|
Reviewed
by Sarah Hilary
It’s
a rare thing, at least in my experience, to catch an author on the cusp
of perfecting her style, at a stage where she’s still experimenting
with voice and form. That’s how I found Chavisa Woods in this first
collection.
It
was in some ways a frustrating experience, not helped by the fact that
the book needed the attention of a good copyeditor; I found the
frequent grammatical and spelling mistakes very distracting. Woods’ own
tendency to pull readers from the story by side-tracking into
meta-fiction, or simply metaphor, was infuriating precisely because the
story was so damn good you wanted to stay inside it. In The Smell of Honey,
she conjures a family in meltdown, children about to take drastic steps
to cope with an abusive father. Her descriptions and the voices of the
children are vivid and compelling, yet at a vital moment in the
narrative she chooses to insert a passage about J.E. Amoore’s
Stereochemical Theory. It’s hard not to resent the jolt this gives the
reader. In Mr. Bunny,
a powerful story of brutality and survival, Woods is unable to resist
the temptation of a metaphor, "insects (lying) in a holocaust of
quest", which has no business coming from the mind or mouth of her
otherwise inarticulate heroine.
Then
comes a story like Never
Enough, angry, sad, chaotic – at last it feels as if we’re
getting the full measure of Woods’ true voice. Not for a second does
she trip up while telling this story of a woman struggling against the
prejudices of her family, friends and lover.
A
very few of the stories I found too consciously poised, pretentious
even. Home,
where the heroine is given the tag ‘the grown child’ with its two page
detour into the properties of triangles, felt like a lecture in how to
overload a story with analogy. Sundown
in the Land of Lincoln infuriated me with its sudden
switch to surrealism at the very end, which felt like an act of
desperation on the part of an author struggling with an insoluble issue
(in this case, the insidious nature of racism). Pathos played in
the same territory, between realism and surrealism, and with an
equivalently large issue at stake (organised religion) but it succeeded
because Woods was faithful to the internal logic of the narrative and
characters she’d created so well.
The
themes which repeat throughout the collection – incest, abuse,
prejudice, sexuality, escape – tend to create an expectation in the
reader; you feel after the first four stories that you know what’s
coming next. So when Woods pulls out a story like The Bell Tower, the
effect is electric. I won’t give away what’s so remarkable about this
particular story but suffice to say it’s something I’ve never read
before and doubt I’ll read again.
I
came last of all to The
First Five Hundred Years of my Life, in some ways the
story which surprised me most. It’s a terrifying concentration of
Woods’ favourite themes, uncomfortable to read but utterly persuasive,
a modern-day equivalent of The
Yellow Wall-Paper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman.
I
wish for Woods great things – and a great editor! – the strength to
trust to her own voice and to resist the lure of gilding her raw prose
with learning. I’m betting her second collection will be a knockout.
Read one of
Chavisa's stories on The
Fiction Circus
Sarah
Hilary
won the Fish Historical-Crime Contest with Fall River, August 1892, and
has two stories in the Fish anthology 2008. She was a runner-up in the
Biscuit Short Story Contest 2008. MO: Crimes of Practice, the Crime
Writers’ Association anthology, features Sarah's story, One Last
Pick-Up. Her work appears in Smokelong Quarterly, Literary Fever, Every
Day Fiction, Ranfurly Review and Zygote in my Coffee. Sarah blogs at
http://sarah-crawl-space.blogspot.com/
|
Publisher: Fly By Night Press
Publication
Date:
January 2008
Paperback/Hardback?
Paperback
First
collection?: Yes
Author
bio: Chavisa
Woods writes poetry and short
stories. This is her first published collection of fiction.
Read
an interview
with Chavisa Woods
Buy this book (used or
new) from:
Author's
recommended booksellers: Bluestockings
AbeBooks
Amazon
BetterWorldBooks.Com
And...don't
forget your local booksellers and independent book shops! Visit IndieBound.org to find an independent bookstore near
you in the US
What
other reviewers thought:
GO magazine
Goodreads
Brooklyn Rail
|
