STUDENTS OFTEN ASK, how can I develop a good style, and the answer is simple: Honor thy mother and father, eat your carrots, don’t step on the cracks in the sidewalk, and as surely as your hair grows and your fingernails lengthen, your style will develop. The companion question is: What should I write about? And another simple answer comes to mind: Don’t fret; your themes will find you.
If the novel is a doorway opening to another universe, then the short story is a window through which we can glimpse a contained piece of another world. In her novel The Falling Woman, Pat Murphy opened wide the door into modern Mexico, as well as ancient Mayan times, and invited us in to walk and talk with compelling characters.
In the stories in this collection we get glimpses of other strange and wondrous places and people. But a window works both ways: Not only can we see through to the other side, but from there we can look back and perceive the emerging writer. And this writer has eaten her carrots and done honor to her parents. Her style is emerging strongly, lucid, often lyrical, and uniquely hers. Her themes and concerns have discovered her and are demanding a voice.
From the earliest story in this collection, one recurring theme is undeniable: the meaning of personal power and talent. In “Touch of the Bear” power is denied, then accepted. It is shown to have a Shadow side that is both exhilarating and threatening. To carry the Jungian examination just one step further, we can see the strong line of continuity from past to present most clearly in this early story: The power is derived from sources so ancient they are the very basis for the collective unconscious, pure archetypes. The idea of the past as a dynamic force in the recent surfaces again and again. This early story states the theme of creative power blatantly; the subtlety of the later stories is not yet developed, but the meaning is clear from the start. Again and again Pat comes back to the quandary that the possession of talent, of power, presents.
In “Don’t Look Back” the question arises: Isn’t talent enough to free one from a deterministic universe? In “Clay Devils” the creative power is recognized and dealt with in quite a different manner as a simple peasant artist comes to understand the high price creativity may exact.
“Prescience” is a lovely story with a marvelous sustained tone that is a pleasure to read, and it deals with the question: If you knew what the future holds, couldn’t you arrange your life better? This is a late story, with a subtle treatment of the same theme, with yet another approach and without despair. In it Katherine of the story is accepting of her strange talent; she uses it honestly and openly and takes whatever consequences that follow with good humor.
Not so in “Bones” where the power is manifest in a giant among humans, but a giant who must suffer torment because he cannot find the outlet his gift demands. To have such power denied through any means can be dangerous; instead of liberation there may be destruction of the self.
Another of Pat Murphy’s recurrent themes is the encounter with the stranger, the other who does not fit in, who is alien either literally or metaphorically. The stories in this group mature from the earliest, a simple wish fulfillment, through the alien as phantom lover, to a more complex treatment as in “In the Islands,” where the alien is web fingered and ocean-bound, and the human is very human indeed. Nick in this story, and Michael in “Orange Blossom Time” react to the other with suspicion, awe, envy, resentment, all the human emotions that such an encounter must excite.
In “A Falling Star Is a Rock from Outer Space,” a middle-aged, lonesome woman encounters an alien in a story that could have turned into just another horror story.
Pat chose compassion instead of special effects to make the story rise above such easy categorization. And compassion is the key word for the very fine story “On a Hot Summer Night,” in which a lusting Mexican hammock vendor meets a strange woman who cannot get warm. The usual xenophobic treatment of the alien, the other, is missing in both of these stories; instead, compassion and acceptance bring about peace, the filling of a void, or even redemption.
The final story in this series is the highly acclaimed, award-winning “Rachel in Love,” which needs no further introduction here, of course.
One of the thematic threads interwoven throughout Pat’s novel The Falling Woman was the relationships within the triangle of mother/father/daughter. The complexity of parent/child relationships, of male/female relationships surfaces again and again in her work, not stridently as in the most radical feminist mode, but thoughtfully and even painfully. The man searching for his father and the Yeti, the girl whose sister ran way to space to escape domestic battling, the woman whose clever fingers created devils that turned her husband into a devil, these are all very human problems, not necessarily feminist concerns, except that feminism embraces all humanity, all its relationships.
What makes a man sacrifice his daughter to achieve a material success? Her revenge is to keep him imprisoned in the box, one of the “Dead Men on TV.” What makes a man eschew a real woman for a vegetable wife? Her revenge is to teach him that even turnips have teeth.
Explanations are not necessary; it is enough to have seen this situation unravel, or that one. We are given the vision; we can ponder the reasons.
And the “Women in the Trees,” a frightening, haunting story, doesn’t try to answer the questions either, but only poses them. The live oaks were old when the landlord’s grandmother was young. They have always been there, have always held a community of women who escaped, have always sheltered them; the continuity is intact. This collection is like a house of many windows, and this is one of the encapsulated worlds visible from within, ugly, forbidding, mysterious, real. Our world, after all.
These stories span a ten-year period, hardly a beginning to what will surely be a long career. Pat is flexing her muscles; her grasp is growing ever surer, her reach more ambitious, her vision sharper. She is still staking out a territory, and she has found a voice. Read and enjoy these stories, and anticipate, as I do, the new vistas to be revealed as she opens more windows, opens the door wide, and invites us in.
October 1989