Midwestern Voice: Still Listening

The all-time best title of a book on the short story form has to be Frank O’Connor’s The Lonely Voice. Published in 1957, good parts of it still hold up, particularly O’Connor’s ideas about “loneliness”—an essential quality of the writer, he believes—and the necessity of a writer to have a “voice.” The latter term is mostly misused these days. In creative writing classes it’s usually applied to characters and characterization, while O’Connor rightfully confers “voice” upon authors—their intelligence, their worldview, the characteristics of their “loneliness” (they wouldn’t be writing, otherwise) as it leaks through the story, and gradually over the length of a collection, accumulates meaning. Three new short story collections by Minnesota-connected authors Charles Baxter, Patrick Hicks, and Ron Parsons, along with a midwesterner-at-large, Luke Rolfes, give us a chance to listen, in particular, for midwestern voice.

Patrick Hicks’s new collection, The Collector of Names, reveals a remarkable, sometimes creepy intelligence. His skill is in deeply inhabiting wildly disparate characters: an aging country coroner who’s seen it all (but not a plane crash that rains bodies on Duluth); the pilot of b-17 Flying Fortress in World War Two; a geeky high school art student whose muse arrives in a (literal) tornado; an aging widow whose son appears on the doorstep—though he was killed in Vietnam in 1969 (or was he?); a fourth grade boy whose life’s work is listing the names of everyone he knows and everyone he meets. This authorial shape shifting can be disorienting as his concrete, muscular prose kicks us from story to story, world to world.

“She was naked on the embalming table, and I couldn’t stop staring at her nipples.” So begins “Living With the Dead,” narrated by teenaged Brian, whose father owns a funeral home. Brian is speaking of dead Ginny, a high school classmate who was texting as she ran a red light. “Growing up in a funeral home is a bit like growing up on a farm because it’s a family business,” Brian continues. “Everybody pitches in.” One of the better stories in the collection, “Living With the Dead” riffs on the irony of a horny teenager working with dead bodies while fixated with the sweet, real body of Ashley, a schoolmate. Ashley is weirdly obsessed with breast cancer, and she’s happy to show Brian her goods in return for a favor: have him take her to the basement of the funeral home and “show me a dead person.” Unlike other stories in Hicks’s collection, this one churns smoothly, and with growing force, to the top of its container but never spills over.

“57 Gatwick,” on the other hand, reels under the weight of plot. A world-weary county coroner who carries unprocessed grief for his late wife is suddenly overtaken by a larger catastrophe: bodies falling on the city of Duluth. After the mid-air disintegration of a large passenger plane bound from Minneapolis to London, George McCourt’s business is bodies (maybe he’s an older version of Brian from “Living With the Dead”). However, this time there are simply too many of them. And too many authorities from various agencies. And too much chaos—too much of everything. As a way to cope, he begins to obsess over the passenger list—the names, their lives, their stories—and gradually reframes his work into an outwardly noble action: fundraising for a memorial to “57 Gatwick.” At the memorial’s dedication, George is treated as a kind of a survivor—a hero, even. After the service and the bagpipe’s last note, “… the families came over to George McCourt. Some of them shook his hand, others embraced him.” From his business, George understands...