Rough South

Detail from cover

Richard Ford, Harry Crews, Dorothy Allison, Lee Smith, Tom Franklin, and so on. The virtues of these and many other writers treading roughly the same fictional territory as Scott Ely serve only to highlight how Ely's brand of hypnotic prose and solid storytelling sense matches and at times, overshadows these more well-known writers. Ely is not a name that comes to the tongue quickly, even though he's published eight books so far, almost evenly split between novels and short stories. Ely's eighth book, a collection of stories entitled Dream Fishing, serves as a fine introduction to his work, which carries in it everything you might expect from a Southern writer: an emphasis on character, aptly detailed landscapes, family affairs.

In "Wasps," Ely's elegant, understated prose captures the slow rhythm of illicit skinny-dipping while simultaneously preparing us for the forward motion of the story: everything looks different in better light. And if you're not fully revved up by the opening of the first story in the collection, "Wasps," you might want to have your engine looked at.

Cassie wanted to play the game naked. It was not that they had not all seen each other naked before. They had gone swimming by moonlight many times off the sandbar where the Mississippi River made a wide gentle loop at the edge of Rembert's father's land. But Cassie at night, the details of her body—breasts, legs, and the patch of hair between her legs—all softened in that gentle light, was not at all how she would look in the glare of a cloudless June afternoon.

Narrated by Peter, this story is a love triangle at its base, complicated by thoughts of the ongoing Vietnam War and by Peter's odd refusal to act on his feelings for Cassie until Rembert comes back (or doesn't) from the war. The last sentence makes a statement that could end any one of thirty different stories: "And he suspected that from now on his life was going to be difficult in some unknown and frightening way." Considering that this comes after Peter has lost Cassie and picked up another woman, the unspoken writer-reader contract seems to demand something else, further evidence of the change in Peter that this statement implies. The implication ought to be made clear within the story, instead of outside the action and in the nebulous future. On the other hand, people don't often get closure, but simply trail away into the rest of their lives. Why can't these characters do the same?

Many of Ely's stories and their section breaks begin with descriptions of landscape, as if to establish bona fides somehow, but they never exceed the proper weight for the story. In "Lovers of Hurricanes," Ely uses landscape and setting juxtaposed with the effects of an oncoming hurricane to reveal truths about his characters. After a description of the hurricane's eye, during which he had been making love, the protagonist worries more about his cabin and the flood than the woman he's with. Or, consider another story, "The Poisoned Arrow."

It's unbearably hot in the Mississippi Delta. I drive down from Memphis on the two lane highway that runs the length of the Delta, pass seemingly endless fields of cotton, soybeans, and rice. Here and there along rivers and creeks are patches of woods, places where I suppose my father once hunted.

In this story narrated by Judson, the simple verb "suppose" ramps up its meaning considerably in context. Lulled by the barely changing landscape, the longer Judson drives, the more he falls into a reverie, much like the reader, a reverie broken only by that single well-chosen verb. The narrator doesn't know anything about his father, not his hobbies or interests, nor even the way he was killed. Interpreted as sarcasm, the verb makes a deal of difference in how he approaches his father's killer...