Guru of Words and Loss

Abstract

Guru of Words and Loss Erin H. Davis (bio) Underground Women Jesse Lee Kercheval University of Wisconsin Press www.uwpress.wisc.edu/books/5859.htm 158 Pages; Print, $16.95 The undergraduate fiction workshop, peculiar in its own unwavering conformity, preaches the necessity of the essential, the overwhelming need for writers to consider the world in three prime colors. Simplicity is emphasized, sentences are chopped and modified to express the roots of our learning—noun, verb, direct object. A powerful practice, especially in the wake of Raymond Carver, of William Keepers Maxwell Jr., "echoes of Hemingway" in each line. Word count looms. And although "being misunderstood" is the personality en vogue, authors walk the line to do quite the opposite. It is the job of the fashionable writer to look forward, to avoid the reader's desperate mining into purple prose. All must be "genre-less" (although realism is the word in which they look for), a mantra quoted to mundanity. And at the beginning of each year, students witness some sort of surrealist or quasi-fantastical text thrown back at an undergrad for its sheer inability to mock modern prose. A rite of passage to witness this, and more so to be on the receiving end. Jesse Lee Kercheval experienced this firsthand when she turned in "A Clean House" and "Tertiary Care," stories which both appear in her latest short-story collection, Underground Women. "I left the classroom," she states, "not knowing if I could trust my ability to choose and over but. My husband said I shook my head in my sleep, muttering, No, no." Rather than give in to the popularity of realism, the practice of taking the mundane and calling out its own mundanity, she creates in the wake of authors such as George Saunders. Yet it would be unfair to mark her as a writer of science fiction. Nor would it be quite right to compare her to Charlotte Perkins Gilman, whose characters creep into delusion. Kercheval writes on the half-line, allowing the reader into the mind of the characters she nurtures, acknowledging the truth behind what they say despite the unconventional way in which they say it. Surreal, possibly. Mimicking the human experience, undoubtedly. Eleven stories, all tragically similar in their beauty, Kercheval gracefully signing away the physicality and mentality of her darlings with tragedies so commonplace, so hauntingly beautiful. A poet, a novelist, a memoirist, a translator, an editor—a storyteller. She is the author of thirteen books, winning countless prizes such as the Alex Award from the American Library Association, the Dorset Prize, and the Associated Writing Programs Award for Short Fiction. That is only a small sliver of her accomplishments, of how she can fit a lifetime into a single story. And the stories, themselves, are important. Kercheval demands that her plot arcs arrive at sudden turns, her dramatic climaxes beginning from page one, or wrapping up in a single paragraph. Her characters are just as surprising despite their seeming ordinariness. All this achieved by her ability to transform a single word into an object of relish. All is lyric. Ordinary moments, like drinking on the Sabbath, turn pivotal. It was touching and sincere and very different than my lukewarm Methodist upbringing had led me to expect from the Sunday choice between piety and sin. Half listening to the abbot and Karl, I caught in their malts and hops and bitters and strongs the shading and nuances of a sort of theology. Punctuation be damned. Life, unlike the period, is not categorized into clear-cut cubby holes. It goes on in spirals that take left turns at random. In reading, her stories become a sort of magical realism, even historic fiction although they do not aim to be so. It is as if her stories merely fall into certain categories. Dipping their toes, more like. Yet, after all, the best stories are "genre-less," are they not? Historically, many of her stories are ambiguous, once again bolstering the idea that a story's setting is not the crux of the text. The best historic tales are, after all, not based around the history itself. In fact, "A Story...