Some of the pieces in this collection by Judith Shaw are stories in the sense that a protagonist faces tension and the tension is somehow resolved. Some are brief memoirs. Some, like many poems these days, are brief, intense descriptions of a person, place, or event.
The prose is tight, flexible, supple employing short to long sentences as appropriate.
One of the stories is about two sisters, one married to a childish, arrogant husband and how the sisters deal with him separately and as a team. The husband has vainly acquired a drawing by the renascence artist Guercino. Guercino is aptly chosen as if the character knew the author who was writing hm. His style is intensely realistic, his subject mostly people whose portraits appear in revealing light, whose faces, unlike many artist of his time, show particular emotion, but coolly.
Shaw is not afraid of esoteric references, to location: New York street corners; to Guercino; to someone undergoing a Kohutian analysis, to little-known culinary techniques.
The voice is both detached and intimate, like Guercino.
Where there is room to do so, the characters are fully conceived. You read about them like you read about people, not like stereotypes. They tend to be intelligent and educated.
The stories are mostly about facing death, in one way or another, mourning, either the mourning of a person for a beloved who is dying or has died, or the mourning of a dying person for his (usually) life. Those dying are usually men who are important figure to those who mourn them, husbands or fathers of the mourners, who are usually women. Sometimes the mourning is drawn from an oblique angle, as in a woman seeking recontact with an old lover after the death of her husband, but mostly straight on, searchingly engaged.
Less searching but illustrative, is a poem in reply to a poem by Richard Wilbur. Wilbur’s poem recounts how Don Quixote lets his horse decide where to go next, reveling in the fantasy that whatever course the horse chooses will lead to grandiose adventure. Rosinante heads for the barn. This is Cervantes’ usual trope of warmly contrasting Quixote’s grandiose visions with commonplace reality. Shaw’s response is about Quixote grieving for his fate.
Another theme is separation in geography, usually between characters living in New York and those living in parts of northern California. The New Yorkers in California mourn for their lost environment.
The stories mostly focus on a single thread. My favorite, however, has the resonance of two strings. The point of view character is a New York woman enduring mourning in a Northern California coastal village, but the subject is the tenuous existence and final death of a local hippie waif.
The book is nicely designed and printed. This is quality reading material also in the material sense.
