REVIEW | Arthur Powers
Seeing Still Lifes: The Seven Stages of Anger Wendy J. Fox. The Seven Stages of Anger. Winston-Salem, North Carolina: Press 53, 2014. $14.95, paper. Novels are large landscapes, with multiple images and figures. Short stories are more often still lifes—the angle of light on a peach, a bowl, a knife—illuminating small moments in a way that helps us to see things we would not normally see. In The Seven Stages of Anger, Wendy Fox helps us see those moments. The first two stories, about children of hill people in eastern Washington State, set the tone of the collection. Raised in a tough, individualistic, yet tightly knit community, the children begin to see themselves in perspective when a fire drives them into town: …we heard two of the town men…talking about what kind of people lived there, on our mountain, how we were just hill people anyway, how we couldn’t have much worth saving. We had barely, some of us, started our years of education then, and we knew some people bought most of their food at the store and wore clothes other than hand-me-downs… I think we had known for a long time that we were different, we just didn’t know how much it mattered. As these children grow up and move to Seattle, they find themselves adrift in the much more comfortable, but somehow less coherent, less meaningful, urban, middleclass life. A sense of drifting pervades the stories in this book. Women, particularly, drift into sexual liaisons, into marriage and motherhood without really wanting to. The 70 | Raleigh Review
