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The
short story is generally defined as a piece of prose fiction
that can be read in one sitting. In the hands of a master
like Lee Abbott, however, the short story becomes something
more-a microcosmic view of the world of Everyman and Everywoman,
where calamity, loneliness, haplessness, and heartbreak are
revealed with both painful authenticity and comic acceptance.
Short
stories are often compared to snapshots, but in Abbott's case
the more apt analogy is to holograms. His best work presents
fully realized, three-dimensional characters and settings
that are as vivid as life itself. With a remarkable ear for
dialogue and a seemingly limitless supply of humor, Abbott
creates characters that jump off the page and take up permanent
residence in our minds, where they continue to amuse and enlighten
us long after we've finished reading.
A
native and still part-time resident of New Mexico, Abbott
places most of his stories in the American Southwest, the
area he knows best. His tales almost always feature a few
kooks and oddballs, to be sure, but for the most part the
stories are populated by average folks engaged in the same
quests we all pursue-looking for meaning in life, for understanding
and, above all, for love. That Abbott chooses to present his
protagonists' tribulations in a comic light reminds us that
absurdity is as much a part of the human condition as suffering
or joy. Indeed, the confusions and missteps of his characters
are often the most profound revelations of their humanity.
Abbott
served on the faculty of the English department of Case Western
Reserve University from 1976 to 1989, during which period
he won one of his two O. Henry Awards and all three of his
Pushcart Prizes. He earned the Cleveland Arts Prize for Literature
in 1982. His collection, The Heart Never Fits Its Wanting,
won the 1980 St. Lawrence Award for Fiction, he has twice
been nominated for the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction, and his
stories have been included in The Best American Short Stories
and other anthologies. Currently, he divides his time between
New Mexico and Columbus, Ohio, where he is professor of English
and former director of the master of fine arts in creative
writing program at The Ohio State University.
Novelist
William Harrison calls Abbott “John Cheever's true heir,
our major American short story writer.” Fellow writer
Max Apple says Abbott possesses “a unique voice, one
of the best in contemporary fiction.” Both men are correct.
Like Cheever, Abbott limns people and places with the precision
of a watchmaker. And he does so in a style purely his own,
at once straightforward, quirky, formally intelligent, and
unabashedly acrobatic.
Most
of Abbott's readers harbor a frustration that, in its way,
is one of the highest compliments an author can receive. They
would like to spend more time with his characters-perhaps
share miseries over a beer or three in some dusty Southwest
saloon, or just eavesdrop on a few more of their disjointed
conversations. One measure of Lee Abbott's talent is that
his stories make such robust connections with readers. Another
is that those same readers keep coming back for more, returning
again and again as to a much-loved old friend who never ceases
to delight with his ability to spin a yarn they've never heard
before.
text
by
Mark
Gottlieb
Fall
2002
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Friends,
at thirty-four, on the edge of triple ruin, his crazed
and minutely crenate brain steaming with waste, Scooter
E. Watts was a bona fide numero uno furtivo-creepy,
brilliant, a loser, weak and consumptive, his guts a
quaking moil and true image of Modern Times. “Me,”
he said one night, “I'm flopped, got to be dulled
out.” The moon was up, full and nasty, a fat juicy
piece of depraved fruit; and Scooter was saying that
if there weren't meaning or purpose or reason in this
good life, there had to be something- sum, quotient,
salty residue. “There's paste or ash or goo,”
he said. “Me, I'm gonna find it, shake its muscular
hand.” Unmarried, his heart a fist slamming against
his ribs, without gifts or vision, lacking a home and
ordinary parents, Scooter Watts was doomed, Friends,
as unlikely and unwelcome a being as Godzilla. He was
trumped, stewed, crushed, and beleaguered. And so, aiming
to change his fortunes, he stuffed his clothes in a
ditty bag and, hitching, lit out, heading south.
“I
know the many ways to kill a man,” he told the
first dude to give him a ride. “He can be gutted,
stomped, whipped, shot, chopped, pierced with knives
and arrows, exploded into infinity, buried and mashed,
drowned in a sumphole and forgotten, humiliated, worried
till his heart breaks.” The driver was interested,
fearsomely. “He can be suffocated with pillows
or horse blankets, set aflame by his own longing, dragged
behind a Greyhound bus, made to drink poison, have affection
withheld, told he's queer, given useless chores to occupy
his idle hours, and whomped by fortune.” The driver
was whipping through Beltway traffic in Washington.
“You can do this slow or with dispatch,” Scooter
told him. “Many folks prefer speed to beauty and
so advise against protracted deaths. Me, I like living
and being free.”
-“Near
the Heart-Place of Grue,” from The Heart Never
Fits Its Wanting (Cedar Falls: The North American
Review, 1980)
Her
name is Stacy and she became Buddy's girlfriend during
the spring last year, when he was an entirely adequate
third baseman for the Alameda Junior High School Falcons.
Though nothing like my own first love-Leonna Allen,
now a registered nurse who lives in Lubbock, Texas-Stacy
was as perfect and sure of herself as every first love
appears to be; and, as I have told Buddy, he went for
her as I, in eleventh-grade history, went for Leonna
Allen-which, in the moon-June-swoon poetry I learned,
is described as tumbling and falling and being, well,
rent with life. Something opens up in you, I have decided.
A vessel, or a cavity, or an organ, and for a while
thereafter you are a rocking-chair philosopher who sees
significance in all the objects and rigmarole and ideas
you bump into day by day by day. Sofas have meaning,
as do what is eaten by the two of you and how the weather
whirls. Everything is secret, and you are made so strong-by
words and touch and smell-that you wonder how you managed
to live without it.
That's
what Leonna Allen did to
me. Tall (Stacy is medium) and thin (Stacy is thicker
through the shoulders) and quiet (Stacy is, like
me, a blabbermouth), Leonna sat behind me in Mrs. Sutherland's
class, and one day she tapped me on the back to ask
me to name again the British kings and queens whose
order we'd studied; and suddenly-there is no other word
that recollects the thunderclap love is-I was absolutely
smitten. My past (which had my father and his heart
attacks, and my mother and her alcoholism) vanished
completely; and my future (which has come to have property
and wealth) seemed impossible. I had only what Darlene
calls an eternal moment: electric and weird, physical
as a fistfight.
-“Here
in Time and Not,” from Dreams of Distant Lives
(New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1989)
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