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NORTH CAROLINA L I T E R A R Y RE V I E W
The short story remains a highly regarded art form in the twentyfirst century, as evidenced by the 2013 Nobel Prize for Literature, awarded to Alice Munro, author of over a dozen collections of short fiction, as well as Lydia Davis’s receipt of the 2013 Man Booker International Prize for Fiction. Two recent short story collections by writers living in North Carolina offer impressive contributions to the genre. Rebecca Lee’s Bobcat and Other Stories and Peter Makuck’s Allegiance and Betrayal provide engrossing stories that live up to what Mark Edmundson describes in his essay “The Ideal English Major” as the “soul-making . . . dimension” of literature that enriches readers’ lives. He goes on to say that the English major “knows that any worthwhile event in life requires commentary and analysis in giant proportion,” and this idea certainly translates to readers at large.1 In particular, Lee and Makuck’s two collections offer readers the opportunity to explore interesting, intelligent characters who seek to understand the sometimes baffling events of their lives and the mysteries of their own behavior and motivations.
soul-making short fiction a review by Kristina L. Knotts Rebecca Lee. Bobcat and Other Stories. Chapel Hill, NC: Algonquin Books, 2013. Peter Makuck. Allegiance and Betrayal: Stories. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2013.
Kristina L. Knotts has a PhD from the University of Tennessee. She works at Westfield State University in the Learning Disabilities Program and teaches English parttime. She is a regular reviewer for NCLR.
Rebecca Lee has written an intelligent, hard-to-put-down collection of short stories, Bobcat and Other Stories. As in her first book, a novel titled The City Is a Rising Tide (2006), her short fiction features a range of diverse settings from Hong Kong to a Southern college campus, and in each story Lee creates a powerful sense of voice – sometimes sardonic or self-deprecating, but always poetic and wise.
Rebecca Lee, a native of Saskatchewan, Canada, received her MFA from the University of Iowa Writer’s Workshop and is currently an Associate Professor in the Creative Writing Department at UNC-Wilmington. In 2013, she won the Danuta Gleed Literary Award for Bobcat and Other Stories. Peter Makuck is Emeritus Distinguished Professor of ECU’s Harriot College of Arts and Sciences and the founding editor of Tar River Poetry. The author of seven poetry collections, he was interviewed in NCLR 2007, and his poetry has appeared in that issue and the 1995 and 1996 issues. Allegiance and Betrayal is his third short story collection.
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Mark Edmundson, “The Ideal English Major,” Chronicle of Higher Education, 29 July 2013: web.
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Many of Lee’s characters are remarkably sensitive and generous to others around them – sometimes to a fault. We see this large-heartedness especially in her narrators’ reactions to those with some sort of disability. In Bobcat, several characters have pronounced facial tics, and one has a hand with three fused fingers – distinctions another writer might have rendered grotesque. Lee’s characters are notable in their expansive desire to accept others, often viewing these traits as symbols of human fragility and beauty. In “The Banks of the Vistula,” the main character describes her boyfriend’s threefingered hand as having “the nimbus of an idea about it, as if the gene that had sprung this hand had a different world in mind, a better world, where hands had more torque when they grasped each other” (48). In “World Party,” the narrator recalls a Lutheran pastor from her childhood whose facial tics add a dramatic emphasis to his sermons. She describes his face during such a moment as “that grave, magnificent revelation of fragility . . . a beautiful old man’s face, God and time and mortality working its way over it” (149). Lee’s characters tend to view others through this generous lens, and including these elements lends her writing an authenticity that humanizes her characters. “The Banks of the Vistula” is one of the most engaging and surprising stories in Bobcat, at times poetic and funny, despite coming from the voice of a student plagiarist. The narrator, Margaret, a firstyear college student, enthuses