity of the American short - story cycle shows no sign of fl agging. Kelly
Cherry ’ s The Society of Friends , an excellent book that has been heavily reviewed but
not as yet critically examined, builds on the tradition of Anderson ’ s Winesburg, Ohio
(and Joyce ’ s Dubliners ), while it charts but one of the many ways in which both the
genre and American society have evolved. Cherry, retired Eudora Welty Professor of
English at the University of Madison, Wisconsin, also echoes Raymond Carver – who
despised any and all kinds of tricks in writing (88) – when she writes that what she
desires is to read – and presumably, write – work endowed with “ honesty ” and “ not
tainted with cleverness ” ( “ Cleverness ” 184). Honest literature, she feels, forswears the
necessity for applause that clever writing demands:
Would literature that managed to negate its need for attention send itself to kingdom
come, blow itself up, like an apocalypse? Are we speaking here of a self - contradiction
492
Jeff Birkenstein
that can lead only to fi n de si è cle foolishness and disaster? Or, on the contrary, is not
absence of self - contradiction the sad little secret at the center of even the smartest current
fi ction, an academic inability to admit to the disorganization in the universe, to a mul-
tiplicity of perspective: we want our fi ction to toe the line, the politically correct line,
though the line will shift and shift. And how cleverly it is done, as if with mirrors, while
not just corners but vast rooms of our consciousness go unrefl ected and unrefl ected upon.
(185)
It is this apparent disorganization and disconnection resulting from “ a multiplicity of
perspective[s] ” that, like life, is at once key to the community of Madison and the
(often frustrated) movement within so many American short - story cycles.
Cherry writes about a modern American town, a place neither big nor small, a
place fi lled with interlopers, people not at all local, yet people who, when making
their case to the small business loan offi cer, “ believe in the viability of our downtown area ”
( Friends 13; Cherry ’ s italics). Such people are at once descendants of and very different
from George Willard.
Cherry has long been interested in the short - story cycle genre. Writing about
another short - story cycle of hers, My Life and Dr. Joyce Brothers: A Novel in Stories
(1990) (the misnaming of such works is a common enough problem, as Nagel points
out, Contemporary 18) in the New York Times Book Review , David Finkle admonishes
his readers: “ forget the title and the classifi cation of the book as a ‘ novel in stories, ’
which sounds as if Ms. Cherry is trying to have things both ways ” (14). Nine years
later, however, Cherry, and/or her publisher, does not seem to have the same confusion
as to genre, for the book The Society of Friends is called a book of “ stories ” on the front
cover. Cherry also quotes from the Winesburg story “ Death ” to begin her book. Nev-
ertheless, as is typical, some of the stories from this cycle – all about tenuously upper
middle - class academics and the search for a meaningful life amidst the largesse of the
present - day American suburb – appeared elsewhere fi rst. Notably, the story “ Not the
Phil Donahue Show ” was originally published in the Virginia Quarterly Review and
won an O. Henry Award in 1994.
Similar to Anderson
’
s
“
The Book of the Grotesque,
”
which Cowley called
“
a
general prologue ” ( “ Introduction ” 13), Cherry ’ s fi rst story, “ The Prowler: A
Prologue,
”
introduces us to various characters in the community of Madison,
Wisconsin, some of whom will later have their “ own ” story. In the person of Nina
Bryant, university professor and locally famous writer, there is something of a
central character (like George Willard and Anderson, one can see echoes of the
quasi - autobiographical relationship between Nina and Cherry): Cherry writes that
Nina “ is who I would be if I were living her life ” [ Writing 38]). Cherry uses the
device of a prowler – an enigmatic fi gure who lurks in the dark on the frontier
between the safe light of the home and the dangerous dark of the street – to rep-
resent the common fears of not just Madisonians, but people throughout America ’ s
suburban communities.
