Clap Your Hands
For those who like their literary magazines neat and orderly, Colorado Review is for you. All four short stories are gathered together at the beginning of the magazine, followed by 36 poems, followed by a single work of nonfiction, and concluding with eight book reviews. This symmetry may not be significant, but this reviewer found it oddly comforting.
The first short story is also the winner of the 2008 Nelligan Prize for Short Fiction, selected by Antonya Nelson. It's "Witness," Ashley Pankratz's first published story. What an auspicious debut.
Jack and Anna Renton are Jehovah's Witnesses who live on Jack's father's farm. Jack is haunted by the memory of a visit he and Anna make to a house, "'encouraging our neighbors to read their Bibles,'" at the beginning of the story. The door is answered by a little girl in possible distress, and Jack has two girls of his own. His father, two weeks earlier, sold the farm to avoid bankruptcy and broke the news to Jack ("'I got nothing at all to leave you, kid'"). Now his father, Tom, determines his own fate and informs Jack of it in a heartbreaking note. Jack's reaction to this comprises the conclusion of the story.
Pankratz narrates this tale in the present tense, which is fitting, as it captures the zeitgeist of our financially and morally troubled era. Every character remains in the mind, disturbingly so, from Tom Renton to the occupants of the house Jack and Anna visit, to Brother Jenson at the Snake Creek Kingdom Hall, who makes a statement about Anna that Jack takes issue with. The ending is powerful.
Meaghan Mulholland's story "Immersion Program" is about two young people on "a journey of forgetfulness," especially Jill, who is trying to put time and space between her and the death of her brother, Charlie. She meets Dean after teaching in Honduras as part of an "immersion program," and they decide to travel to Mexico, where he wants to take photographs. Dean's camera is a distancing device to keep him at bay from the real world. So it's difficult for Jill to talk to him about Charlie. When they hear of a boy killed in the surf at Zicatela, and later Jill discovers a piece of a surfboard washed ashore, she can no longer run from her pain, even if Dean can. This is an intriguing character study of two people who have left time behind (literally--they make a pact at the outset to do away with clocks and any mention of time), but find that the past is always with them.
In Linda Woolford's "The Wider World," Marilou is on a journey as well, only hers is a "final journey" "to begin the slow unfurling of her life." She's a seventy-nine-year-old widow who has moved into an independent-living apartment at the Paul Revere Continuing Care Community. Unable to relate to her gossipy neighbors, Marilou begins meeting one of the community's cleaning women, Estrella, at the local library to give her English lessons. They soon become life lessons, and Marilou ends up learning more than English. This is a gentle tale about two good women and how their paths cross and ultimately separate.
The title of Barrington Smith-Seetachitt's story "Superman Falling" comes from a joke someone tells at a high school reunion Sarah and her husband Alex are attending in Indiana. The joke is pretty funny until you find out why not everyone at the table is laughing. It's brilliant of Smith-Seetachitt to make it a good joke so that the reader is laughing also before being blindsided by the revelation. At that point in the story, we become, as the saying goes, putty in her hands.
Sarah and Alex are tremendously sympathetic characters. They have suffered a loss, and "Superman Falls" is about the impact this loss has on their marriage. Of Alex: "He marvels that they can seem so together on the surface as everything is crumbling underneath." Everything rings true. At a critical point, one of the characters, drunk, rides a mechanical bull--and doesn't fall off. Smith-Seetachitt subverts our expectations more than once, just like life.
Stories on this topic are not hard to find. Anne Tyler's novel The Accidental Touristcomes to mind. But "Superman Falls" is one of the best I've come across. It's my favorite of the forty-nine pieces of prose and poetry in this issue.
