Ploughshares Fall 2021

Ladette Randolph (editor) Ploughshares Fall 2021 (2021)
Ploughshares is a quarterly literary collection of short fiction. Most contributions are approximately novella length, so this is going to be a long one. If you need to dash to the kitchen to grab a few cans of Kestrel and a packet of custard creams, I can wait.

Okay, in vague order…

I'm kicking off with Afsheen Farhadi whose The Mexican Detective takes its time, creeping up on the reader without giving away too much of where it's going despite the obvious focus on bereavement; and once everything has fallen into place, it leaves a lasting evocation of the unreality which tends to surround the death of a loved one, mapping a borderland in mythic terms - in this case by the seemingly implausible agency of a Mexican detective who admits he's mostly just a guy who attends a writing class. The aforementioned borderland incorporates Mexican streets terrorised by knife wielding infants, and I've always enjoyed reality described by that which is found beyond its outer limit.

Christie Hodgen's Bush v. Gore hits a lot of buttons for me, being set in Texas - albeit Dallas rather than San Antonio - with a regular gal, probably the author, abruptly stranded within one of those dysfunctionally over-moneyed families with which I'm now somewhat familiar thanks to the stepson. My bunch are of generally lesser toxicity than Phyllis and the gang, but not one of those people got where they are by playing nice; and the point at which our narrator finally pops, dumping an entire paragraph of home truths on her hosts - page 113, if anyone's wondering - is so satisfying that I had my wife read it too. The entire psychodrama is set against the backdrop of George W. Bush defeating Gore in Florida, or kinda sorta maybe defeating Gore in Florida. Why the election played out as it did seems adequately explained by the family dynamic of Jack, Phyllis and the rest, which in turn goes some way towards accounting for what happened more recently in November 2016.

Yxta Maya Murray's When the Prophet Gazed upon the Face of the Lord is incredible, and one of the tightest, most powerful pieces of writing I've read all year. It orbits - I suppose you could say - the true story of a partial nuclear reactor meltdown in Simi Valley, California back in 1959, additionally taking in the tangential horror of Nazi rocket scientists and other elements found so far beyond the edge of daily existence as to impinge on the spiritual, in this case the religion of corn, stone knives, and the Centzontotochtin of old Mexico. The reality of the tale and its telling is such that it's difficult to imagine it consciously composed and directed as a fictionalised narrative, such is its power.

Talking of which, Mona Susan Power is a member of the Standing Rock Sioux tribe and a Harvard graduate who was awarded the PEN/Hemingway prize for her novel, The Grass Dancer. Here she contributes Goodreads Warrior which tells how of a young Native American man from a town near the Standing Rock Sioux reservation gets into Harvard to be taught by a teacher whose last collection of short stories won the PEN/Faulkner prize, whatever that is. Whilst I very much like the theme of what it takes a Native to get ahead in such institutions, I had trouble getting past this one being writing about what it's like to be a writer - a genre I dislike because it feels self-involved and dishonest on some level. It probably doesn't help that our guy's own literary efforts, which appear nested within the narrative, aren't anything special and are conspicuously consistent with Power's own narrative voice, which is freewheeling and would, I suspect, better suit something a little less recursive.

A Procession of Beasts and Men is Will Schluter's first short story - according to the byline - and if it's a mostly decent effort and not lacking in poetry, most of it seems to comprise descriptions of the domestic texture through which his character moves without any obvious sense of direction. Accordingly, there are some long fucking sentences here.

Not unlike those waves of electric pole and line that rose and broke in a steady stream all the way from West Texas through New Mexico and into a rest stop just south of the headwaters of the Rio Grande where she ditched the Volvo for a Pinto left idling at a gas pump and urged that baby up up up and into the Rockies as that one cassette played over and over on fuzzy speakers because the car's broken antenna wouldn't pick up a radio signal that didn't give way to static after about three and a half seconds but the electric line never stopped no matter how high she went and that one song kept on playing Josie's on vacation far away as the woman not yet named Josie approached the crest of the Great Divide and the waves of post and line seemed to transfer into her own body starting in her abdomen and continuing on down through her pelvis over and over again until she felt the emptying that soaked her leggings and the whole carseat under them and she knew her water had finally broke up there among the snow-capped peaks.

I appreciate the reason for the absence of a pause anywhere in the above, but this sort of thing doesn't always work, and here it slows everything down which is, I suspect, the opposite of the desired effect. Additionally, Schluter strives to create mood by means of sentences broken into inactive segments. Such as this. Where a comma would work a whole lot better than a full stop. Never mind.

Having known Nick Sweeney since the nineties, I'm probably biased regarding his contribution, although you wouldn't actually be reading these words if I'd thought it was crap so make of that what you will. The Émigré Engineer is really a novella and the longest story in the collection, which is as it should be given the scale of the tale, trailing its main guy from his bloody coming of age during the Russian Revolution, to Paris, then small town America between the wars. It's about an engineer, one who forges with his hands, making his way by sheer bloody minded force of will in a difficult and occasionally fucking ridiculous world, as told with a satisfyingly nourishing cadence and a sense of the physical which reminds me of a folk tale or even Gogol, albeit without quite the same level of surrealism. I mainly know Nick as a friend of my friend Eddy and as - much to my excitement - a man who once auditioned for Adam & the Ants. I've no real idea from whence his interest in eastern Europe is derived, but he channels it like a native, I suppose you would say. My recent reading has brought me to the surprising conclusion that, despite the last few hundred years, the heart of our world has generally been that expanse of land between the Baltic, Adriatic and Caspian seas for the longest stretch of human history, with the rest of us fiddling about around the edges; and as an immigrant myself, and friends with at least one former Russian Jew, I recognise a lot of The Émigré Engineer, although thankfully not so much the more harrowing episodes. Nick Sweeney taps into something fairly fundamental here, yet without the need for anyone honking away on a trumpet.

Joan Wickersham's Mortal Enemy was an odd one for me, not least for being listed as non-fiction in the index - presumably through being directly autobiographical - which implies the potential for a technical discussion of scaffolding. It's an account, and a fairly harrowing one, of a one-time friend evolving into a violently bipolar stalker. The problem, which is possibly my problem rather than anything to do with the author, is the initial setting of writers, writing courses, and literary discussion amongst students at Yale, the sort of thing which hits me as vaguely adjacent to Wickersham's own assessment of a novel written by her mortal enemy.

The prose sounded like Bobby, Bobby eager to tell the world about itself, but what he knew about the world he'd learned from reading other books by men eager to tell the world about itself. He wrote in clichés. Every sentence congratulated itself for being that sentence.

This is why Charles Bukowski recommended time spent at the race track. To be fair, Wickersham writes without either cliché or sentences congratulating themselves, and the account begins to feel distinctly more vital once we move on from prestigious colleges and trips to Paris. It's honestly a respectable piece and one I'm glad to have read because I'm sure many of us have known Bobby at some point or other, although that whole deal of an insight into the lives of writers usually brings me out in hives which, as I say, is possibly just me.

Leslie Kirk Campbell's The Man with Eight Legs and Julian Zabalbeascoa's What We Tried to Bury Grows Here were both entirely decent without inspiring me to write about either, which is why I haven't.

I don't actively seek out new writers as any sort of official policy because I already have too many books stacked up on the to be read pile, some of which admittedly may be garbage, but these anthologies are always a pleasure when I make the time and I highly recommend this one, not least on the strength of the contributions from Afsheen Farhadi, Yxta Maya Murray, Nick Sweeney and Christie Hodgen.