FICTION
‘Mr. Tall’
By Tony Earley
Little, Brown and Company, $25, 256 pages
You’ve probably heard of the legendary British hero famous for scaling beanstalks and slaying giants, but if Tony Earley is to be believed, you really don’t know Jack at all.
To understand the central conceit of “Jack and the Mad Dog,” the entertaining novella contained in Earley’s new story collection, readers should recall that Jack’s adventures didn’t end with the golden goose. In the New World, Appalachian balladeers took the picaresque stories in inventive and racy new directions, as seen in the yarns gathered in the 1930s by folklorist Richard Chase. These stories portray the rascally everyman Jack as a bane to witches, wooer of farmer’s daughters, and all-around rapscallion.
Earley (author of “Jim the Boy” and “The Blue Star”) gives a nod to Chase in his epigraph for “Mr. Tall,” a lively collection featuring six short stories and the hard-to-categorize “Jack and the Mad Dog.” The novella’s opening reveals that our protagonist is “that Jack, the giant-killer of the stories,” now facing an unforeseen midlife crisis. Jack’s mojo with the maidens is fading, plus he can’t remember the last time he ran across a greedy giant or even a witch (“good-looking or not”). Instead, he’s on the run from a talking black dog that taunts him. “This is the last Jack tale,” warns the dog. “The end of the story.”
No ordinary canine, the dog turns out to be a rabid personification of the fate awaiting mythic heroes once their legends are forgotten (similar to the Nothing in Michael Ende’s “The Neverending Story”). “The day is soon coming,” the dog says, “when your stories will be told only by faux mountaineers in new overalls to ill-informed tourists at storytelling festivals.”
It sounds like grim and heady stuff, but Earley’s amusement with the material is often infectious. As Jack’s existential crisis unfolds and he’s plagued by visions of former swindles and seductions, the tone remains light and jokey. The novella, with its self-aware characters who call attention to the tropes and absurdities of fairy tales, achieves a masterful level of metafictional legerdemain. It’s an acquired taste, to be sure; Earley’s concoction of lowbrow and bawdy barnyard humor combined with more high-minded questions of nihilism and the storytelling impulse may not jibe with all readers.
The other stories in “Mr. Tall,” no less witty and engaging, aim for wider appeal. In the title piece, the strongest of the short stories, teenage bride Plutina Shires struggles with loneliness after moving into her husband’s isolated farmstead in rural North Carolina. Earley spends the first half of the story loosely in Annie Proulx mode, detailing the many hardships of agrarian life in the middle 1930s. “Most days she had to work from can to can’t just to stay close to even with what all she had to do. The work seemed to her a hateful thing she chased but never once caught.”
The narrative then ventures into folktale territory as the young bride does the One Forbidden Thing (as seen in “Bluebeard” and countless other fables) and begins spying on her reclusive neighbor, Mr. Tall. Earley’s conclusion is gut-wrenching and indeterminate — or perhaps not so indeterminate once Plutina resurfaces as a minor character in a later story.
“The Cryptozoologist,” another page-turner set on the same mountain, also deals with a woman suddenly alone, though with far more enigmatic implications. On the night Rose Kohler’s husband dies, she spots a mysterious animal lurking on the edges of their orchard. Though Rose believes she’s seen Bigfoot (or his Appalachian cousin, the “skunk ape”), scattered clues leave the reader wondering how the sighting relates to an abortion-clinic bomber (reminiscent of Eric Rudolph) hiding in the wilderness.
Earley’s considerable skills at storytelling are equally obvious in “Haunted Castles of the Barrier Islands” and “Have You Seen the Stolen Girl?” — two stories in which supernatural overtones (including a visitation from the outlaw Jesse James) figure less as major plot devices and more as subtle, but effective, set decorations. Earley isn’t afraid to end a story abruptly, a technique that works well with “Mr. Tall” and not so well in “Yard Art” or the fragmented “Just Married,” the latter a collection of lukewarm character sketches that never quite reaches full boil.
Common themes of aging and the challenges of maintaining lifelong relationships inform most every story in “Mr. Tall,” especially “Jack and the Mad Dog.” Earley’s chief fascination is with, as one character puts it, “the transfigurative ordering of event into story.” Time and again, Earley plunges his characters into unexpected solitude, either by divorce, separation or the death of a partner, and gradually forces them to reckon with the stories they’ve told themselves about their lives. How these individuals cope with their insecurities makes for truly fine fiction — an astounding feat when the hero of the story knows he’s a fictional character. Though Jack’s roots may lie in Britain, his perennial dreams of landing in “a taller tale” qualify as quintessentially American.
