This time, she dips into The Odyssey for the legend of Circe, a nymph who turns Odysseus’ crew of men into pigs. The writer returns to Homer, the wellspring that led her to an Orange Prize for The Song of Achilles (2012). Imagine all the prayers.” So says Circe, a sly, petulant, and finally commanding voice that narrates the entirety of Miller’s dazzling second novel. I speak now of the sun-struck, deeply lived-in days of my past.Ī retelling of ancient Greek lore gives exhilarating voice to a witch. There may be a barely-glimpsed smaller novel buried in all this succotash (Tom's marriage and life as a football coach), but it's sadly overwhelmed by the book's clumsy central narrative device (flashback ad infinitum) and Conroy's pretentious prose style: ""There are no verdicts to childhood, only consequences, and the bright freight of memory. It's his death that precipitates the nervous breakdown that costs Tom his job, and Savannah, almost, her life. There are enough traumas here to fall an average-sized mental ward, but the biggie centers around Luke, who uses the skills learned as a Navy SEAL in Vietnam to fight a guerrilla war against the installation of a nuclear power plant in Colleton and is killed by the authorities. Susan (a shrink with a lot of time on her hands) says to Tom, "Will you stay in New York and tell me all you know?" and he does, for nearly 600 mostly-bloated pages of flashbacks depicting The Family Wingo of swampy Colleton County: a beautiful mother, a brutal shrimper father (the Great Santini alive and kicking), and Tom and Savannah's much-admired older brother, Luke. Savannah, it turns out, is catatonic, and before the suicide attempt had completely assumed the identity of a dead friend-the implication being that she couldn't stand being a Wingo anymore. When he hears that his fierce, beautiful twin sister Savannah, a well-known New York poet, has once again attempted suicide, he escapes his present emasculation by flying north to meet Savannah's comely psychiatrist, Susan Lowenstein. Tom Wingo is an unemployed South Carolinian football coach whose internist wife is having an affair with a pompous cardiac man. Half a century ago, Ralph Ellison was excited by the prodigious talent on display in this collection, and it can still galvanize contemporary readers.Ī flabby, fervid melodrama of a high-strung Southern family from Conroy ( The Great Santini, The Lords of Discipline), whose penchant for overwriting once again obscures a genuine talent. The collection remains an exemplar of humane, tough-minded grace while anticipating much of the trenchant, boundary-breaching fiction by young African-American writers emerging so far this century. “Of Cabbages and Kings” evokes some of the darkly comedic paranoia of the 1960s while “An Act of Prostitution” puts the edgier comedy of the legal system up front. McPherson’s keen ear is perhaps most evident in “A Solo Song: For Doc,” which uses the irascible first-person voice of a 60-something Pullman waiter to recount the life of a similarly testy co-worker whose supreme competence and fierce dedication couldn’t protect him from bigotry or arbitrary dismissal. With similar incisiveness and sensitivity, the title novella dissects the vagaries of interracial romance. “Gold Coast”-which was later included in The Best American Short Stories of the Century, edited by John Updike-manages to compress whole contradictions of personality, ethnicity, and class into the seemingly discursive but poignant reminiscences of a young black janitor’s apprenticeship to his building’s embittered and elderly Irish superintendent.
Upon reading this new edition, it somehow isn’t enough to say that the stories “hold up well.” Their blend of grittiness and sophistication, compassion and common sense, measured observation and melancholy humor can still profoundly move and illuminate.
Nine years earlier, the Savannah-born McPherson, who held degrees from both Harvard Law School and the University of Iowa (whose storied Writers Workshop he later directed), published this, his first and only other short-fiction collection. McPherson (1943-2016) was the first African-American to win a Pulitzer Prize in fiction, which he received for his 1977 collection of short stories, Elbow Room. Short stories reach across decades of racial upheaval and social transformation to reaffirm what remains human and vulnerable in all of us.
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