THE STANDARD READER
The Standard Reader Books in Brief The Difference Between Women and Men: Stories by Bret Lott (Random House, 208 pp., $23.95). When a writer who is also editor of the Southern Review gathers his...
...On the other hand, one that works brilliantly is "Rose...
...As domesticated as most of his settings are, the universe of Bret Lott's stories is the uncertainty of family life...
...He draws the reader into the haunting events with the sure and steady fluidity of a memory surfacing at its own pace...
...A Rose for Emily" is as straightforward as any tale Faulkner ever chose to tell, achieving its gothic quality with a minimal suggestion of grotesque events...
...Locations, to the extent they are discernible, are all over the map, from New England to Florida and coast to coast...
...But it does seem that Lott's epigraph could afford to be a touch more apologetic...
...But the disjunctions are more perceived than real, like those moments when life briefly feels like a Saturday Night Live skit that no one is watching but you...
...Faulkner, with respect...
...Postscript" is a nice story to end the book...
...parents don't really know their children...
...Most of the stories eerily border the edge of an alternate universe: A man in the car with his wife uses a wrong turn of phrase and reaching home discovers that his marriage of 27 years is now set on an uncomfortable new path...
...While there is no hint of the impact of cyberspace, and none of the hyped-up eclecticism of the stories of, say, David Foster Wallace, the characters Lott plays witness to inhabit today's world, where marriage and parenthood are fragile states, never very far removed from disintegration...
...children miss parents who have been dead for years...
...When a writer who is also editor of the Southern Review gathers his stories into a collection like The Difference Between Women and Men, one thought that has to pass through the reader's mind is that the regional writer is becoming a thing of the past, even if one of the writer's most enjoyable tales begins with the epigraph, "For Mr...
...Disconnections are vertical as well as horizontal...
...It's a brief piece in which a writer mulls over his daily efforts in the face of his family's daily uncertainties, to find the right words for a story...
...Then, in a perfect rising of the moon against a night sky, he finds them...
...Another man, admitting an adulterous affair to his wife, takes comfort in assuring her that they will get through this, unaware that she is already seeing him dissolve and about to disappear...
...Lott does show a touch of regionalism by exercising his abilities as a Faulkner connoisseur to replay the events of Faulkner's famous story "A Rose for Emily," only as the facts of the tale could be known to no one but the dying Miss Emily herself...
...Such moments get their potency, though, from their light arrival, and not every story here works equally well...
...An electrical contractor, confident in his sense of what it takes to make things work, reaches for the switch plate in the bedroom of his tract house and finds how little control he actually has over the events of his life...
...Set apart from all the works in period and tone, it is a memory piece, and a ghost story without ghosts, in which the narrator recalls a moment from his boyhood in New England during the Great Depression...
...Whether you have been seduced at some point in life by the Faulknerian style or remained inured, you will enjoy this reiteration of its long interior meanderings, with the sins of the fathers (or in this case the mothers) being visited on the next generation yet again, polished off now and then with a nice verbal fillip...
...No assumption about your nearest and dearest is safe...
...Ordinary events are unreliable, sometimes even irradiated, so that when a husband and wife in the midst of a quarrel realize that they've forgotten their children, then find them, they are grown up and miniaturized, living in an Igloo cooler in the backyard shed, with no memories of themselves to match what the parents treasure about them most...
...Rose" is more in the mode ofAbsalom, Absalom...
...The Train, The Lake, The Bridge" is the real jewel...
...Edith Alston...
Vol. 10 • August 2005 • No. 45
