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A Mosaic of Lives
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11686 |
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BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
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2 / 1994 |
1,211 Words |
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Beryl Lieff Benderly
Beryl Lieff Benderly is the author of Dancing Without Music:
Deafness in America, Thinking About Abortion, and The Myth of
Two Minds: What Gender Means and Doesn't Mean, which won
honorable mention in the 1988 National Psychology awards for
Excellence in the Media. |
HONEY
Elizabeth Tallent
New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1993
207 pp., $22.00
Reading Elizabeth Tallent's stories is a bit like viewing the paintings of Georges Seurat, the pointillist who concocted immense, complicated images from tiny dots of pure color. Tallent's scenes are not vast but they are complicated, and like Seurat, she builds them out of the smallest possible units of human experiences: motes of dust in harsh desert sunlight, crescent-shaped dents left along the rim of a used Styrofoam cup, the oily gleam on the inky surface of the fluid in a cheap restaurant's glass coffeepot, the catch in a speaker's voice. Each of the tales in this collection, much like Seurat's vast canvases, is an intricate mosaic of many such tiny, irreducible fragments of perception.
And like so many Seurat images, these stories have an apparent stillness, a shimmering smoothness, a calm, dispassionate surface wrought by the lapidary intensity of Tallent's attention to detail. Indeed, she takes note of things so small, so ephemeral, that, were we actors in these tales rather than readers, we might not have consciously registered them. But each of these perceptions-- "the creak and hiss" of stretched silk giving way, "the unevenly graded erasure" of a man's worn shoe sole--is as palpable, as bounded, as a pinpoint on canvas.
But there the similarity to Seurat ends. He wished his dots to combine into representations of timeless, immobile essences. Tallent wants hers to add up to something at once more fleeting and more complex: a revelation of both her characters' lived experience and what that experience means to them. Perhaps she builds meaning out of fragments because of the fragmentary world her characters inhabit: the social universe of geographically and socially mobile southwesterners; a universe (or, more accurately, congeries of universes) that lacks settled traditions, inherited myths, any established meaning beyond what individuals manage to impose on the flux of sensation.
Looking for love
Her people have come from other towns; been through other marriages; grown up among half-siblings and stepcousins and alternate-weekends custody; taken on the forlorn, half-grown children of their new spouses. "Stepcousin. You have such an elaborate way of keeping track," says Hart, a husband, ex-husband, and father whose
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