In a town of seemingly comfortable houses hidden from the street, of bookstore -
fi lled main streets and community gatherings, the prowler threatens the outwardly
The Short-Story Cycle
493
placid neighborhood with unrest, fear, and insecurity. Indeed, we learn that many in
the community have sensed the prowler ’ s presence. Taken in sum, the prowler is a
projection of the community ’ s collective insecurities, a representation of whatever they
dread: death, sexual confl ict, divorce, bankruptcy, the onset of Alzheimer ’ s in one ’ s
parents, etc. Throughout the book, however, the narrator ’ s voice often assumes a semi -
humorous (even fatalistic) perspective on events, thus undermining this sense of
insecurity. For the narrator ’ s tone indicates that such a feeling is suspect. After all,
such people live lives of relative ease and comfort, and thus their fears are largely
self - manufactured, products of myriad neuroses and an inability to accept the inevi-
tability of decline and decay, certainties that even the promised security of suburbia
cannot forestall.
In the center story (there are six stories before and six after) “ As It Is in Heaven, ”
Nina visits her mother in London, where she and Nina ’ s father have moved after retire-
ment, a world reminiscent of Joyce ’ s Dublin in Dubliners . Because Nina temporarily
leaves her home, the reader is afforded the ability to examine her home from afar, much
as we might have wanted to examine Winesburg from George Willard ’ s perspective
after he arrived in the big city. Like Joyce ’ s blind - fi lled Dublin, Cherry ’ s London is
also a world of dead - end streets, a place where the working classes coagulate amid a
tangible sense of socioeconomic class division: “ The house was in a close, a dead - end
drive like a sclerotic artery to the heart of the development ” ( Friends 73). But London
is not the escape for which Nina ’ s parents had hoped, something Nina had not realized
before visiting them. Nina comes to understand that her parents ’ gaze has always been
far afi eld, and she now believes that her mother has wasted her time looking “ out over
the Gulf in the direction of Mexico and South America, constructing the future as an
exotic landscape just over the horizon ” (83). Her parents have never had time for the
present and even though her father is dead (his ghost still appears in the kitchen), her
mother continues this obsession with the future, though her only current future can
be death. Thematically and emotionally, this story balances Nina ’ s own story – before
the trip Nina is lost; afterwards, she vows to reduce her wandering – even as her
neighbors, with a single story each, are perpetually foundering, caught between the
desire to embed in the community and to reject the knowledge that they are only one
more community transient, albeit transients with single family homes.
In “ Chores, ” for instance, Conrad hires a Czech graduate student to shovel his snow.
She needs the money, but it is a big job, so she brings her mother along. Like the
Reverend Curtis Hartman in Anderson ’ s “ The Strength of God, ” or the young narrator
in Joyce ’ s “ Araby, ” Conrad “ watches them from his bedroom window, peering between
the slats of the blind ” (55). He watches them, or the daughter anyway, lustfully; he
watches them also because he feels guilty: “ Now he feels like shit. This is not how
he wants to see himself: as landed gentry, an overseer. He wants to be kind. He wants
to make broad, humanitarian gestures. He wants to be like V á clav Havel. ” He wants
to be, but he is not. Instead, he just watches them, weakly promising himself that
next year he will shovel the snow himself. Cast adrift in a single family home, Conrad
spends his time gazing out the window at this family, itself essentially whole but
494
Jeff Birkenstein
houseless. It is this window through which, Robert Beuka claims,
“
middle
-
class
American culture casts its uneasy refl ective gaze on itself
”
amidst the
“
symbolic
minefi eld ” of modern suburbia (4).
And yet the majority of the major characters in Friends have already risen to, and
are “ content ” to remain at, their middle - to upper middle - class level, all the while
trying desperately to ignore the life
-
rupturing explosions that lurk behind every
corner. This socioeconomic level embarrasses them and leaves them ill prepared to
deal with those from other classes. This is especially true when the (sub - )divisions are
purely economic and not educational, this latter creating a forced solidarity. Conrad,
we learn, is trying to recover from the recent death of his wife and child in a car
accident; he obsesses over all the chores he must complete alone. For this reason he
hires the Czech graduate student. But he also does so because, as an “ affl uent ” Ameri-
can, the ethos of his suburban community conditions him to try and help those less
fortunate, if only to assuage his class - guilt. The confl ict arises when this Czech “ charity
case ” violates Conrad ’ s neighborhood space. This immigrant, who has come to America
to better herself, has crossed into the territory of Conrad ’ s insulated neighborhood.
