From Harper's, August 2023: "The Return" by Joyce Carol Oates, andreprinted from The Massachusetts Review, Spring 2023: "Fidelia Córdoba" by Amalialú Posso Figueroa (as translated by Jeffrey Direman and Shanna Lee)
and, reprinted from The Stinging Fly, Summer 2023: "Happiness" by Anne Carson
from Ploughshares, Summer 2023, "The Dark" by Jess Walter
from Story, June 1962: "Saroyan's Paris" by William Saroyan
Although chosen by not quite random selection, with no foreknowledge of their content, from the current issues of Harper's and Ploughshares, the stories by Joyce Carol Oates, "The Return", and by Jess Walter, "The Dark", are both about surviving one's spouse, and how to keep on. This is somewhat unsurprising in a new story from Oates, as it deals with a woman who has survived both her first and second husbands, the first after a long-term marriage, the second after 13 years, who is visited by the protagonist, a long-term woman friend, after a long period of lack of communication between them. The protagonist is Maude, the twice-widowed friend is Audra, and there's probably nothing accidental about the similarity of their names, even given the mild discomfort that has delayed, though also the guilt and curiosity that are driving Maude's visit to Audra...whom, as it turns out, is in a sense haunted by a sort of specter of her second husband, Thad. The story is largely a long meditation on how those who have died might not leave one, particularly if one continues to live in their formerly shared residence, a converted New Jersey farmhouse...while not quite delusional, Audra is constantly of late aware of a sort of not-quite-supernatural, not-quite tangible revenant of Thad who visits and wonders why the grounds have gone so unattended, why the food in the house is so little to his liking. It's a graceful sort of mix of reminiscence of and memorial to the flawed, often irascible and much-missed Thad (and perhaps Oates's own second husband Charles Gross); Maude isn't sure what to make of it all, even by the time of her departure.
The Jess Walter story seems considerably less a matter of pulling one's own viscera out and rolling them through the platen, while telling the story of a widower, who's wife of forty years had died two years previously, and who asked only two things of her husband in her last days...that he not introduce any new romantic interests to their adult children at least for a year, and that he Beware of blond women in their 60s. They had had a happy and often playful life together, and he finds that even after the first year is up, he doesn't feel a great desire to seek to play the field again...but by the end of the second year, he tries to explore opening up his romantic life again, at first with a mildly embarrassing online matching-service date, and then with one that goes along a bit better, after some tips and other help from his more tech-savvy son. This story leans a bit more into humor, while also dealing with the small insecurities as well as major heartbreak of surviving one's spouse, and not being too sure of much of anything in the wake of that experience. I've read considerably in Oates's fiction over the decades, and a bit of Walter's, both engaged to some degree with the crime-fiction community (Walter's 2005 Citizen Vince won the Edgar Award for best crime-fiction novel of the year in 2006); and Oates has also written no little in horror and related fiction, much as the guest editor of the Summer 2023 Ploughshares, Tom Perrotta, is best known for three of his novels, which have been successfully adapted for film or television, the dark fantasy The Leftovers and his earlier crime-fiction-adjacent, at least, Election and Little Children. Perrotta, in his editorial to the issue, notes how much the recently late Russell Banks's The Sweet Hereafter (another novel that at very least comes close to crime fiction) influenced aspects of The Leftovers, something Perrotta hadn't realized till rereading the Banks novel after his death.
The other two short stories in the Harper's issue are reprints from recent issues of other, smaller-circulation magazines, the Irish magazine The Stinging Fly, and a translation of a vignette by Colombian writer Amalia Luisa Posso Figueroa, who signs her given names more often as Amalialú, from The Massachusetts Review, which recently hosted Posso Figueroa and her translators doing a reading of the story; sadly, the vignette seems a bit arch and slight to me, if not in any way painful to read, and not bereft of poignancy...I wonder if I would like it better in the original. Canadian poet and academic Anne Carson's historical fiction "Happiness" involves a young Irish woman, enslaved after capture by raiding Norsemen, and how she adapts to the less than harmonious household she's turned over to, and finds a sort of release when she's tasked, by the man of the married couple who hold her, with writing poetry for him to recite at gatherings of the men in his settlement. Deft and interesting.
Perhaps not the most cheerful lot of stories, but William Saroyan's 1962 consideration of his current situation, as a 53yo writer living in Paris, is an amusingly irascible assessment of how little of the Moveable Feast post-WW1 exiles found remained, and how little of Paris he has a handle on; he is kind enough to provide sketches, as well, which more resemble mobile-sculpture than anything else. "There isn't a more majestic city, and you can have it. There couldn't possibly be a more delightful people, and you can have them, too. The reason is that it isn't working. Nothing is working. [...] The thing that isn't working appears to be the human race." Plus ça change...
For more of today's Short Story Wednesday entries, please see Patti Abbott's blog
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