FRANK DISCUSSIONS, FRANK SHORT STORIES
By J. Charles
artssf.com, the independent observer of Northern California books
Week of Feb. 26-March 4, 2010
Vol.
12, No. 72
Short stories are
tricky. They lack the spaciousness of
the novel; there is no room for subplots,
leisurely descriptions, or occasional wordiness.
You need a good story to tell, and every word
counts. It's not impossible to do this
well. James Joyce was a master of the
form. John Cheever succeeded most of the time, and Edith Wharton often. It is, nevertheless, hard to get it right.
Northern California-based Joan Frank, in her collection “In Envy
Country,”
pulls it off--occasionally.
Is it fair to
compare a twenty-first century writer to the time-tested greats? Perhaps not.
Joyce, Cheever, and Wharton were masters. They
could sketch a scene with a few strokes
of the pen and put you right into it.
Joyce and Cheever excelled at creating quite ordinary characters
whose reactions to the constraints of
their society ranged from uneasiness to quiet despair.
No one tells a story like Wharton. Frank
aspires to these heights, and sometimes
reaches them. That's not a minor
accomplishment.
Description,
mood, story line. Frank can create them all.
The problem is that she seldom incorporates them all into one
piece. As a result, too often I
found
it difficult to engage with her work.
In some of the
stories the alienation is a result of narrative technique.
For instance,
some tales are told from the
point of view of a character who doesn't quite understand what she sees. So, in “A Thing that Happens” we see the
breakdown of an older woman through the eyes of Sarah, a twenty-one
year-old
college student “who'd grown up nested in loyal praise.” Even
inexperienced
Sara knows that Ruby is admirable: “a good model. She
was keeping a secret list of them in her journal--women
she'd decided made good models of how to be.
Who to be. Especially as you got
older.” Frank does a fine job of drawing
a smug young woman. (It's not often I
want to slap a fictional character.) But
Sarah's not the interesting one in this story.
Ruby is; and no one as vacuous as Sarah could understand what
brings
Ruby to the state she is at by the story's end. So we can't either. To
be sure,
there is a suggestion of a change in
Sarah by the end, but it is Ruby we care for.
Because we never really know Ruby's story,
the piece doesn't quite work.
Frank writes
better when she moves her stories away from the west coast. She knows Northern
California, but perhaps she is stifled by familiarity in
the same
way as her characters. In her
California-based stories we get a little fog, some bay views, but no
real
feeling of location. She seems, however,
to see foreign lands more clearly. In “A
Note on the Type” Rochelle goes to Greece on holiday: “Rochelle flew to
Athens,
which looked like one vast, seedy miracle-mile, crumbling sheds and
shacks and
tire shops, scraps and auto parts, garbage and noise.
Athens
frightened her with its beggars and wizened grifters, its miles of dust
and
chaos.” One knows the feeling, and one
immediately begins to worry about Rochelle's future.
As Frank's sense of place is stimulated
by
foreign locations, her stories get better.
“Sandy Candy,” the best piece in this collection, takes place in
a
sleazy Spanish holiday town, swamped with Britishers attracted by cheap
booze
and questionable entertainment. Brad and
Lorna, fresh out of Sebastopol, come
for
some affordable sun. While
there, they have a bizarre experience
which exposes the cracks in their comfortable relationship. The ending is beautifully written. I'd quote it, but that would spoil
things. The story shows Frank's talent
at its best.
Probably,
reading a whole volume of short stories in one sitting highlights its
flaws,
but what is a reviewer to do? The great
collections carry the reader long. “Dubliners” has such a sense of
place that
it can almost be read as a novel.
Cheever's stories are so
despairing that you read through whole volumes hoping for
redress and
come out wanting a drink. Wharton's New York
stories work
together to make you, fleetingly, a member of a narrow, but fascinating
tranche
of society. Frank, on the other hand, is
still at the point where her stories
only succeed intermittently.
Will
she
ever produce a volume where the stories are the stronger for being read
together? I think that's possible.
In Envy Country
by Joan
Frank (University
of Notre Dame
Press, 173 pp.,
$20.00)
©J. Charles 2010
#
J. Charles is a book-review contributor to www.artssf.com.
These critiques appearing weekly (or sometimes semi-weekly, but never
weakly)focus
on book reviews (by authors of the region), plus theater, dance and new
musical creativity in performance, with forays into recordings by local
artists as well.
#
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