This is certainly a common enough occurrence in the suburbs of America where the
house cleaners and yard keepers arrive by day and leave before dusk. But Conrad is a
professor and is thus often home during the day. After Conrad embarrassedly tells her
that he can ’ t even balance his checkbook, she “ looked at him with a mild pity, perhaps
the way she regarded all Americans, as a weak people with money and bad puns. She
is strong and beautiful and smart, a worthy compatriot of V á clav Havel ” (61). She
already is what Conrad cannot be.
When we fi rst meet her, Nina is likewise trapped in her home and in her life. The
snow confi nes her older, present - day self within her younger self, a self who was long
ago molested by her brother, in “ Love in the Middle Ages. ” But where snow trapped
the girl Nina, it eventually becomes a blanket of comfort for the adult Nina, who at
last learns to trust a man. Almost. On their way to the bedroom to make love for the
fi rst time, the snow recreates, in part, Nina ’ s childhood dreams from before they were
assaulted by her brother ’ s actions and her parents ’ inaction: “ As they entered her own
room and shut the door behind them, she looked out the window and saw that fresh
snow had fallen, arborvitae wearing long white gloves on their limbs, like women at
the opera. Frost - mountains sloped down the windowpanes into the valley of the sill ”
(157). Nina is not fully recovered, however, for she passively allows Palmer to take
her to bed and is even “ too embarrassed to look at him. ” Nevertheless, it is a start.
Boundaries are permeable in Friends . Even the noise of the congested city cannot
stay outside; like the fear of the prowler, the din invades the suburban streets and
enters homes through the windows, under the doors. Home is an illusory r
efuge at
best, in part because this society of friends is anything but permanent. Cherry ’ s char-
acters have come to Madison from other places and are always looking to go to yet
others; there is scarcely a Wisconsinian in the batch. Typical of the characters is Nina ’ s
love interest, Palmer, a man who, “ like most academics[,] … was deracinated, a man
for all locales, Pittsburgh, Charlottesville, Palo Alto had been some of the points on
The Short-Story Cycle
495
his trajectory, but weren ’ t they all the same, intellectually homogenous no matter
how ethnically diverse, one big reading list? ” (140). Writing about this transitory
American nature in Marxism Today , Doreen Massey asks, “ How, in the face of all this
movement and intermixing, can we retain any sense of a local place and its particular-
ity?
”
(24). Cherry
’
s Madison, then, subverts the more traditional, pre
-
industrial
understanding of community and space against which George Willard struggled, for
everyone is ever in fl ux, trying to cross boundaries, because this is what educated
people are
supposed
to do. Just among Nina
’
s friends,
“
Aria wished she lived in
Wyoming or Utah, someplace roomy
”
(175); Larry
“
was thinking of moving to
Chicago. He had an offer ” (181). When Jewish DA Manny Durkheim and the African
American performance artist/professor Jasmine Jazz (who owns a cat named Zora
Neale) begin dating, Manny must overcome his discomfort with their multiracial
situation. This, despite their mutual attraction and his belief that he is beyond preju-
dice. After sex for the fi rst time:
“ You have to get used to the idea that you ’ re the kind of man who could fi nd himself
in bed with a woman like me, ” she reminded him.
It was already morning. Cold light was breaking into the room, a burglar stealing
the night away. (105)
Manny has his work cut out for him.
In “ Tell Her, ” Guy knows that he must inform his wife that they are about to lose
the house, because the bookstore for which he mortgaged it is not paying the bills