Discovering Eve by Jane Candia Coleman (review)

164 WesternAmerican Literature Airlift: Short Stories. ByJan Epton Seale. Afterword by Roland Sodowsky. (Fort Worth: Texas Christian University Press, 1992. 174 pages, $21.95.) Eighteen absorbing tales filled with an infinite variety of characters are separated into four sections in this attractive book. “Finding the Grain,”the first part, features fully mature protagonists, some facing the final conflicts in their lives. Middle-aged protagonists adjust to loss or hardship in the second, “Only One Eye Crying.” “Small LightAbove”and “Plants, Animals, and Sin”center on young adults’ and adolescents’ rites of passage. Seale’s characters-housewives, farmers, migrant workers, widows and widowers, teachers, children-possess a vitality that engages us and affirms the resilience of the human spirit. Happily, Airlift avoids sentimentality while evoking the poverty of exploited minorities, abuse of a spouse and animals, or the innocence of children. Seale favors first-person and limited omniscient narratives in this collec­ tion, providing the reader adequate access to the understanding and feeling each character possesses. We perceive, for example, the disappointment of a widower in his hasty re-marriage, the pain of a mother upon the death of a son to war and the ensuing violent behavior of her grieving husband, the joy of a farmer’spurposeful and satisfyingwork, the desire ofa grandfather to provide a legacy. Seale also uses archetypes and literary allusions to advantage—initiation, journey motifs, and Biblical references particularly. Her fictional world is cred­ ible and familiar albeit fresh and surprising. Sodowsky, in the Afterword, declares that Seale’s characters may be famil­ iar, but they are never stereotypes and that the storytelling voice is clear and straightforward, but never boring. He compares the stories to one of the annual “best” collections and prefers Seale’s because of their “minute accuracy” and “the intimacy achieved” in the various persons. Certainly the western settings, traditional lives in small towns or farming communities, provincial colleges, and vacation Bible schools are ordinary; but Seale possesses a Chekovian ability to render people and events significant and memorable. Poignant in their grief, fierce in their adherence to desire, bewildered in their advancement from one stage of life to another, Seale’s characters breathe and signify much that is worth our attention. DELORES WASHBURN Hardin-Simmons University DiscoveringEve. ByJane Candia Coleman. (Athens, Ohio: Swallow Press, 1993. 125 pages, $21.95.) Having only been familiar withJane Candia Coleman in the context of her collection of pOems, No RoofBut Sky, which won a Western Heritage Wrangler Award, DiscoveringEve is quite a shock. Gone, in this volume, is her professed “love affair with the American West,” and presto chango, now that Coleman Reviews 165 actually lives and breathes in the West, having relocated from her native Penn­ sylvania to New Mexico, she is utilizing creative distance by writing of her younger years-childhood and young womanhood. These stories are set in a profoundly eastern American atmosphere with smatterings of a cultured Euro­ pean backdrop as well, as evidenced in the title and subject of her story of a disintegrating marriage, “La SignoraJulia.” These stories have more in common with the works of a less imaginative Francine du Plessix Gray than an astute Willa Cather, but as promised in the flyleaf, they are indeed awoman’sperspective, and they do seek out wisdom and understanding. Unfortunately, they are not memorable. In fact, I found their female characters rather boring. Are they subdued by inexperience? Passive socialization? Occasionally, I sensed an underlying rage in these stories, anger keptunder civilized wraps. However, I’d vote for releasing a bit ofit in small doses here and there ifonly for the singular purpose of providing variation in tone. In “Freddy, The Blind Professor, and the Scent of Roses,” for example, Coleman is either stretching and struggling to force a mundane memory into something deeper, more intellectual, than it really was, or she is burying her character’s fury by forcing an implausible magnanimous narrator upon the reader. PENELOPE REEDY The Redneck Review ofLiterature SorrowFloats. ByTim Sandlin. (New York: Henry Holt, 1992. 352 pages, 21.95.) Maurey Talbot claims to have “devoured Dickens—searching for a clue as to what happens next.”Perhaps this is how she ended up in a picaresque...