Death Like Sudden Death

Anyone one who has ever been a student of a freshman literature class has probably spent at least a small amount of time pondering the metaphorical nature of the "hills" in Ernest Hemingway's famous, and often taught, short story "Hills Like White Elephants." But how many of us have considered the literal nature of these hills? A prize-winning author of almost twenty books, W.D. Wetherell has written a new collection of stories, Hills Like White Hills, that seems to be deeply engaged with the literal dangers of the world, but also the stories we tell in order not to succumb to these fears.

In the title story, "Hills Like White Hills," the protagonist, Anderson, searches the jagged mountains of New Hampshire for the wreckage of his son's airplane, which disappeared the previous Christmas Eve. As the anniversary of the plane's disappearance draws close, the likelihood of finding the wreckage and closure seems bleak at best. In this acute but highly functioning state of grief, Anderson is disdainful of fantasy in any shape or form, and he has even lost his own ability to imagine anything other than "his son's final seconds." Over and over, he places himself inside the cockpit:

it was always the rushing vertigo, the blinding forwardness, the shoulder straps tightening, straining, snapping—but try as he would, summon up all of his courage, he could never get past that moment, imagine impact, not unless he knew for certain where that impact had happened.

This "blinding forwardness" has erased his ability to see the hills that surround him as anything other than hills. Anderson remembers how once on camping trip, he and his son had played a car game, "trying to make each mountain into a familiar shape. A llama, a roller coaster, an elephant." But there are no elephants in the hills now: "The hills that confronted him out the windshield refused to be anything but stark white hills, and the deeper he drove into them, the more their literalness seemed to matter, matter hard." Later in the story, we are told that Anderson fears his son's disappearance will "become an unsolved mystery, written up in anniversary articles when the rest of the news was thin, fodder for hacks. Literalness was what he wanted, answers. Hills like white hills. Death like sudden death."

At this point, the reader may suspect that Wetherell is trying to out-Hemingway Hemingway. But the story makes a subtle yet dramatic shift, when Anderson's hunt leads him to a woman who has reported hearing a plane in the mountains on Christmas Eve—Sarah Hall, an elderly invalid who has lived in the mountains her entire life. And with her entrance into the story, the "blinding forwardness" of Anderson's narration begins to wander into a Katherine Anne Porter-esque stream-of-consciousness. Sly point-of-view shifts vacillate between Anderson and Sarah, and though the plane she reports hearing roar through the hills was piloted not by Anderson's son on Christmas Eve last year, but by her first lover on Christmas Eve, 1932—Anderson is finally able to escape the terrible literalness that has been pressing in on his life and is able to receive that most precious of gifts—a story.

Thus, perhaps Wetherell's collection may be read to say story is the antidote to grief, though some of the characters in the collection lose the saving grace of stories rather than finding balm in them. In "That Old Montana Pure," one can't help but chuckle upon reading the first sentence of the story: "My father was the best cowboy singer in the state of Maine." What follows is a portrait of a somewhat ridiculous man who has dedicated his life to a profession his daughter considers clownish. Sandy spends part of her childhood in the 1950s singing embarrassing duets at state fairs and church socials with her dad, celebrity cowboy Jack Stang, before her father abandons his family...