By Rob Davison

In an exercise delivered to his students at City College in New York, Donald Barthelme once asked the question, "What can we reasonably expect, or even demand, of the sentence in fiction?" Barthelme’s own answer was compact and challenging: "We must ask . . . for a sentence that is at once surprising, true, beautiful, and also possessed of a metaphysical dimension."

Tess Gallagher, in her second collection of short stories, meets Barthelme’s criteria time and again. A few samples:

Elna had once said that beautifying was nothing more than grabbing Mother Nature by the throat and showing her who was boss ("Creatures," 80)

But [Jeanette] saw that to be born out of the body of a mother who’d loved and protected her and stayed beside her from the beginning was pure accident and more than that – a gift for which there was no deserving. ("The Mother Thief," 184)

When the Baron gazed at the cherubic faces of his female students, he often thought tenderly of his daughter at eighteen, already pregnant with the child of a car thief. ("The Poetry Baron," 199)

The characters of these stories are real people: men and women with mixed motives, portrayed without sentiment or excuses. Billy, the narrator of "I Got a Guy Once," is laid off work by Danny Gunnerson, a man who owes Billy and the rest of the timber-clearing crew a substantial sum of money. When Billy finds out that Danny hasn’t gone bankrupt, but has hired a second, cheaper crew to continue cutting trees, Billy knows immediately what he will do: he will cut down Danny’s spar tree, effectively putting Gunnerson out of business.

Standing there in moonlight, next to kinked iron and that downed spar, I felt that, at least for those moments, there was something peaceful in having called a line on what you were willing to put up with. Pride is an awful engine, mind you. I had been raised to keep a clear heart, not to do wrong to anyone, and if anyone asked me today, I would stand by that view of life. I would not bother to argue for rightness in what I’d just done, and done out of the usual misbegotten notions that add ruin to ruin in the world. No, this night’s work was somewhere out there with cougars and bobcats, with instincts we pledge mostly to overcome. But I figured, right or wrong, that for all the daylight I’d given up to Danny Gunnerson in good faith, I had one such night coming. My mind seemed eerily far-reaching, like that moon-washed night. If an army of Danny Gunnersons were to line up in my future, I hoped maybe I’d walk away with a little more backbone for having taken that spar down, wrongheaded as it was. (34)

Passages of such insight and wisdom are found throughout At the Owl Woman Saloon; Gallagher’s ability to render such moments with striking intensity is another of the book’s wonderful features.

Gallagher knows the weight of silence, how it can be used to imply or suggest meanings deeper than what initially confronts the reader on the page. In "Creatures," a story set in a hair salon, a cat leaps onto a young girl’s shoulders as she’s getting her hair done for the high school prom. The incident means more than just damaging the girl’s skin on her big night. The silence and sadness that follows the violent removal of the cat (Elna, the beautician, throws it against a mirror) concludes the story:

There was unearthly calm and stillness in the space they now inhabited. They seemed suspended in the close chemical smell of the room, but elsewhere in the house they heard things falling, glassware shattering – the racing, desperate plunge of an animal seeking its full measure of darkness.

Shelly stared at her friend and realized she didn’t know what Elna might do next – that everything, and everyone, had somehow been reduced to their simplest, most destructible element . . . . Shelly knew she and the others had arrived at some precarious boundary – where, despite their strongest instincts, they seemed to have agreed that no one would run from this room. (93-94)

Not surprisingly, there are stories that combine the best of Gallagher’s talents as both poet and storyteller. "The Leper" is one example. As the narrator negotiates a difficult long-distance phone conversation with Jerome, a neurotic friend, a shipment of flowers arrives unannounced at her door, followed by a stranger who inexplicably delivers a covered casserole. The narrator, who has been trying to bake a pie while talking on the phone, is baffled. Toss into the background a husband complaining about the near-constant din of carpenters repairing the neighbor’s front porch, and you have a confusing (though well-rendered) scene. How wonderful, odd, and refreshing it is, then, when Jerome suddenly stops talking, the carpenters stop pounding, and the narrator looks out the window and sees a small band of wild horses swimming across a bay. The moment is lyrical, charged, intense. There is no way to prepare for it; the reader, like the narrator, is simply stunned into a receptive silence.

Complicating and unifying the range of voiced collected in At the Owl Woman Saloon are the brief "interchapters" that separate – and link – each story. I like the result; community is one of the book’s important themes. This collection, then, presents both the community of the salon – "a periodic gathering . . . of persons of note in artistic, literary, or political circles" – and the saloon, where elbows-on-the-bar storytelling is as ubiquitous as Beer Nuts, and at least as nourishing.

So dig in, drink up, read on: this is a fine and memorable feast.

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