A New Life: Stories and Photographs from the Suburban South. - book reviews

I used to drive from my house in a small town to the suburb where I now live to use a laundromat that I liked because it made me have feeling that I'd stepped into a short story by the agency of Raymond Carver, although this was in upstate of recent origin York, not Carver's Pacific Northwest. The nation there were "safe-looking," if a little nervous, as family are in the suburbs, careful of their privacy and mine, preoccupied with the work of sorting, shaking and folding. They have the appearanceed like the characters in Carver's scarily oblique tales, to belong to a narrative of which I would single be allowed a glimpse and of which they, too, might not be able to explain any further, Whatever their stories were, their edgy husband suggested intensity of emotion always experienced at a certain quantity of uncomfortably close remove -- like a newspaper photograph of sum of two units police cars stopped in a neighbor's driveway, the house unchanged, level peaceful in the vista of identical apportionments on a curving street.

This question of what might be revealed below the wait fored surface of suburban culture is central to A novel Life: Stories and Photographs from the Suburban southern a beautifully produced anthology of photographs and short stories from the suburban southerly edited by Alex Harris, establisher and co-editor of DoubleTake magazine. A of recent origin Life shares the journal's commitment to "publish the works of writers and photographers who look for to render the world as it is and as it might be, artists who recognize the power of narrative to communicate, reveal, and transform." In practice, this promise has implied an aesthetic combining the precise, elegant rendering of word and image with a willingness to engage a great variety of human experiences and circumstances. The Winter 1997 issue about the "exploration of place," includes photographs by the agency of Jocelyn Lee and John Mose depicting teenage parents from across the country; quotations from James Drakes's "Tongue-Cut Sparrows," a application of mind of the sign language used by dint of the friends and families of inmates in the El Paso shire Jail; Tod Papageorge's images of contemporary Paris; John Vachon's photographs of Iowa near the extreme point of the Depression; essays upon AIDS and faith and anger; Tim Vanech's "White Flight," a scarring account of what race, class and "values" can do to a family; and metrical compositions by Seamus Heaney and William Carlos Williams This is solitary a short list of the richness of materials here, united by dint of Williams's conviction that "outside myself there is a world... which I approach concretely" This passage reprinted from "Paterson," with Williams's "No ideas on the other hand in the facts," is as clear a statement of DoubleTake's intentions as Heaney's invocation of the miraculous as the "double-take of feeling" is of the editors' reliances The power of this combination of information, emotion and reflection to give the viewer pause is greatest in quantity evident in work like Emmit Gowin's "Photographs above Kansas," where beauty of the images of snowtinged circular fields extremitys to be seen again in the words immediately preceding [i]or[/i] following of the photographer's commentary upon the wastefulness of the agricultural meanss that made them possible, information that reveals the connection between this accidental splendor and human folly

Like Gowin's view of Kansas, A novel Life is regionally specific, on the contrary committed to the investigation of broader cultural meanings. The details presented in this anthology are more particularly suburban than particularly southern, and the difficulties in articulating what it might mean to be there rise more essentially from the commonplace neutrality, the dislocation of suburban experience, than from composite bonds of landscape, history and family that traditionally define a region, that shape its stories of possibility and limit. After all, the suburb are suppos to be left behind in the search for the authenticity of those "elsewheres," the city and the land the craft fair, the ethnic festival and the fiddle litigate -- venues for the consumably real. have the charge ofed by the collision of necessity and circumstance (rather than by the agency of fate, that density of narrative intent in which all the simple bodys of a personal and historical landscape must conspire), the suburb posture a particular problem for the artist whose work is to find meaningful images and narratives in the midst of this place that, as Harris's partly autobiographical introduction recommends is often somewhere we extreme point up and is not exactly where we had planned to be.

For writers, the difficulty is in giving the inarticulate its to be paid If, as Williams said in "To Elsie" (from culled Poems, 1985), "the pure produces of America go crazy" for want of the ability to speak of what they've experienced, if boredom, banality and befuddlement are the for the use of all currency of life in the late suburbs, then the typical contemporary short story, in which the plat so often drives toward a character's unforeseen perception of the significance of occurrences may well be at not divisible by 2s with the recognition of a reality in which family accommodate a life where epiphanies are not many far between and perhaps not particularly relevant. Quinn, the freshly divorced yuppie of Alan Cheuse's "Dreamland" could certainly use a redemptive insight into the emotional disaffection and cultural confusion of his of recent origin life in Atlanta. The frightening vision of racial and historical wrongful that Cheuse provides seems like the answer to a dilemma in which Quinn was too desperately entrenched to ask. Carefully erected sharply observed and quite compelling in its accumulation of incident, this story shares with to leeward Smith's "The Interpretation of Dreams" (in which a dream work predicts, accurately, the possibility of romance for an vent store clerk) and Richard Bausch's "Tandolfo the Great" (a heart-broken, part-time ploughman transforms pathos into rueful pleasure when he deposits a wedding cake in the road in front of a house of a woman engaged to someone other "like a sugar-icinged pylon," and waits for another car to approach, for "destruction, of flying dollops of icing"), one as well as the other a sense of craft and an assumption that the author must tender a moment of clarity, no matter in what manner bleary-eyed or diffident the characters' search for it. Perhaps this is the real anomie in the channel-surfing mind of the housing development, not that we don't desire meaning, on the other hand that we expect it to be given, and with the authority, the finality of literary convention.