My Review of The Last Amateurs by John Feinstein

When I was twelve, my mother, sister, and I took an overnight train to Kansas City, where my great-aunt met and drove us several hours south. Hovering near the border of Missouri and Arkansas, we were in the heart of the Ozarks. Here’s what I remember about them. My family’s private cemetery, near the one-room schoolhouse my grandfather attended and the cabin with a shotgun hole in the roof. The somewhat sad sights of Branson, and an evening trip to see the Osmond Brothers. Lush greenery. The wide expanse of the White River seen from my great-aunt’s home.

Judging from Daniel Woodrell’s fiction, there’s a lot I missed. It would seem, for example, that the Ozarks are no place for people of moderate appetites and emotions. In Woodrell’s superb new collection, The Outlaw Album, characters are fueled by desperation, anger, and (one suspects) a sense of humor either incomparably keen or completely nonexistent. How else could you explain the book’s first sentence, found in a story called “The Echo of Neighborly Bones”?: “Once Boshell finally killed his neighbor he couldn’t seem to quit killing him.” After burying his neighbor in a makeshift grave, this Boshell makes a habit of stopping by whenever he’s feeling blue. Nothing takes the edge off a rough day, or soothes the memory of his wife’s tears, as well as going at the rotting corpse with a heavy stone or a blunt hatchet.

When we eventually learn the reason for the murder — the neighbor killed Boshell’s dog — wit and pathos elide. We’ve anticipated an act of tremendous brutality, and what we find seems relatively petty. But small slights are deeply felt in Woodrell country. They carry life or death stakes. Why not shoot the neighbor? What could be crueler, really, than targeting a childless couple’s beloved pet? In another story, an outsider builds a house directly in the line of sight between a dying man’s window and his cherished river. His son restores the vista as quickly and effectively as he can—with fire—in his father’s final days. As in Woodrell’s earlier novel Winter’s Bone, The Outlaw Album’s hills are filled with methheads and gunfire, but unkindness proves no less explosive a presence.

That’s not to say darker works don’t abound. Woodrell’s characters are capable of terrible things. A driver accelerates at a hitchhiker and sends his car plummeting into a ditch. A Civil War veteran carves driftwood, avoiding both confrontation with and atonement for the murders he committed against civilians. These acts of unmerited violence are sometimes sudden, sometimes forgotten, always contained within a specific moment in time. When the deed is justified, though, it often haunts the perpetrator. When a man wakes up to a naked, growling figure towering over his bed, he reaches for a nearby knife. In the light, the intruder is revealed to be a troubled Iraq veteran, and his killer doubts his actions. He spends nights walking circuits around the house. He becomes a near-pariah in town. And he has one notably awkward, sad conversation with the dead man’s parents outside a diner.

Even amidst his characters’ wildest thoughts and most profound transgressions, however, Woodrell’s prose winks slyly at us. In one of the book’s finest stories, a girl attacks her rapist uncle with a pickaxe, leaving him in a vegetable state. She’s left to care for him while her mother works, and enjoys inflicting small cruelties on her former tormentor. But soon things begin to change. He follows people with his eyes. Once he swats a fly. It’s all too much. The girl sets out to finish the task she started, wheeling him up to a local bridge.

“I’d been making him well,” she thinks, “now I needed to make him right.” Ruefully, savagely, joyfully, she laments in the story’s final line, “My baby ain’t meant for this world.” The character is a triumph. She takes pleasure in administering justice, bringing wit to the unspeakable and a gritty pragmatism to morality. In a book full of memorable characters, this nameless narrator stands out as an unreservedly sharp and funny presence.

All this amounts to one of the best evocations of rural life that I’ve read in years. Woodrell’s characters have a hard time of it, and wealth and education don’t help much. There’s a whole world contained within his Ozarks — several veterans, rich summer-homers, a damaged girl with a mysterious past, an inner-city father whose son is in prison, a nostalgic divorcé from the city — and its dangers affect all of them indiscriminately. Slim and utterly delicious, The Outlaw Album is a quick read and will leave you asking why this is Woodrell’s first collection of stories. Few authors have such a sure and deft hand with reveals. Even fewer combine humor and desperation so effectively.

It becomes clear at a certain point, though, that he was not quite content to deliver a collection of genre pieces, however superlative. There are unexpected moments. “The body fell within a shout of a house that still stands,” begins a story called “The Horse in Our History.” “A house shown up rudely in morning brightness, a dull small box gone shabby along the roof edge, with tar shingles hanging frayed over a gutter that has parted from the eaves and rolled under like a slackened lip.” While Woodrell’s writing is often beautiful — sparse construction and sudden, lush images feature prominently — this passage falls in a different register. It immediately sounds like someone else. I couldn’t place it until I got to the next paragraph: “The body fell within a shout, and surely those in the house must have heard something.” The repetition, the narrative disguised as speculation: Woodrell’s doing Faulkner here and he’s doing it well. Even the somewhat vague but insistent impression of alienness left by the first few sentences testifies to the success of his imitation.

But why do it? It’s a virtuoso performance and a fine story, but Woodrell’s voice is confident and distinct through The Outlaw Album. There seems to be little impetus for Faulknerian digressions. But while The Outlaw Album could stand alone, I think perhaps Woodrell wants you to compare it to the work of the masters. His ventriloquism does more than show off his ability. It demonstrates the power of his own unique voice. It throws into relief the expansiveness and clarity of the place he’s imagined, as well-defined as Faulkner’s own Yoknapatawpha County. It’s the request to be admitted to the pantheon, and with The Outlaw Album as evidence, it’s none too soon.

