Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, June 6, 1993 TAG: 9306060208
SECTION: HORIZON PAGE: F-4 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Reviewed By MONTY S. LEITCH
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
If the winners of the Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction can be said to have any common attribute, it's a facility for startling, original language that gives palpable voice to singular characters.
Which is the same as saying that these prize-winners share only excellence - a tribute to the University of Georgia's 12- year-old competition.
This year's winner, "Mother Rocket" by Rita Ciresi, is no exception to the rule. The first page of the first story, "The Silent Partner," assures you that you're in the hands of a mature, confident story-teller who listens to the world around her: "Introducing his champion chatterbox, girlfriend Baby Bartholomew. Stuffed to the gills with jabber, she went bibbly babbly all the blessed day." Who wouldn't give her eye-teeth to have written those euphonious, vivid sentences!
Each of the seven stories in this slender volume examines a love relationship, although in many of them, there's precious little love, or the love's been lost, or it's imaginary, or only one-sided.
Or, as in the title story "Mother Rocket," it's so peculiar, because the lovers themselves are peculiar, that it doesn't quite look like love. When Jude Silverman stands on a window ledge and threatens to jump, declaring, "I was born to die," her boyfriend says, "So do it later, when I'm not looking. Come on down now, and we'll get married." They do. But that's hardly the end of the story.
Over and over, Ciresi is able to show how differing expectations, differing perceptions, and subtle self-delusions open crazy, wide gulfs between people who might otherwise connect uneventfully. In my favorite from this collection, "Dutch Wife," cartographer Tom Zogg goes off to Shy Beaver, SD, to redraw the community's maps, to see snow, and to find himself a Pioneer Woman.
He's met by a community of "tall, broad-shouldered farmers, veritable Norse gods in faded overalls and seed-feed caps," and equally "broad-shouldered women" - a community in which a woman who dies "an unplowed field," he's assured, is "rare."
Zogg, nevertheless, holds tight to his misshapen dream of Pioneer Woman, who's out there somewhere in the cold, cold North, just waiting to "sew for him, cook for him, completely un-Zogg him ... transform him from a skinny little surveyor into a virile, rugged Pioneer Man."
You could say that that's exactly what happens. But not at all in the manner that Tom Zogg expects. And not especially happily, either.
Ciresi's characters may delude themselves, but they're no mystery to her. She sees right into their hearts. And she lets us look there, too.
Monty S. Leitch is this year's winner of Shenandoah's Thomas H. Carter Prize for the Essay.
by CNB