FICTION
‘A Kind of Dream’
By Kelly Cherry
University of Wisconsin Press, $27, 174 pages
“Writing fiction,” said Eudora Welty, “has developed in me an abiding respect for the unknown in a human lifetime and a sense of where to look for the threads, how to follow, how to connect, find in the thick of the tangle what clear line persists.”
Kelly Cherry, the Eudora Welty Professor Emerita at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, embarks on such a search for connections in her new cycle of stories, “A Kind of Dream.”
The collection traces the links between five generations in a family of artists. These richly imagined, sympathetic characters face trials common and devastating: failing marriages, lost children, terminal illnesses.
Cherry, a recent Poet Laureate of Virginia, embellishes her prose with evocative images and instances of heartbreaking candor. As in dreams, the threads of these narratives tend to remain tangled — or lead the way to unconvincing endings.
“Shooting Star,” the most energetic story, finds a coupled movie star and director filming in Mongolia after the death of their newborn. BB, an actress who has “no process, or rather, her process was to daydream,” enters a nervous flirtation with a Japanese business man. After years of “thinking of herself as an image made of light cast on a screen,” BB’s awareness expands as if to fill the vastness of the terrain, which Cherry describes masterfully. That sense of enormity marks the somewhat rushed conclusion, a plot choice that affects later stories.
“Story Hour” culminates in an unforgettable, though also problematic, finale. It begins in classic John Updike mode: Luckless Larry, reeling from another failed relationship, gives into his depression and goes to bed, for weeks. Rescue arrives via Aileen, a klutzy librarian, and a courtship that’s endearing in its awkwardness. “He was a man who could shoot himself in the foot while it was still in his mouth,” the narrator quips — but don’t be fooled. While “Story Hour” pretends to be a lightweight romantic comedy, the eventual, wildly violent crisis has nothing to do with midlife.
Sadly, the author shoots herself in the foot first. She preemptively spoils this and other plots by revealing too much in the prologue. The piece appeared as “On Familiar Terms” in the online journal Blackbird in 2011 and somehow won a short-fiction award — despite being a droning slog through a century of uninteresting family history. Cherry, who has published 21 books of fiction, poetry, memoir and nonfiction, optimistically tosses the “show, don’t tell” rule of every creative writing class, leaving readers with a hard-to-follow series of marriages, separations and numberless detours into inconsequential ephemera. Rather than an “abiding respect for the unknown” that Welty asserts, Cherry’s fiction sensibilities err on cataloging every last shard of anecdotal minutiae.
The problem is reflected thematically in “The Only News That Matters,” an enjoyable tale of (another) librarian and “current events addict.” Conrad’s obsessive journaling of daily headlines serves as a coping mechanism, “a way to stay present, yes, but it was a present that pushed you around.” After his wife puts him on a forced news detox, he faces up to painful memories and his tendency to disconnect. Similarly, the stories in “A Kind of Dream” achieve their greatest resonance when the author shuts down the archives and pursues what Conrad’s wife calls “the only news that matters,” the immediate concerns of the characters.
The stories coalesce in the book’s final third around Nina, a prolific writer dying of pancreatic cancer. As an academic and an introvert, she ponders the overlap between the challenges artists face and more universal questions of meaning and mortality.
“What is a story?” she asks in “The Dead Brother.” “A sentence leads to more sentences. There is a beginning, a middle, and an end. Or maybe not. Maybe there is only a beginning and middle.”
Rhetorical flourishes become more frequent as Nina’s health deteriorates, providing a sort of meta-fictional commentary on the collection itself. We’re told in the epilogue, “All the Little Dogs,” that Nina “was in search of sentences that transcended time,” one to “sum up everything that needed to be said.”
Nina’s concerns are surely shared by the author. At 73, Cherry retired from teaching 15 years ago but continues to publish poetry and short fiction. Her absolute care with syntax and adoration for her characters becomes most apparent in the Nina stories, especially “Faith, Hope, and Clarity.” In the epilogue, she all but abandons realism and dives deep into Nina’s stream of consciousness, a risky choice that pays off, at last, on the final page.
As with dreams, Kelly Cherry’s stories can be either deeply affecting or exasperating — or both. Her impressionistic style and imagery feel like snapshots of the subconscious. “A Kind of Dream” leaves memories and questions that will linger long after the stories fade — at least for the readers who make it past the prologue.
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