While reading Alice Munro’s new book, Dear Life, I kept finding myself thinking of something that had nothing to do with books, or with Canada, or with any of the dozen other things you might expect. What I thought of was a professional basketball game I went to 15 or so years ago. The Bulls were visiting the lowly Wizards (who were then still called the Bullets), and my friends and I had lucked our way into decent seats. It was the first and only time I’d seen Michael Jordan in person, and it was the strangest thing. You could feel a collective awareness in the building, like the smoke lingering after a fireworks show: he will outlive every one of us. Jordan’s name would appear the next day beside Calbert Cheaney and Bill Wennington’s in the box score, but years from now, when their names evoked nothing, his would be unfaded. He inhabited the court like a time traveler, visiting from a future in which he continued to exist while the rest of us — chewing our $7 hot dogs, taking his picture every time he touched the ball — did not.

Which is to say: contemporary greatness is a strange thing. Alice Munro’s books are reviewed right there beside Ann Patchett and Richard Russo’s; they’re set on the New Releases table between the latest from Jane Smiley and Dave Eggers. But they’re of a different order, they’re made of different stuff. The Mona Simpson quote that appears on many of Munro’s paperbacks (“The living writer most likely to be read in a hundred years,”) seems truer than ever, and it gives an air of preemptive nostalgia to the act of reading her. Soon enough it will seem very strange, almost miraculous, that we could go to the store to buy a new book by Alice Munro.

But for now, anyway, we can; the daily highlight reels must still be assembled. And so how does this latest collection of stories, her 14th, stack up? It is, I’m pleased to report, wonderful — even surprisingly so. Since 2001’s Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage, published when she was 70, she had seemed to me to be in the cruising phase of her career. The three collections since then were full of good, solid, Munro-grade stuff, but with a couple of exceptions, there were no stories that I imagined would make it into her best-of collections. Her writing had simplified considerably, and she seemed, with her plots, to be retracing old ground. When she announced her retirement in 2006, I confess to feeling a certain relief; she was too proud and too self-aware to leave us remembering her like Jordan on the Wizards.

Well, she didn’t retire, and it’s a good thing she didn’t. Her writing continues in its understated mode, but the simplicity seems now to reflect an increased urgency, rather than a diminished capacity. There’s a kind of cut-the-crap quality to this latest batch of stories — material that might have once have taken up 20 pages she now deals with in a couple of sentences, unsentimentally, almost in passing. In “Gravel,” the news that the narrator’s sister has drowned arrives by implication, like the passings of the seasons. In “Train,” a man walks away from his life with as little fanfare as if he were walking out of a movie theater.

Here is how, in one of the collection’s best stories, “Leaving Maverley,” Munro describes a man whose wife has died after years of insentient dwindling in the hospital:
He’d thought that it had happened long before with Isabel, but it hadn’t. Not until now.

She had existed and now she did not. Not at all, as if not ever. And people hurried around, as if this outrageous fact could be overcome by making sensible arrangements. He, too, obeyed the custom, signing where he was told to sign, arranging — as they said — for the remains.
“Not at all, as if not ever,” — these seven short, simple words give as clear an account of grief, of the infantilizing incomprehensibility of a loved one’s death, as anything I’ve ever read. The book is full of formulations like that — births and deaths, marriages and infidelities, rendered in unimprovable calligraphic strokes. Much of the material here will be familiar to anyone who has ever read her — the train trips and heartsick letters and unpaved roads — but the voice is newly sharpened, as if she were freshly aware of only having so many words remaining in her allotment.

And, in fact, such an awareness becomes explicit in places; growing old has, like a trip through a difficult country, endowed Munro with all manner of new information, and she has here begun to file her dispatches. “In Sight of the Lake,” about a woman’s increasingly baffled search for her doctor’s office, is as harrowing an account of old age as I’ve ever read. And “Dolly” makes the case, with worrisome authority, that jealousy and heartache are not occupations from which we may retire.

A surprise, then, is that the book ends with a sequence of stories that Munro could almost have written decades ago. “The final works in this book are not quite stories,” she writes in an author’s note (under the disconcerting heading “Finale”). “I believe they are the first and last — and the closest — things I have to say about my own life.” A certain prurient ear-pricking is natural, when an author promises to share the actual goods about herself, but what she has to say turns out to be not so different from what she’s said about her childhood in her earlier books. We get the failing fox farm, the humble father, the ambitious and ailing mother. We get the house set uneasily between town and country, the rickety bridges, the trees known by name. The difference, if there is one, is the frankness with which she sets aside the possibility of artifice. It’s as if, after decades of plot trickery and composite characters, she longs to remove all the filters from her light, to show us the bare bulb. Here, finally, is the intelligence itself, the compassionate but merciless awareness that she has shone through all her hundreds of stories.

At the end of one of those stories, a dozen or so books ago, there’s a sentence that may be the best single thing she ever wrote, and it offers something like a key to her entire career: “People’s lives, in Jubilee as elsewhere, were dull, simple, amazing and unfathomable — deep caves paved with kitchen linoleum.” In Dear Life, Munro, equipped with a head-lamp the likes of which we may never see again, continues to explore.