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Man Receives A Letter
by Peter Gordon
Red Hen Press
2009, Paperback
First collection
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Peter Gordon is a graduate of Yale whose short
stories have appeared in Ploughshares,
The New Yorker, Glimmer Train, and elsewhere. His work has
been anthologised, awarded a Pushcart Prize and cited in The Best American Short Stories
series. He lives in Massachusetts with his wife and two sons.
Read
an interview
with Peter Gordon
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"Here he was, practically
an old man, on the threshold of his last phase, at the beginning of his
mortal end, and somehow he was still in love with God… He loved the
smell of candle wax. He loved the tart blood and the dry host. He loved
the wind that blew through the congregation when the back doors were
left open. How unremarkable he was! How dull! How typical!"
Reviewed by Sarah Hilary
At the end of Drive,
my favourite story in this collection, Father Stanley McDonough tries
to catch a glimpse of his face in a car mirror: "He wanted to see
himself, how he looked behind the wheel and in full command, but he
couldn’t quite get it full and square. Too many moving shadows, too
much reflected light." This same trouble afflicts other characters in the collection, in fact
it might be said to sum up the tension at the heart of each story, as
the heroes struggle to make sense of their lives. Drive is told in
the third person by a man who believes himself beyond the awful
(literally "full of awe") earthly temptations that have transformed the
life of his fellow priest, Father Carlton. The fallen priest bequeaths
his fast car to hero, and we are left to wonder whether Father Stanley
is poised to fall prey to the lure of this "divinely fast" car and its
female passenger. We suspect not, from what we have learnt of Father
Stanley, but Gordon – with real skill and delicacy of touch – allows us
to imagine more than one ending for our soul-searching hero.
This same delicacy of touch characterises each of the stories in the
collection. The narrator is often a faceless young man, telling us
about his wife or his father, revealing a little of himself in the
process. In Celia,
this hero (Peter) is diminished by his dying father’s insistence that
Peter died as a child, attempting to cross a river. This false memory
is full of dramatic detail, compellingly told by Peter’s father. Peter
is a shadowy presence in the story, despite his first person narrative,
left wondering what became of the son his father loved:
"I think, what would he be like now? If I passed him on the street,
would I even know it was him? What kind of face would he have, what
kind of clothes? Would he be rich? Would he be happy? Would he find
someone to love or spend his whole life looking in vain? If he had
lived, I mean. If he had made it across that river."
The characters in these stories are always wondering at the lives they
didn’t live, or might have lived, or may yet live. Always trying to get
that glimpse in the mirror which tells the truth of who they are and
where they’re headed.
Dreams and premonitions play a big part in more than one story, my
favourite being Birds
of Paradise, where the hero’s near-death experience aligns
with his wife’s visitations by ghostly relatives. The story is told
with dark humour, and pathos.
If the men in his stories are searching for self-enlightenment,
Gordon’s heroines are running from premonitions or trying to fight
fate. In Bridge of Sighs,
the hero tells how his wife’s Aunt Eda, a bruja or Peruvian witch,
predicts that her niece will marry not the man she loves but a stranger
from abroad (the hero is an American). This prediction shapes their
first meeting, but the story is shot through with the struggle between
the young woman’s belief in her Aunt’s powers of prediction and her
desire for another man.
In Photopia,
the young wife loses her only photo of her father when she leaves Peru,
and spends the story searching among her relations for a replacement
photograph. The story leads us in an unexpected direction, towards a
man who was the girl’s surrogate father in the days following his
death. Her search is circular, self-defeating, but no less powerful for
that.
My second favourite story, Stones,
has a perfect ending, the echo of which can be heard almost from the
first line. It’s the story of a father visiting his son’s college, and
we sense it’s a last journey even before Gordon begins unravelling the
father’s destructive history. Gordon leads us around the edges of the
story’s heart, sometimes taking us closer, sometimes drawing back to
give us a better perspective. It’s powerful, credible story-telling,
woven from the raw stuff of relationships.
Lost
is a strange story, appearing towards the end of the collection,
telling of a makeshift army trying to navigate a hostile land. It
reminded me of Cormac McCarthy’s Blood
Meridian, a uniquely-American tale of unending war and
weariness. Gordon, like McCarthy, offers no easy access to the reader;
the best we can do is suspend judgement. It’s possible to imagine an
optimistic ending, if you’re so inclined. But you can’t escape the
feeling that this isn’t the only ending Gordon would write, if he was
in the habit of "ending" his stories emphatically, which he isn’t.
It’s tempting to conclude from this collection that Peter Gordon
doesn’t "do plot". But it would be more accurate to say he comes at
story-telling from another angle, one which opens doors into lives,
affording us glimpses but denying us the indulgence of thinking we can
know for certain the fates of those we’re reading about. Some readers
will find this frustrating. For me, it made the characters less
knowable but more alive. I believed in these people, hoped and feared
for them. And that’s what I want from a good story.
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