Unhappy in Their Own Way

Flannery O’Connor makes my top ten list; John Gardner’s polemic On Moral Fiction (1979)set my teeth on edge 30 years ago; and I’m prone to judge books by their covers, not necessarily inappropriate in the case of a small press with a distinct sense of mission, such as Wiseblood Books, publisher of Swarm to Glory, Garnett Kilberg Cohen’s latest collection of short stories, nine of which have been published in well-regarded literary magazines such as the Michigan Quarterly Review, the Ontario Review, and Crab Orchard Review. “We are wide-eyed for new epiphanies of beauty,” Wiseblood Books proclaims on the back cover of Swarm to Glory. Not just garden variety epiphanies (unwanted self-knowledge, etc.) but those evanescent moments James Joyce spoke of “when the soul of the commonest object seems to us radiant.” Special pleading or rash promise? To announce you’re in the business of providing the highest level of uplifting beauty is to set the bar awfully high, especially for those of us who’d prefer to be taken by surprise rather than prompted; nonetheless such a moment comes at the conclusion of the title story, strongest of the collection, as an eight year old girl in foster care watches a beekeeper lure a swarm of bees to a new home. She has just received the worst possible news. Her mother is dead:

And just for a moment—before the bubble in her throat burst and she began to cry—Ellen felt so light and small that she imagined she had risen to become part of the winged trail moving behind a leader who was effortlessly guiding her. And Ellen knew, at that very moment, that, indeed, a part of her of her mother was in the Queen Bee, every tree, every blade of grass, and that her other would be inside her too, forever guiding her to a better place.

We are meant to take on faith that Ellen’s consoling vision, that melding of mother, swarm and self will be enough to sustain her in the hard years ahead.

The front cover of Swarm to Glory with its drawing of a long-haired girl with down cast eyes (reading? grieving?) set up hopeful expectations that I’d be reading Young Adult fiction. “Swarm to Glory” could be the first chapter of a YA novel with Dickensian overtones, pitting eight year old Ellen Goldberg against her self-servingly pious foster mother Mrs. Wickle, whose sense of Christian duty includes taking in a Jewish foster child in hopes of converting her. Increasingly you’ll find Old Adults like me browse the YA section because YA fiction is fast paced and emotionally engaging, reading pleasures you can’t always count on with fiction that aspires to be what we call for want of a better term, literature.

Most of Kilberg Cohen’s stories are about traditional adult concerns: marital discontent, ill-advised love affairs, and failures of communication. Some are cautionary tales, the kind cherished by the mother in “Bad News” as conversational currency. “Her favorite tragedies are those brought on by the victims themselves, the result of a character flaw.” In “The Wedding Announcement” a professor of poetry married to a younger man, prides herself on avoiding tawdry scandal yet is unable to avoid the clichés of jealousy. In “Bottle of Wine,” the lover of a resourceful woman (brews her own beer, builds her own house) accuses her of lacking spontaneity and balks at saving breadcrusts. “Bad News” itself seem to circle around a tragedy—the alcoholic decline of a woman who’d once seemed the embodiment of perfection in young motherhood—but its true subject is the oblique communication between aging mother and daughter, a dabble into deep waters and a hasty retreat. Any adult daughter whose professional life is very different from her mothers could fill in the blanks, right? But each unhappy family is at least a little bit different in memorable fiction if not in real life.

Reading pleasures that I can’t...