Predictably unpredictable fiction

By RICH SHEREIKIS

Kermit Moyer. Tumbling. Pp. 128.
Helen Norris. Water into Wine. Pp. 152.
Phillip Parotti. The Trojan Generals Talk: Memoirs of the Greek War. Pp. 164.
Gloria Whelan. Playing with Shadows. Pp. 147.
Urbana & Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1988. Cloth $11.95 each.

Like any good series, the University of Illinois Press's "Illinois Short Fiction" series is in some ways unpredictable. Over the past 13 years, the press has turned out four volumes each year, each volume by a different author. Some of the volumes have featured innovative fiction, reflecting recent experiments in point of view, style and even subject matter. Some have been largely conventional, reminding us of how strong but flexible traditional forms can be, adaptable to any number of subjects or themes.

But the U of I series is predictable, too: You can always expect some fine writing in any year's group, and you can assume you'll come away from your reading with a firmer faith in the health of American fiction. The U of I series features writers who are little known outside the pages of our "little" magazines; yet the strength and richness of their efforts tell us that our culture is not yet brain dead, despite the banalities of television and popular fiction. As long as people like Kermit Moyer, Helen Norris, Phillip Parotti and Gloria Whelan are probing the crannies of the human condition, there's hope yet that we are capable of sustaining creative life.

Among this year's collections, Whelan's stories are perhaps the most conventional technically, although they are also, in a curious way, adventurous. Almost all of Whelan's characters are people well past the prime of their lives, many of them facing retirement with more than a little uncertainty. The Rev. Donald Wangerman searches for meaning in a Florida retirement complex in "A Dwelling Place for Dragons." May Elger, victimized by her daughter and committed to a sterile nursing home, seeks solace in martinis when a friend takes her to lunch at a club in "The Dogs in Renoir's Garden." An 80-year-old psychoanalyst copes with the departure of her last client in "Keeping House with Freud."

All Whelan's characters are captured in those painful moments when things they have believed in are shattered or threatened, and their efforts to cope make the stories interesting and satisfying. One virtue of these stories is that they remind us of how rich and varied the human race is, once you get past stereotypes and self-fulfilling prophecies. "Seniors," too often, are thought to be equally limited, identically motivated, and Whelan's stories remind us that our separate needs and idiosyncracies stay with us into later years, making life and its problems diverse and fascinating, however long we live.

Helen Norris, whose "The Christmas Wife" (the title story from her volume in the U of I Press 1985 series) was recently made into an HBO movie starring Jason Robards and Julie Harris, also explores the problems of aging in many of her stories. But her fantastical imagination adds another dimension to her efforts. "Mrs. Moonlight" tells the poignant story of Mrs. Gideon, who tries to recapture her youth by having a tree house built in her daughter's yard. She selectively turns off the things she doesn't want to hear or remember from her daughter and, in an inspired moment, calls up an old beau who helps her escape, if only temporarily, from the life she's leading. Despite her flaws, her indomitable spirit makes Mrs. Gideon admirable, and her tactics are a tribute to the resilience of the human condition.

Norris's "The Cloven Tree" tells the wonderful story of Abby and Dave, a couple in their seventies, who take up dreams they'd deferred after they got married. Dave has moved out, to a hut behind a neighborhood widow's house, where he pursues his dream of planning an ocean voyage. Abby begins to practice the piano she hasn't touched in years. Their middle-aged children are appalled and shocked by their behavior, but the two find themselves, and each other, again, in the course of their explorations. In another vein, Norris creates a wonderful fantasy world in "White Hyacinths," in which an amateur string quartet brings life to a shabby basement, until the group's complacent satisfaction is disrupted by a curious and talented little foreigner named Rostov.

Like Whelan's, most of Norris's stories (except for "Water into Wine," which involves a trucker and a kind of evangelistic water purifier salesman and which will make you think you're reading Flannery O'Connor) deal with people from genteel classes. But Norris's creative touches and fertile imagination lift these characters out of their literal drabness and into that rarified air where the best artistic creations reside.

Kermit Moyer's Tumbling is a fine complement to Whelan's and Norris's tales of aging heroes and heroines. Moyer's characters are, for the most part, young people poised on the edge of innocent youth and awareness of the powerful sexual drives they're beginning to feel, but not understand. The title story deftly reveals this awakening in a pair of twins (a boy and a girl) who are taken in by a strange family while they're running away. "The Compass of the Heart" lays bare a young man's initiation into the meaning of sexual attraction and of life's fragility through the events of a simple camping trip. "Ruth's Daughter," which ends the volume, tells the painful story of a young girl's abortion: yet it, like Moyer's other tales, pays tribute to the healing powers of love and commitment among the characters.

Finally, Phillip Parotti's The Trojan Generals Talk takes us on an exploration of mankind's timeless folly and tenacity. Ten aging Trojan officers (whose names you won't find in the Iliad, I'm pretty sure) look back on their experiences from the vantage point of 50 years. In each of their dramatic monologues they're addressing a representative of the Hatti, a tribe planning for war and looking for advice. Each of the generals looks back on the final days of Troy, trying to analyze what went wrong and how the Trojan forces might have avoided the defeat they endured at the hands of the Greeks.

Parotti's experiences as a naval officer come into play in these stories, as the generals debate the absence of a Trojan naval strategy; and his immersion in Homer's works becomes clear not only in the splendid

March 1989 | Illinois Issues | 30

sketches of Hector and Priam which emerge from the generals' narratives, but also in the rich images and style of the writing. But these are more than second-guesses of military strategy. The generals' stories remind us of how human pride and vanity can lead to destruction, and how honor and courage can be spawned by the worst conditions.

Tales of aging; tales of initiation; tales of timeless frailty and strength. Unpredictable styles and approaches. Predictable quality. The U of I Press has sustained its best traditions in its current short fiction harvest. □

Rich Shereikis teaches short fiction at Sangamon State University and writes regularly for Illinois Times, the Springfield weekly.

March 1989 | Illinois Issues | 31