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Sweet
Land Stories by E. L. Doctorow Rating: •••• (Highly Recommended) |
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Savory Over
many years and much writing, there’s been very little of E. L. Doctorow’s work that hasn’t been exemplary. The five
stories in his new collection, Sweet
Land Stories, will make readers hungry for more. With his great skill,
readers become absorbed in the love, pain, alienation and power of characters
often bereft of sympathy. Here’s an excerpt from the beginning of “Jolene: A
Life,” pp. 57-67: She married Mickey Holler when she was
fifteen. Married him to get out of her latest foster home where her so-called
dad used to fool with her, get her to hold him, things like that. Even before
her menses started. And her foster mom liked to slap her up the head for no
reason. Or for every reason. So she married Mickey. And he loved her—that was
a plus. She had never had that experience before. It made her look at herself
in the mirror and do things with her hair. He was twenty, Mickey. Real name
Mervin. He was a sweet boy if without very much upstairs, as she knew even
from their first date. He had a heel
that didn’t touch the ground and weak eyes but he was not the kind to lay a
hand on a woman. And she could tell him what she wanted, like a movie, or a grilled-cheese
sandwich and a chocolate shake, and it became his purpose in life. He loved her, he really
did, even if he didn’t know much about it. But anyway she was out of the house
now, and wearing a wedding ring to South Sumter High. Some of the boys said
smutty things but the girls looked upon her with a new respect. Mickey’s Uncle Phil had come to the
justice of the peace with them to be best man. After the ceremony he grinned
and said Welcome to our family, Jolene honey, and gave her a big hug that
lasted a mite too long. Uncle Phil was like a father to Mickey and employed
him to drive one of the trucks in his home oil delivery business. Mickey
Holler was almost an orphan. His real father was in the state penitentiary
with no parole for the same reason his mother was in the burial ground behind
the Aunt Kay was real smart.
She was an assistant manager in the Southern People’s Bank across the square
from the courthouse. So between her and Uncle Phil’s oil business, they had a
nice ranch house with a garden out back and a picnic table and two hammocks
between the trees. Jolene liked the room she
and Mickey occupied, though it looked
into the driveway, and she had what she could do to keep it nice, with Mickey dropping his
greasy coveralls on the floor. But she understood the double obligations of
being a wife and an unpaying boarder besides. As
she was home from school before anyone finished their jobs for the day, she
tried to make herself useful. She would have an hour or so to do some of her
homework and then she would go into the kitchen and put up something for
everyone’s dinner. Jolene had always liked
school—she felt at home there. Her favorite subject was art. She had been
drawing from the time she was in third grade, when the class had done a mural
of the Battle of Gettysburg and she drew more of it than anyone. She couldn’t do much art now at this time in her
life as a married woman, not being just for herself anymore. But she still
noticed things. She was someone who had an eye for what wants to be drawn.
Mickey had a white hairless chest with a collarbone that stood out across
from shoulder to shoulder like he was someone’s beast of burden. And a long
neck and a backbone that she could use to do sums. He surely did love her—he
cried sometimes he loved her so much—but that was all. She had a sixteenth
birthday and he bought her a negligee he picked out himself at Berman’s
department store. It was three sizes too big. Jolene could take it back for exchange, of course, but
she had the unsettling thought that as Mickey’s wife all that would happen in
her life to come was she would grow into something that size. He liked to
watch her doing her homework, which made her realize he had no ambition,
Mickey Holler. He would never run a business and play golf on the weekend
like Uncle Phil. He was a day-to-day person. He did not ever talk about
buying his own home, or moving toward anything that would make things
different for them than they were now. She could think this of him even
though she liked to kiss his pale chest and run her fingers over the humps of
his backbone. Uncle Phil was tall with a
good strong jaw and a head of shining black hair he combed in a kind of wave,
and he had a deep voice and he joked around with a lot of self-assurance, and
dark meaningful eyes—oh, he was a man, of that there was no doubt. At first it made Jolene nervous when he would
eye her up and down. Or he would sing a line from a famous love song to her. You
are so beautiful to mee! And then he would
laugh to let her know it was
all just the same horsing around as he was accustomed to doing. He was tanned
from being out on the county golf course, and even the slight belly he had on
him under his knit shirt seemed just right. The main thing about him was that
he enjoyed his life, and he was popular—they had their social set, though you
could see most of their friends came through him. Aunt Kay was not exactly
the opposite of Phil, but she was one who attended to business. She was a
proper sort who never sat back with her shoes off, and though kind and
correct as far as Jolene was concerned, clearly would have preferred to have
her home to herself now that Mickey had someone to take care of him. Jolene
knew this—she didn’t have to be told. She could work her fingers to the bone
and Aunt Kay would still never love her. Aunt Kay was a Yankee and had come
to live in the South because of a job offer. She and Uncle Phil had been
married fifteen years. She called him Phillip, which Jolene thought was
