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The stories in this collection
are the fruits of long cultivation in the field of the author's
calling. "The Wall" recounts an epiphany, one widely common in the
maturing of human beings: confrontation with the first apparition of
death in a young life. The child prevails here by reaching out for a
mythical metaphor to bridge the awesome contradiction between his
small threatened existence and the great mystery beyond. "The Naming
of the Animals" takes a parallel path to the same end. The fearful
distance between the innocent heart and stark reality is also
reconciled by turning to myth, by drawing this time on the imagery
of our supreme myth: the Bible. This miraculous work encompasses the
longing to link the everyday with the universal in several stories
in this volume. The child in "Naming..." conceives of a name for the
beast fitting to contain its ferocity, much as Adam did when God
called on him to name all the animals of Creation. In "Is This
Naomi?" the contest with death arrives on the verge of old age, with
a hero who stares down its fearful visage by uniting in vision with
an ancient suffering analogous to his own.
From this point on, the stories
of more recent composition attempt themes testing the limits of
fictional probing, a dedication to experiment undertaken
after numerous years devoted to the craft. "Gold Star Mother"
examines the delusions of a woman who will not believe that her son
is dead, in spite of conclusive evidence that he is. The narrative
enters the far realms of her quest, as she also compels others
into the service of her delusion. "Joshua Briscoe" finds us in the
presence of visions possessing a man who believes himself to be the
direct descendant of a prophetess from the time of King Saul. In
"Snow Woman" a loner is compelled by his own nature to follow his
beloved beyond the joys of carnal embrace into the death of the
body, where the only sense of being is in the skeleton. "3300 B. C."
turns from hallucination to the prehistoric, imagining the Ice Man
of the Alps to have been a creature like ourselves, harried by the
same challenges and sustained by the same hopes. "Pilgrim's Progress Redux" rounds out this volume's gamut of recurring human constants
with a contemporary reliving of John Bunyan's epic journey through
time to eternity: where life is indeed a dream and God permits a
vast reach of metaphor.
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