84
2016
NORTH CAROLINA L I T E R A R Y RE V I E W
“WANT[ING] MORE LESS” a review by Monica Miller Pam Durban. Soon: Stories. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2015.
MONICA MILLER is the Assistant Director of the Writing and Communication Program and a Marion L. Brittain Postdoctoral Fellow at the Georgia Institute of Technology. Her research interests include feminist and gender theory, Southern and Appalachian Literature, Queer Theory, and American Literature. She has a PhD from Louisiana State University. PAM DURBAN is a South Carolina native who now lives in North Carolina and teaches at UNC Chapel Hill. Her new book, Soon: Stories, is her second collection of short stories; her first was All Set About with Fever Trees (University of Georgia, 1995). She has also published two novels, The Laughing Place (Picador, 1995), and So Far Back (Picador, 2001). She has received a National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellowship and a Whiting Writer’s Award as well as a James Michener Creative Writing Fellowship from the University of Iowa.
The story “Forward, Elsewhere, Out” in Pam Durban’s new collection, Soon, begins with the protagonist, Kate, admitting that rainy nights in October are her “favorite time of day and year” (74). Her fondness for such darkness is a secret which she’s never told anyone, even her husband. Many of the stories in this collection take place in the dark: the “moonless night” of “Island” (69), “March 1839, just after midnight” in “Rowing to Darien” (1), or a morning in late fall when “the sky came down like a low gray ceiling” in “The Jap Room” (13). In these stories, the shadows offer safety and solace from immediate dangers and painful memories, enabling different kinds of escape. The collection opens with “Rowing to Darien,” a fictionalized account of the real-life Fanny Kemble, the British actress whose memoirs of her brief marriage to and separation from a Georgia plantation owner in the 1830s formed the basis for her Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation in 1838–1839, an antislavery memoir published in 1863. Durban’s story narrates Fanny’s escape from her husband and the immense sorrow and horror she discovered in life as a plantation mistress. Alone on the Altamaha River after midnight, Fanny, “an accomplished horsewoman, a hiker in the Swiss Alps; she is no flower,” reaches the limits of her physical strength in the “hard, almost desperate work” of fighting the currents of the river in the dark (1). For Fanny, as for many of Durban’s characters,
darkness provides more than simply a cover for their actions or a place to hide. They experience sadness and pain fully, and then do the work necessary to come out the other side. In these stories, shadows provide a place of rest and preparation, as they reflect on and plan for what’s to come. There are echoes of Bobbie Ann Mason and Clyde Edgerton in these stories, as well as more recent work such as Wilton Barnhardt’s 2014 novel Lookaway, Lookaway (reviewed in NCLR Online 2014). As in these other works, global History (with a capital H) and personal histories (with a small h) intertwine in unromantic alliances. The title story, which was first published in The Southern Review in 1996 and was subsequently chosen by author John Updike to appear in the 2000 Best American Short Stories of the Century, exemplifies the ways in which motifs of Southern literature – from the loss of the family plantation to the physical grotesque – mutate in the South of the twenty-first century, where family heirlooms are catalogued by scholars and any references to plantations are in the names of subdivisions. Instead, in “Soon,” Elizabeth Long Crawford, the heir to the family home Marlcrest, is born with a lazy eye, rather than being a beautiful belle, and when she undergoes surgery at the age of twelve “to fix her so a man would want to marry her someday,” she is instead blinded and maimed (98). The character of Elizabeth in “Soon” evokes perhaps Durban’s