The Pale of Settlement
By Margot Singer
University of Georgia Press, 213 pages, $24.95
Refresh, Refresh
By Benjamin Percy
Graywolf, 249 pages, $15 paper
Collections of linked short stories have proliferated rapidly in recent years. There will never be as many of them as collections of disparate tales. But they’re piling up, and some of them, such as Elizabeth MacKenzie’s “Stop That Girl” of a few years back, remind us of the excellence of the model — Sherwood Anderson’s Midwest masterpiece “Winesburg, Ohio” — and the possibilities for the form among contemporary fiction writers.
Pull Margot Singer’s “The Pale of Settlement” from the growing pile and you find individual stories with a certain mix of the personal and political that are quite impressive. They focus on a young Israeli-born woman named Susan who has grown up in New York and travels frequently to the Middle East. The lead story, “Helicopter Days,” opens in Haifa, Israel, within earshot of a terrorist bomb blast during the 1982 war with Lebanon. Susan has made her first solo visit to Israel, which begins her long, on-again off-again love affair with the Holy Land, and the history of her family living on it, and a long flirtation with her Israeli cousin Gavi.
The latter appears now and then in subsequent stories, and other relatives proliferate — her mother, uncles and aunts — so that Singer begins to create a sort of family archeology, going back to the difficult days of Europe during World War II, as well as to the early Zionist settlers in the Holy Land, and to the dig of a Canaanite city that was thriving during the Bronze Age. In fact, her Uncle Avraham and his wife, Leah, both once-practicing archeologists, set the tone for Susan’s personal excavations.
In the story “Hazor,” Avraham skims through Leah’s diary while she languishes from Alzheimer’s disease in a facility on the site of Deir Yassin, where, during the Israeli War for Independence, Jewish terrorists once massacred Arab civilians. Writing about cuneiform tablets unearthed at a dig, Leah notes:
“Everything depended on a few lines etched in red-brown clay.
“A scratch made by a human hand.
“The impression of a wedge.”
Susan digs into her own past, augmenting her search by reading fiction, including a novel by Amos Oz (unnamed here, but by the plot undoubtedly Oz’s work “The Same Sea,” a marvelous mix of mostly prose and some poetry that Singer echoes in some of her pages). Unearthing stories of everything from Israeli soldiers in shock to unfaithful wives and unsettled expatriates, Singer becomes a bit of an archeologist herself. And the effect of her stories taken together is greater than any created by them individually. The triumph of this collection is the effect it creates of the near-novel.
Benjamin Percy’s second collection, “Refresh, Refresh,” contains 10 stories linked by geographical location — rural eastern Oregon is the turf where he has planted his flag — and by motifs rather than the same characters.
But the characters are roughly similar: young people, mostly men, coming of age, wrestling with their actual fathers or stand-ins for them, and as rural life would have it, hunting or fishing up a storm while coming of age. In the process, Percy, whose best stories reveal gifts close to the level of early Richard Ford and Tobias Wolff, writes up a number of storms, including confrontation with the realities of wartime America (as in the war in Iraq), spousal abuse, murder, cardiac arrest and large, angry bears.
Most of these do the job a short story should do, which is take us deep into the heart of a few selected scenes and moments and reveal to us how these, as Bernard Malamud used to say, “predicate a life.” That’s the perfection of the form, that we wouldn’t want a great story to be longer, or a great novel to be shorter.
In the best of these stories, such as the title tale, Percy gives us just enough and no more as he recounts the passions of two high-school pals in Tumalo, Ore., whose fathers have shipped out to Iraq and how they nearly commit murder to stave off the fear that those elders might not come back. In “The Caves in Oregon,” in which a young, precariously married couple’s house rests above a cavern, we see the same perfection at work.
Some of the other stories veer off into science fiction and horror — “The Woods” and “Meltdown” are two of these — and as enjoyable as they were to follow, they each sooner or later crossed over into the realm of the unsatisfying. The rest of the stories that stayed within the boundaries of the realistic, depending on sharply portrayed details and deep psychological insight, made me wish all of them stayed more on course. Because when he is good, Percy is as good as any young writer working today.
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Alan Cheuse is a book commentator for NPR’s “All Things Considered,” a writing teacher at George Mason University and the author, most recently, of “The Fires,” a book of two novellas.
