The Red Road

Page 7 November–December 2008 traces the potent interracial/intergenerational relationship —bittersweet at best, though readers may find the increasingly frail protagonist more villainous —from 1953 to the story’s poignant tableau in 1970. As a form, the short story seems best suited to narrow chunks of time—a day, a week, not months or years—and then a work like this one comes along and proves the short story can handle nearly two decades with ease, in the right author’s hands. Each of the ten stories in this collection appeared previously, mostly in literary journals, from regional periodicals such as Arkansas Review to national stalwarts Crazyhorse and Indiana Review, to hip newcomer One Story. Stories from the Afterlife is a testament to the high quality of writing available for the literary magazine reader. Should you hear anyone complain about the work put out by current American literary journals, writers like Quinn Dalton are the best antidote. Press 53 should be lauded for giving Dalton’s stories a new home and putting them all in one place. Dalton should have more collections in her future (she’s a novelist as well, but shouldn’t abandon the short form—it would be our loss), and let’s hope she continues to collect wide-ranging stories, unbridled and unburdened by the strict expectations of linked collections. Her expert range here— illustrated by the fraught depictions of her varied characters’ often jagged alternatives—is the prime charm of Stories from the Afterlife. John A. McDermott directs the Creative Writing Program at Stephen F. Austin State University in Nacogdoches , Texas. His fiction has appeared in a variety of journals, including Alaska Quarterly Review, Cimarron Review, and The Southeast Review. McDermott continued from previous page the Red Road Catherine Calloway Scott Ely returns to the Mississippi Delta, “cotton and soybeans stretching away green and rich across the flat land,” in his seventh book, The Dream of the Red Road, the story of a Vietnam veteran who grows weary of the war and walks away from the American military to become a translator for the North Vietnamese. When the novel opens, Pender Hartwell is trying to reestablish himself in his family home in the American South in Egypt Ridge, Mississippi, having finally returned to the US decades after the war’s end. It is evident that the war is still not over for Pender or for the American public, for now Pender must war not only with his dreams and his own soul, but with those who oppose a traitor who has suddenly reappeared in their midst and laid claim to his Southern heritage. Ely skillfully centers the novel around a number of contrasts: Vietnam versus Mississippi, dream love versus real love, the younger generation versus an older one, the past versus the present, and the Civil War of Pender’s honorable ancestors versus the Vietnam War of a deserter. Like many of Ely’s Vietnam veteran protagonists, especially those in his short story collection The Angel of the Garden (1999), Pender has chosen to reside in the Mississippi Delta where he grew up because he wants “to live carefully among simple, predictable things.” As he slowly restores his family’s ancestral home, ironically complete with portraits of his relatives who served their country faithfully in both the Revolutionary and Civil Wars, and tries to forge a relationship with Miranda, a divorced friend whom he dated only briefly in high school and with whom he thinks he can at last find real love, Pender dreams of an elusive girl in a white aoi dai whom he saw “walk[ing] down a red road lined with palms and pepper trees” in Vietnam. The intertextual nature of The Dream of the Red Road surfaces through allusions to Nguyen Du’s eighteenth-century love poem The Tale of Kieu, which Pender learned to read in Vietnamese while working for the communists. As in his last novel, A Song for Alice Loom (2006), Ely focuses on the possibility of love for those, who, like Kieu, have been scarred by life and its various types of warfare. Whereas Pender has suffered from witnessing too much of the brutal effects of...