The Resident Judge of Port Phillip

2016, 256 p

Written by the author of one of my favourite books (This Side of Brightness) this is a really strong collection, comprising a novella and three short stories.  Each one of them is memorable in its own way.

The heart of the book is the eponymous novella with which it opens ‘Thirteen Ways of Looking’.  It is told in thirteen chapters, each of which is headed by a stanza from Wallace Stevens’ poem ‘Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird’. It was not clear to me that the stanzas had a direct connection with the chapter: they seemed to act more as an organizing device.  The octogenarian Manhattan judge Peter Mendelssohn is murdered after lunching at a nearby restaurant with his boorish, self-centred son. The thirteen chapters follow Mendelssohn through this last day as he wakes and is tended by his live-in nurse, dresses, shuffles to the restaurant, eats, then leaves.  Some chapters are his lengthy, wordy inner monologues which flesh him out as a character; others are more detached descriptions of the vision captured by the CC cameras with which wealthy Americans, in particular, surround themselves as a way of insulating themselves from danger.  We see, and yet do not see the one thing we need to know: who killed him?  We have multiple perspectives, and have been given knowledge things that the judge and jury in the ensuing murder trial do not know- but the ending of the story is abrupt and frustrating. The question is not answered definitively, but in many ways it doesn’t matter.

I was perhaps less taken with the second story, “What Time Is It Where You Are” which is a rather postmodern story of the construction of a story- in this case, about a female soldier in Afghanistan on New Years Eve. Just as in ‘Thirteen Ways of Looking’, there are choices in how a story can be told.  ‘Thirteen Ways’ utilized CC cameras as its way of creating a narrative, and in this story it is the unnamed author who is weighing up which facts to include or omit, and which twists of plot to introduce or not.

The third story, ‘Sh’khol’, riven through with a raw, keening anguish, counterbalanced the archness and self-consciousness of the second story.   An Irish mother, separated from her partner, is holed up in a cottage beside a raging ocean, with her thirteen year old deaf son who was adopted from Russia.  She has given him a wetsuit as a present. The next morning she wakes and he is gone.  Sick with dread, she searches for him on the windswept beaches and in the swirling waves.

I thought that the final story was as good as the one with which the collection opened.  In ‘Treaty’, an elderly nun has been enfolded back into her Irish convent when she is confronted with the sight of the  right-wing guerilla fighter who had kidnapped and raped her in the South American jungle many decades earlier. She’s not sure whether this re-fashioned ‘peace negotiator’ really is the man she thinks he is, and like Peter Mendelssohn in the opening story, her grasp of past and present is slippery.

I often find myself thinking about the editorial decision to select one short story over another in a compilation like this, and whether and how the individual stories contribute to the overarching unity of the collection.  These stories, very different though they are, are linked by their exploration of multiple perspectives, the elision of past and present and the contingency of fate. I enjoyed each of them, most particularly the first and final stories. Perhaps it’s because there were only four of them, but each of them is clearly defined in my mind in its own right – something that doesn’t always happen when reading a book of short stories. Or perhaps, as I suspect, it’s because Colum McCann is a very, very good writer.

Source: E-book from Yarra Plenty Regional Library

My rating: 9/10 (high praise for short stories from me!)

2017, 736 p

It’s been a while since I last read a book by Joyce Carol Oates. What a prolific author she is! Her bibliography lists 41 titles, with one book published each year since 1994. Some of them are gritty, edgy (often icky) novella-length books (e.g. The Beasts at 130 pages) while others, like  My Heart Laid Bare (531 p.) are real door-stoppers. There are themes she revisits in many of her books – emotionally lost female protagonists, infatuation, and the rippling effects of a crime on a family – and they’re all here in A Book of American Martyrs.

Here, though, they’re placed within the cultural and religious chasm between pro-life and pro-choice activists that has ruptured American politics for years.  Luther Dunphy is a zealous evangelical Christian, convinced that God has chosen him to assassinate an abortion provider, Gus Voorhees, in the driveway of the clinic where he is employed. Both men pay with their lives, in different ways.

Rather unusually for a fiction book, it has a table of contents. The book is divided into five sections, each divided from the next by a grubby, much-handled page that suggests that the book is a series of smaller, covered books, each separate from the other.  The first section focusses on Luther Amos Dunphy ‘Soldier of God’ and leads us up to the shooting. It is followed by a section ‘The Life and Death of Gus Voorhees’, subtitled ‘An Archive’. This archive, collected by Voorhees’ daughter Naomi, is her way of trying to make sense of her father’s death. It comprises a disparate and unsorted collection of documents, interviews and narratives from different members of Gus Voorhees’ family, some no longer than a paragraph, others some thirty pages in length.  The reader is left to make her own sense of all this.

The remaining three sections are arranged chronologically. ‘The Hammer’ turns to Edna Mae and Dawn, Luther Dunphy’s wife and daughter, in the years leading up to Dunphy’s execution in 2006. (I read this book in May 2017, very much aware of the multiple executions being lined up in Arkansas, where the drugs used to kill the prisoners are due to expire. It all seemed very pertinent) Now there are two martyrs: Dr.Gus Voorhees who died for the pro-choice principle, and Luther Dunphy who revels in his role as the man God chose to save the babies that Voorhees was about to ‘murder’ that day.

In the fourth section ‘The Embrace’ (2006-2010) and the final section ‘The Consolation of Grief’ (2011-2012) the two daughters, Naomi Voorhees and Dawn Dunphy come into each other’s orbit.  Both are damaged by their fathers’ deaths, each in their own way. Dawn, poorly educated and marginally employed, is achieving minor success as the female boxer, D. D. Dunphy. Naomi, who has spent most of her adolescence and adult life so far in obsessively collecting the ‘archive’ in Part Two is freed by wealth and connections from any real necessity to make a living. For both women, though, their families have fractured.  The two girls are united by their fathers’ martyrdom, but politically and culturally they are far separated.

This is a very long book at over 700 pages, but I didn’t find myself wishing that it were shorter, and I even felt sorry when it came to an end.  The Dunphy characters – Luther and Dawn- are more fully drawn than the Voorhees family, who always seemed rather insipid. I don’t know enough about small-town Evangelical working-class Americans to know whether Oates is being clear-eyed or loading on the stereotypes- I suspect a bit of both.  There is a lot of detail about boxing which probably could have been trimmed, although given that Oates wrote a series on essays On Boxing, it’s probably no surprise that so much attention is paid to the sport.

Oates herself does not come down on one side or the other of the abortion question. She gives each of the ‘martyrs’ a worldview that makes sense of their actions, however they might appear from the outside.

Source: Yarra Plenty Regional Library

My rating: 9