Claire Vaye
Watkins
Riverhead
Books, 2012 (283 pages)
ISBN: 978-1-59448-825-2
In Mean
Country
by Mark Hummel
Claire Vaye Watkins writes as if she scratches her stories
from the grit and mining detritus of the Nevada desert she grew up in, then
transforms the elemental by gathering language as rich and as natural as the sand
or minerals found there like an alchemist. The work is as layered as the often
brutal human history of the region, a history she both draws upon and to which
she will surely add her own narrative. And like the harsh landscapes and
histories that everywhere informs these brilliant stories, when you peer long enough, closely enough, at
what seems an empty, heartless place, you not only see its unforgiving beauty
within the parched hills and among the tailings castaway after decades of
exploitation, you also find glitter among the hardscape, the glint of silver
and gold. Like the characters in her story collection Battleborn, the truths Watkins unearths require strong stomachs and
strong wills to digest but reward the reader with sparkling prose, hard but achingly
accurate portraits of unforgettable characters, and gemstones of hope among the
chaos of despair and interior pain.
They are difficult portraits, not for the faint of heart. In
Battleborn you pass time among
prostitutes and failed prospectors, with the progeny of Manson’s Helter Skelter
crew and with high school pizza makers seeking identity through sexual
awakening in a Vegas hotel room with strangers. We meet a narrator so lost he
writes life-revealing letters to a stranger whose address he found among the
remains of an apparent desert car accident. Remarkably, however, Watkins is
uncanny at not just allowing unfamiliar readers an introduction to such
roughened and often weathered characters, within them she nearly always helps
us also see vulnerability, sorrow, love, desire, and yes, hope.
Savagely gifted, Watkins can create an odd kind of beauty
even in horror and ugliness like these lines describing a dying peacock, a bird
that has become one of the last and most unlikely objects of affection for an
aging, gay whorehouse manager, facing rejection from a beautiful, lost young
tourist from Italy in “The Past Perfect, The Past Continuous”:
For an instant the air is filled
with the report of the sternum snapping. Michele’s never
seen a bird like this. The snowy
feathers redden as blood wells up around the prongs.
He feels the give of the meat as
he plies the rake from the bird’s breast.
Or consider
this movement from wanted violence to heartache and defeat in “Man-O-War”, a
story where a lonely old divorcee thinks he finds, then loses, new attachment
to another:
The truck pulled away and began
its descent to the bald floor of the valley. Milo resumed
her barking. Harris told her to
shut up, but she went on. Rhythmic, piercing, incessant. The
old man had never heard anything
so clearly. He felt a steady holy pressure building in him,
like a vein of water running
down his middle was freezing and would split his body in two.
He lunged at the dog. He wanted
ore to skull. He wanted his shoulder burning, his hand
numb. He wanted holes that had
been her ear and eye growing wider, becoming one, bone
crumbling in on itself like the
walls of a canyon carved by a river. He wanted wanted wanted.
The stories
are like a series of accident scenes from which you cannot look away. But more
than that, you don’t want to look away. Like with Harris and this sudden urge
for violence against his only companion, the only thing left alive in his life
alone in the desert above an empty lake bed, we understand the deep, scouring
loneliness that manifests itself in this moment when another person, a stranger
requiring care, is taken away from him and he has realized that this target of
his misplaced affection is as wounded as he.
Reviews like those offered by no less potent a voice in
short fiction than Joy Williams have likened Watkins to Joan Didion for her
mature management of economy and sharpness of prose, and it is an apt
comparison, for Watkins proves to understand not only the power and beauty of
the perfectly chosen word or phrase, she demonstrates that she understands what
not to say just as keenly. It is often the sparseness of these stories that is
most striking, the space that allows a focus on just how lonely and lost so
many of these characters are. In such characters, Watkins echoes other writers
of the literary West with her presentation of trailer parks and one room
casinos and unforgiving apartment complexes, landscapes passed over and
cityscapes better left unvisited, places and people that recall Raymond Carver
most closely, with a nod to Nathanael West, or moved East, characters that
could inhabit an Andre Dubus story. Like those writers and like Didion, her
prose is precise, sometimes nearly deceiving by feeling so understated and
matter of fact. Yet, just when you are brought closest to the story by its
accuracy of detail or directness of dialogue, she’ll leave you abruptly panting
at the beauty of a turned phrase or graceful description. The details are
precise and revealing, the stories nuanced and extraordinarily mature in their
vision. Here for example, the narrator of “Graceland”, trying to find her
bearings six months after her mother has committed suicide, reflects on her
boyfriend’s unfaltering patience:
After Peter and I have sex there
is some smallness in me that wants to turn to him
and ask, In your professional estimation
as a scientist, how long can a relationship
be sustained on pity and
anthropomorphism and a postcard on the fridge?
But there is such bigness in him
that he would say, As long as it takes.
This remarkable ten story collection certainly has not gone
without notice and praise, winning the Story Prize for 2012 by gaining the nod over
collections by Junot Diaz and Dan Choan, and listed by the San Francisco Chronicle as one of the best books of that year,
still, like most story collections and indeed like most literary writers,
Watkins has not gathered the readership she deserves. Not all readers love
collections. But this one offers the very best the short form can accomplish,
presenting stories that read with the breadth that seem ready for expansion
into novels yet that, every time, prove fulfilling and complete as they stand.
You will not want to seek out the real-life equivalents of these characters to
pass your leisure among but you will cherish the way that meeting them in
fiction can transform your vision of your own fears of failed life ventures and
castings of hope.
