McCarthy’s dark and violent landscapes,
Raymond Carver’s minimalist plots and
yearning characters, and Eudora Welty’s
photographic eye and comic sensibility.
Flowing from the pen of a lesser writer,
such confluences might be a wash, and
might seem derivative and diffuse, but
Taylor has managed to direct these disparate streams into a mighty river. Through
his creative vision and technical artistry,
Taylor reminds us of the awesome power
of a good story well told.
Here are eleven deft portraits of fear
and fierceness, loneliness and compan-
ionship. Taylor may be at his best in “The
Coal Thief,” a tale about a twelve-year-old
boy’s instinct and will to survive in the
train-tracked woods in the dead of winter.
Or for some readers, his art may soar in
the book’s opening and title story, a darkly
grotesque and comic tale about settling a
score on the banks of the Gasping River in
the summer light of day. Taylor’s is a pre-
cariously balanced world, where merely
living “would make somebody fierce,”
and yet, as in “We Were Men and the Fire
Made Us,” living in it can also kindle one’s
yearning to “mend up everything while
the world [spins] into flame, to stopper the
leaking heart of it all with love.”
Sheer meanness faces a just retribu-
tion in “Winter in the Blood,” the collec-
tion’s final story. Incited by the wanton
shooting of three Charolais heifers, the
tale turns quickly into an edgy, cinematic
drama of a father and his teen daughter
caught in the clutches of two armed men
out on a joy killing. One of the story’s
most remarkable feats—in a tale full of
remarkable feats, by the way — is how the
two men’s cold brutality is trumped by
the wise tenacity of a cancer victim and
the sweet delicacy of a warm vanilla sheet
cake. The story’s ending is self-reflexive,
the father puzzling over how to recount
the twist-and-turn events—how to trans-
form the incredible into something stat-
able and believable — to the police.
Like many of the best southern writers
before him, Taylor can see and project rural landscapes through a mythic lens. In
“A Courier among Green Trees,” perhaps
a reminder of how the past walks among
us, Taylor reaches way back into the 1790s
to imagine an encounter with the smaller
of the murderous Harp Brothers of frontier fame. The tale’s Tory narrator, along
with three other men, chase Little Harp
on his wounded horse into a cave. What
follows is the stuff of legend, “something
worth speaking of around other fires and
polished tables, in old taverns and smoke
rooms”—and something worth opening
up and experiencing first-hand on the page.
— Morris A. Grubbs
Birdology
BY SY MONTGOMERY
Free Press, 2010. $25, 272 pages.
gOOD lITERATuRE envelops the reader
in a whole world; it invites us to be visually, verbally, and sensually present in that
place. While absorbed in
a good book, we lose ourselves to extraordinary
possibilities and come
back to our quotidian
lives a little richer, a lot
more compassionate.
Birdology is, plain and
simple, good literature.
After you set the book
down and step back
into your daily chores,
you’ll notice a tinge of
difference in just about
everything you perceive.
For instance, by now,
it’s fairly common knowledge that birds
are dinosaurs. But Sy Montgomery renders this abstract notion palpable. When
we interact with birds, she reminds us,
“we are communing across a gap of 300
million years”— making birds a little like
stars, whose light we see millions of years
after it first shone. Early on, Montgomery emphasizes the “otherness” of birds.
The 150-pound cassowary, with its bony
weapon of a head and a lethal blade on its
feet, comes clear as a living dinosaur. “I
am witnessing the story of evolution writ
small,” says Montgomery.
The chapter on parrots assures you that,
though we may not share much with birds
in terms of physiology or physiognomy,
But these days information is only a
mouse-click away. And
information is not what
makes this a damn good
book. It’s Montgomery’s writing, beautiful
language embedded in
tightly woven narratives. In her breathtaking
chapter on hawks, Montgomery describes the first time Jazz, a Harris’s hawk, sat on her arm: “On my hand
I hold a waterfall, an eclipse, a lightning
storm. No, more than that. Jazz is wildness
itself, vividly, almost blindingly alive in a
way we humans may never experience.”
