It’s tempting, in writing about the collection of bite-sized short stories,
Moses Supposes by Ellen Currie (Scribner, $10 paper), to say
something about the black humor of the Irish, the particularly Gaelic way of
salting gaiety with tears, or some other poetic nonsense like that. And I
started to – but then it struck me all as a load, if you know what I mean. In
the first place, I’ve only met one Irish person in my life, and she was rather
blatantly cheery. Besides, the characters in Moses Supposes are often
Irish-American transplants and their old-country roots, but human beings are
what concern Currie. To walk into Ellen Currie’s world is to find yourself in
the realm of the all-too human. Currie’s characters could all use some training in dispute resolution: they’re
just not very nice. In “Old Hag, You Have Killed Me,” a family gathers
acrimoniously at the hospital to debate whether or not their mother really
stabbed their father; in “The Solution to Canned Peas” a divorced couple,
unable to abandon either suspicion or love, discuss the possibility that their
daughter may be planning to murder her mother; “Slim Young Woman in No
Distress” portrays the anger of a precocious (and somewhat twisted) child at
his mother’s divorce. But it’s not enough to describe Currie’s characters as
being talk-show fodder, although they’d be pretty interesting on Oprah.
Currie sets her stories in small spaces, where the evidence of her characters’
banality is inescapable even to them.
What in the hands of another writer might become sudsy, angst-ridden drama or
a pale imitation of James Joyce, Currie turns into unique human pathos and
comedy – and somehow, there isn’t anything more moving than to see these people
placed face-to-face with the smallness of their respective existence. You laugh
because, dammit, it hurts. Her writing is spare and sharp-edged, with
shimmering touches of poetry, and she rests her characterization on small but
telling details instead of unwieldy exposition – exposition, I imagine, would
be out of place in an Ellen Currie story. These are stories about the strange
things that we do for love, actions that by their own natures defy
explanation.
The stories in Moses Supposes have been described as “snapshots,” which
is a very effective description of these vivid tableaux. But Moses
Supposes reminds me of nothing so much as shadowboxes. Shadowboxes, for
most of us, are those little craftsy things third-graders make out of shoebox
lids, paper butterflies, cotton balls, and what-not. They have the appeal of
portraying three dimensions instead of two in a small space. Ellen Currie’s
shadowboxes eschew cottonball clouds and paper butterflies for such memorable
items as a woman’s bracelets, a homemade noose, a child’s toy tiger, a
battered, spiral-bound notebook. And in the back of her boxes she places
mirrors, polished and highly reflective. Those mirrors are the final touch, the
coup de grace that makes each story in Moses Supposes linger
enigmatically in the mind.
– Barbara Strickland
Murder mysteries frequently
function as a barometer of national discontent – the better ones get there
ahead of the crowd. That may be Dashiell Hammett’s left-of-center legacy, a
storyline on which hangs society’s dirty laundry and consumptive values. But
the venerable genre has long since moved from the brooding noir city and
shuffled off to the ‘burbs and yuppie fast-money centers. In fact, today’s
hapless hero is most often not a P.I. and, in any case, too befuddled by the
shopping mall of horrors to go about his or her work with an over-arching sense
of coolness. Who needs San Francisco in the Twenties? Sleazy status is
franchised daily on television.
Aspen, Colorado is the setting of Into Thin Air by Thomas Zigal
(Delacorte Press, $19.95, hard). Ex-hippie Sheriff Kurt Muller trips over a
string of murders in a town where local boys make bad and the FBI Ruby Ridges
an enclave of small-time Mexican kitchen staff pot pushers. Before long, Muller
is implicated by an arrogant FBI agent who epitomizes the hoary
compartmentalized morality and bureaucratic sadism that is the drug war. All of
Zigal’s well-drawn characters evoke the anger, disgust, and sympathy of the
reader which makes a plot involving mounting body counts, celebrity freaks, and
Argentinian “Dirty War” politics believable.
Into Thin Air is also a melting sand castle of nostalgia – about
development-ravaged Aspen, about the collapse of family and friendship, about
idealism sold for a quicker deal. FBI, coke-pushing football star, terrorist on
the lam – all live up to the bad smell of today’s sneering cynical discourse
and the politics of personal domination for its own sake. It’s a low-hanging
cloud which engulfs us all in a showy cock-strut of spectacular impotence.
While some who move in Muller’s milieu can kill, and the sheriff dodges many
attempts, what can he do about a more powerful weapon: the language of super
confidence, of degradation, of the kow-down? Can we expect his responses to
fare any better than our own? No one gets out of this untarnished and some of
the unlikeliest survive. Though complicated, the plot of Zigal’s first mystery
is as tight as a roadster on a mountain grade and when you’ve reached the end
there’s still enough horsepower for the good guys to beat a retreat to a land
that never-never was. The author is writing his second. Quickly, I hope.
From Aspen we move to Charlotte, the setting for Jody Jaffe’s Horse of a
Different Killer (Fawcett Columbine, $21 hard). Nattie Gold, fashion
writer for the Commercial Appeal, teams up with Henry Goode, that
daily’s investigative reporter, to search out the truth behind the mutual
destruction of a high-dollar hunter horse and its detested trainer, Wally. The
slaughter in the stall looks like equuscide gone awry, but it’s not: another
trainer, the embittered ex-boyfriend of Wally, is suspected of staging the
bloody affair; but neither Gold, Goode, nor Detective Tony Odom are happy with
that symmetry. So the search begins. Along the way, Gold receives threats
telling her to lay off the assignment. It is good advice for the novel.
In real life, Jaffe spent 10 years as a feature writer for the Charlotte
Observer. At times, the first-person narrative reads like a collection of
breezy columns and essays with almost-clever metaphors and sort of cute
one-liners. Even dialogue can resemble narrative. Both, however, fail to
consistently provide the connective tissue necessary for breaks in time and
space. (I found myself running over and backing up to find the border between
North and South Carolina.) The spare story line is loaded up with lots of
arcane hunter culture practice and Yiddish vs. Southern expressionism. But the
horse talk has little bearing on the story and with few ironies, gaffes of
consequence, or even a “say what?,” the potential for linguistic amusement and
conflict is lost. What’s left is a flat-line theme of figurines on a mantel,
revisited from time to time.
The novel is populated by relatively few main characters and even fewer
suspects. Motives of insurance fraud, blackmail, and jealousy are aired well in
advance, so it is no surprise when the real culprit is revealed. But climactic
surprise in mysteries comes less from sleight of hand than from reader
involvement with character.
Perhaps the greatest problem with Horse is that there is little action
or sense of action until well after the half-way point. You must content
yourself with Jaffe’s description of hunter life and her effective assay of TQM
and “civic journalism” which infest daily papers everywhere. A novel along
those lines would be both timely and fascinating.
– Stephen McGuire
This article appears in October 20 • 1995 and October 20 • 1995 (Cover).