Ocean State (review)

Contemporary American literature rarely concerns itself now with issues of explicit regional identity. Given the fluidity of American society, economic and behavioral markers attach themselves to ethnicity and class more often than to place, and readers these days are more likely to know where the typical Lady Gaga fan goes to college than where that fan grew up. One of the effects of the post-World War II years, with their increased mobility and social unrest, has been a sharp diminishment in our sense of the manners, attitudes, and accents that can define a place.

Positive things can be said about this diminishment. There is no question that American society has become less stratified, and boundaries between race and class are considerably more permeable than they were fifty years ago. But I find it hard not to mourn the meticulously delineated social observations of Eudora Welty and Edith Wharton, or the Dickensian portraiture of Saul Bellow, or the elegiac, slightly surreal documentation of Bernard Malamud or John Cheever. Those writers and their counterparts documented the habits and social geography of their chosen locales with such finesse that even a reader who had never been to Chicago could gain a feel for its boisterous streets from reading Humboldt's Gift, or could understand the crippling and sustaining weight of habit and expectation in a Southern town from reading The Optimist's Daughter. Fiction that is firmly anchored to place, as Georgia-anchored Flannery O'Connor never tired of pointing out, not only chronicles the manners of that place but demonstrates how the experience of life is filtered, and therefore changed, by those manners. A haircut in Michigan, according to this argument, is a fundamentally different experience from a haircut in Los Angeles. Just read Ring Lardner and John Fante.

Some American writers still make place central in their work—early Philip Roth, Annie Proulx, and William Kennedy come particularly to mind. I don't think it is incidental that their work has an instantly recognizable quality of tone and detail, as specific as a fingerprint, in both the description and the characterization. Proulx's ranchers and roustabouts have almost limitless physical energy but are hampered in their sweetest moments by an absence of vocabulary; they can only inadequately give voice to tender emotions because they literally have no words for them. Roth's characters, on the other hand, always have vocabulary, and talk flows out of them like fountains. Their talk and expert self-analysis is of a piece with the noisy, colorful, flourishing New Jersey neighborhoods where lives wash from one house to the next and behavior, especially children's behavior, is admired or criticized or worried over, but is always and at all costs talked about.

Jean McGarry's work finds a comfortable home in this company of acute social observers. For thirty years she has been writing complex, verbally dense, emotionally rich stories set in Rhode Island, often the Rhode Island of the 1950s and '60s, when the habits and expectations of the World War II generation held unquestioned preeminence. The culture is clannish, defined by parishes and ethnicity, often Irish, and characters find themselves pitilessly locked into lives defined by acceptable accoutrements—salary-appropriate ash trays, and shelf paper on every surface. Identities are assigned early and never budge: the ballerina, the shut-in (a title that is later piously amended to "handicapped"), or, dreadfully, the respectable one, which everyone knows means the stolid sister who will never marry. Most of the labels are bestowed and enforced by women, who are often, as their seething daughters might say, holy terrors.

Closely documented domesticity, zealously guarded standards: a reader might wonder whether we haven't seen this ground plowed before. And were McGarry to stop with mere documentary description, even as startlingly beautiful as her description often is, the reader would be right. But throughout McGarry's career, and in Ocean State in particular, her work has been concerned with far more than the simple delineation of place. She is engaged with the interface between...