Details That Make a Life
GIARELLI, ANDREW
Details That Make a Life The Lists of the Past By Julie Hayden Viking. 159 pp. $7.95. Reviewed by Andrew Giarelli Like a child at a grownups' party, Julie Hayden loves to interrupt her own...
...For a beat in time wind, noise, wheels are still...
...Indeed, no one I know has so skillfully captured mid-morning on Long Island Sound, or so accurately recorded the desperate, comical search for just a pinch of wilderness in upper Fairfield County...
...It's already been done as well as possible in The Wizard of Oz...
...Reviewed by Andrew Giarelli Like a child at a grownups' party, Julie Hayden loves to interrupt her own stories with breathtaking assessments of the way things really are...
...To wait...
...Next year he will be out with the other small pirates and witches, performing a ceremony he has not invented...
...The latter group richly renders the deterioration and death of the narrator's father and his family's muddled efforts to maintain the old man's complex, demanding garden during his hospital stints...
...For this first effort, despite its weaknesses, is occasionally unforgettable...
...Hayden has an especially keen eye and nose for what human hands have attached to the earth, whether garden or graveyard...
...Charlie, too, can only slip away from the meaningful center of his universe after this...
...The 12 stories in Hayden's first collection are split into "Brief Lives" and "The Lists of the Past...
...There would be trees enough to take on every man, woman and child...
...Just as this absent Robert is about to reappear, maybe to provide a focus to her life once more, the chance is lost and attention shifts back to the little boy: "Charlie lifts his hands toward the moon and revolves in a dance of admiration, conducting some ceremony of his own...
...Her focus is consistently on decay: Mulch piles and mushrooms growing out of animal cemeteries form the core of her best descriptive paragraphs...
...They are confused attempts at the lonely-woman - in - Manhattan - fighting - insanity - alcoholism - and - deliverymen genre, unfit for a first collection by a writer most comfortable with the outwardly sedate stance of a daughter still tied to the comforts of Fairfield County...
...In the Words of," a story about a man and woman thrashing out their dead love in the Catskills, includes this little corpse: "The trees march down the hillside...
...The Park gathers itself and freezes...
...But the people are flocking out of the cities If only the trees could fight back: a leafy, shadowy army...
...These well-wrought passages, though, are frequently followed by tired interruptions...
...Everywhere, except within her, is the vision of a man she used to love...
...He is a difficult man to forget, this "Pop" who never stopped talking baby talk...
...There is both fear and love in the writer's appreciation of the countless details that make a life and a death...
...The animals in the zoo are listening I feel as though all my life I have been traveling toward this spot, to wait beside this baby at the vortex of his joy...
...It is late afternoon on Halloween and the city park is alive with rituals, particularly the still-forming rituals of baby Charlie...
...But the sentences come far too often, reminding readers that here is just another self-conscious grownup...
...The others making up the opening section, fall adrift...
...Hayden works wonders with male characters...
...Whether it's Charlie, the list-making Mr...
...unfortunately, the startling knowledge capping those details in the final tale is thrown at us too glibly...
...Sorry...
...Not to stand...
...Thus in "A Touch of Nature" the author moves briskly through a weird little scene that has a group of children conducting a carefully rehearsed burial ceremony for a dead cardinal, notes their desire to extend the burgeoning cemetery into the yard next door, and then clobbers it all by saying: "In the unlikeliest ways, the land is threatened...
...The first two stories in "Brief Lives" bear the imprint of fathers and families, too...
...Like the Secret Service men across the street keeping watch over the apartment where the Kennedy children live, the narrator is a substitute parent, with orders to wear Charlie out...
...One hopes Julie Hayden will overcome this deficiency in her next book, and that she will get out of the habit of interrupting herself...
...These tales, "Walking with Charlie" and "A Touch of Nature," are the finest in the book...
...Hol-comb or an underfed country waif who crouches under a porch to devour the first books of his life and soon dies of a burst appendix, she's right on the mark...
...She is as close as she will ever come to the center of her world...
...Instead this child, still the center of his world, wears into her a recognition of how far she has traveled away from the center of her own world...
...But the women in these stories remain cardboard figures—looking out on the main action from second-floor windows, fading into the edges of the narrative...
...Hayden uses her bag of surprises most effectively in "Walking with Charlie...
Vol. 59 • November 1976 • No. 22
