Home|
Biography|
Chronology|
Pictures|
Short Stories & Poems|
Precisionist|
Etc., etc., etc.|
Yakima Haunts|
Port Angeles Haunts|
Drafts of "Shooting"|
About This Site|
Comments|
This review was published in the September 2, 1997, edition of the Village Voice. The review was written by Carol Sklenicka.
Tess Gallagher is best known as a passionate lyric poet (Portable Kisses Expanded is her most recent collection) and perhaps second best as the widow of Raymond Carver. Since his death, she has embraced the role of widow and nurtured his reputation along with her own. Gallagher, like the narrator of one of her tales, loves "how life overlaps its own footprints with question marks at times, as when a legend overwhelms history, or history . . . waterfalls past anyone’s individual accounting."
In some of these stories she makes deliberate references to Carver’s tales. "Rain Flooding Your Campfire" is a boldly self-conscious, possibly tongue-in-cheek attempt to lay question marks over his much anthologized "Cathedral." Playing around with Carver’s original characters, Gallagher makes the narrator female and leaves out – of all things – the cathedral, in favor of a more surprising epiphany. Is her story the "real one," as her narrator claims? Surely no one who believes there’s truth in fiction really needs to ask that question – yet Gallagher sets us up so that it’s impossible to read certain of these tales without her late husband’s work in mind.
Several of the richly nuanced stories in Owl Woman Saloon are about widows, who try desperately to overcome history and make their stories their own. One woman contemplates either buying a gun or taking a lover; another undergoes a brief, pleasurable separation of her body and soul. In "Coming and Going," a woman who learns of a lawsuit against her husband’s estate sorts through a tumult of emotions, from anger – "’I’m glad Nyal didn’t have to bear this,’ she found herself saying . . . but what she really meant was that she was sorry she was having to bear it alone" – to forgiveness. In these and other stories, Gallagher shows how love grows and changes even after one’s partner has died.
The strongest piece in the volume, "Creatures," occurs in a beauty salon. (The collection’s title puns on saloon and salon.) It is here that she best achieves a delightful alliance of spare, angular technique and an expansive sense of place and meaning. This devilish swirl of cats and children and women’s talk – all held together by a teenager named Kimberly who’s getting her hair done for the prom, and all disrupted by a man named Eugene who’s having a temper tantrum – could have been written by no one except Tess Gallagher.
Home| Biography| Chronology| Pictures| Short Stories & Poems| Precisionist| Etc., etc., etc.| Yakima Haunts| Port Angeles Haunts| Drafts of "Shooting"| About This Site| Comments|