JCO is more prolific than ever.!. You normally think of a collection of short stories as being gathered from one, two, or three decades of past writings; … .. not “Sourland”. I decided to read this book from front to back, serially. Right off the bat with “Pumpkin-Head”, we face JCO’s recent widowhood through the prospect of being hit on by males who want to “help” the recently bereaved with their “sexual” needs.
Things were sort of back to normal in the next half a dozen stories: violence, rape, other childhood fears, but I felt a growing recognition of thoughts and phrases from her memoir: hospitals, subservience to men, and female teenage powerlessness. Then, with “The Beating”, it dawned on me --- these were all new stories; all writen since her “A Widow’s Story.” She opened the spigots to her dark and mourning side and prose has been gushering out. These are great short stories --- all over the map on character and plot line, but with constant focus on three interlinked, human driving for
ces: obsession, fear, and violence(power).
In “Bitch,” she transfers the male role from husband to father, then in just three pages, she mind-dumps her stream of consciousness fears of inadequacy and powerlessness at her loss; at the hospital; and of no male figurehead in her life.
“Honor Code” is about the female-to-female bullying that goes on at every level of school, albeit more so at the upper echelons of academic priciness.
JCO has organized the short stories into three segments for this book. She doesn’t explain why she chose these groupings. If I were pushed to label the three parts, I would say –I- was women’s stories; -II- was girls stories; and –III- was early bereavement stories.
But I have to mention that, as the reader progresses from front to back of these sixteen stories, the plots become stranger, even delusional, as was “Probate”, which mixed in fear & regret, along with blenderizing hospital and courtroom experiences. When we reach the title story, “Sourland”, we’re in fantasyland. The plotline is like one of those teen-age, chain-saw scary movies; where the viewer is constantly screaming, “No! No.!. Stop.!. No one in their right mind would descend a dark staircase into an unused cellar to see what the strange noise was, when we’re just three girls, home alone on a Saturday night.”
Another view of these stories is as the exercises leading up to, “A Widow’s Story,” which was the full memoir of JCO’s experiences and traumas of bereavement. Reading both the memoir and the short stories is probably of interest mostly to writers trying to analyse her craftmanship. Themes are repeated between memoir and stories. Putting both together is the making of a master writing class on soul searching.
Things were sort of back to normal in the next half a dozen stories: violence, rape, other childhood fears, but I felt a growing recognition of thoughts and phrases from her memoir: hospitals, subservience to men, and female teenage powerlessness. Then, with “The Beating”, it dawned on me --- these were all new stories; all writen since her “A Widow’s Story.” She opened the spigots to her dark and mourning side and prose has been gushering out. These are great short stories --- all over the map on character and plot line, but with constant focus on three interlinked, human driving for
ces: obsession, fear, and violence(power).In “Bitch,” she transfers the male role from husband to father, then in just three pages, she mind-dumps her stream of consciousness fears of inadequacy and powerlessness at her loss; at the hospital; and of no male figurehead in her life.
“Honor Code” is about the female-to-female bullying that goes on at every level of school, albeit more so at the upper echelons of academic priciness.
JCO has organized the short stories into three segments for this book. She doesn’t explain why she chose these groupings. If I were pushed to label the three parts, I would say –I- was women’s stories; -II- was girls stories; and –III- was early bereavement stories.
But I have to mention that, as the reader progresses from front to back of these sixteen stories, the plots become stranger, even delusional, as was “Probate”, which mixed in fear & regret, along with blenderizing hospital and courtroom experiences. When we reach the title story, “Sourland”, we’re in fantasyland. The plotline is like one of those teen-age, chain-saw scary movies; where the viewer is constantly screaming, “No! No.!. Stop.!. No one in their right mind would descend a dark staircase into an unused cellar to see what the strange noise was, when we’re just three girls, home alone on a Saturday night.”
Another view of these stories is as the exercises leading up to, “A Widow’s Story,” which was the full memoir of JCO’s experiences and traumas of bereavement. Reading both the memoir and the short stories is probably of interest mostly to writers trying to analyse her craftmanship. Themes are repeated between memoir and stories. Putting both together is the making of a master writing class on soul searching.
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