putting on airs. She wore suits and panty hose, always, and blouses with
collars buttoned to the neck. She was no beauty but you could see what had
interested Phil—her very light blue icy eyes, maybe, and naturally blond
hair, and she had the generous figure that required a panty girdle, which
she was never without. But now Uncle Phil got in
the habit of waking them up in the morning, coming into their room without
knocking and saying in his deep voice, “Time for work, Mickey Holler!” but
looking at Jolene in the meantime as she pulled the covers up to her chin. She knew the man was doing
something he shouldn’t be doing with that wake-up routine and it made her angry but she didn’t
know what she could do about it. Mickey
seemed blind to the fact that his own uncle, his late mother’s brother, had
an eye for her. At the same time she was excited to have been noticed by this
man of the world. She knew that as a handsome smiling fellow with white
teeth, Phil would be quite aware of his effect on women, so she made a point
of seeming to be oblivious of him as anything but her husband’s uncle and
employer. But this became more and more difficult, living in the same house
with him. She found herself thinking about him. In her mind Jolene made up a
story: how gradually, over time, it would
become apparent that she and Uncle Phil were meant for each other. How an
understanding would arise between them and go on for some years until,
possibly, Aunt Kay died, or left him—it wasn’t all that clear in Jolene’s
mind. But Uncle Phil was not one
for dreaming. One afternoon she was scrubbing their kitchen floor for them,
down on her knees in her shorts with her rump up in the air, and he had come
home early, in that being his own boss he could come and go as he liked. She
was humming “I Want to Hold Your Hand” and didn’t hear him. He stood in the door
watching how the scrubbing motion was rendered on her behind, and no sooner
did she realize she was not alone than he was lifting her from the waist in
her same kneeling position and carrying her that way into his bedroom, the
scrub brush still in her hand. That night in her own bed
she could still smell Uncle Phil’s aftershave lotion and feel the little
cotton balls of their chenille bedspread in the grasp of her fingers. She was
too sore even for Mickey’s fumblings. And that was the
beginning. In all Jolene’s young life she had never been to where she
couldn’t wait to see someone. She tried to contain herself, but her
schoolwork began to fall off, though she had always been a conscientious
student even if not the smartest brain in her class. But it was that way with Phil, too—it
was so intense and constant that he was no longer laughing. It was more like
they were equals in their magnetic attraction. They just couldn’t get enough.
It was every day, always while Aunt Kay was putting up her numbers in the
Southern People’s Bank and Mickey, poor Mickey was riding his oil route as
Uncle Phil devised it to the
furthermost reaches of the town line and beyond. Well, the passion between
people can never be anything but drawn to a conclusion by the lawful spouses
around them, and after a month or two of this everyone knew it, and the crisis came banging open
the bedroom door shouting her name, and all at once Mickey was riding Phil’s
back like a monkey, beating him about the head and crying all the while, and
Phil, in his skivvies, with Mickey pounding him, staggered around the
combined living and dining room till he backpedaled the poor boy up against their
big TV and smashed him through the screen. Jolene, in her later reflections,
when she had nothing in the world to do but pass the time, remembered
everything—she remembered the bursting sound of the TV glass, she remembered
how surprised she was to see how skinny Phil’s legs were, and that the sun
through the blinds was so bright because daylight saving had come along
unbeknownst to the lovers, which was why the working people had got home
before they were supposed to. But at the time there was no leisure for
thought. Aunt Kay was dragging her by the hair through the hall over the shag
carpet and into the kitchen across the fake-tile flooring and she was out the
kitchen door, kicked down the back steps, and thrown out like someone’s damn
cat and yowling like one, too. Jolene waited out there by
the edge of the property, crouching in the bushes in her shift with her arms
folded across her breasts. She waited for Phil to come out and take her away,
but he never did. Mickey is the one who opened the door. He stood there
looking at her, in the quiet outside, while from the house they listened to
the shouting and the sound of things breaking. Mickey’s hair was sticking up
and his glasses were bent broken across his nose. Jolene called to him. She
was crying; she wanted him to forgive her and tell her it was all right. But what he did,
her Mickey, he got in his pickup in his bloody shirt and drove away. That was
what Jolene came to think of as the end of Chapter 1 in her life story, because where Mickey drove to was the
middle of the Thus
begins Doctorow’s take on a hard luck story that we’ve
all heard in country western songs. Where he takes it, and how he takes us
with him, is worth your reading time, especially because of Doctorow’s skill at transforming universal themes. The
five stories in this collection are each well crafted and as with all good
fiction, will leave readers thinking about life a little differently. Enjoy Sweet
Land Stories. Steve
Hopkins, July 26, 2004 |
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ã 2004 Hopkins and Company, LLC The recommendation rating for
this book appeared in the August 2004
issue of Executive Times URL for this review: http://www.hopkinsandcompany.com/Books/Sweet
Land Stories.htm For Reprint Permission,
Contact: Hopkins & Company, LLC • E-mail: books@hopkinsandcompany.com |
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