Chasing Stories
2019; University of Nebraska Press; Volume: 40; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1353/abr.2019.0018
ISSN2153-4578
Autores Tópico(s)Gothic Literature and Media Analysis
ResumoChasing Stories Alexander Luft (bio) Visitations Lee Upton Louisiana State University Press https://lsupress.org/books/detail/visitations/ 240 Pages; Cloth, $24.95 The characters in Lee Upton’s Visitations have stories lurking in their shadows. Nearly each of the seventeen offerings in Upton’s stirring new collection contemplate the stories–whether resilient literary classics or half-remembered childhood episodes–bordering their characters’ lives, even as those characters move through their own narratives. Characters seek out, deny, obsess over, and rework the stories that have defined their lives, both dreaming and waking. One woman despises the literary erotica writer by her husband’s new lover, and another reminisces over an illustrated tome from her youth. Visitations is a book of stories about books and stories, and the collection’s readers, like Upton’s characters, are likely haunted by her fiction long after the book is closed. Upton, a decorated poet and literary critic, follows up her notable 2014 collection, The Tao of Humiliation, with stories ranging from traditional epiphanic realism to surrealistic forays. Together, these stories multiply the possibilities of the book’s title. Sometimes, Visitations are the intrusions of supernatural presences, like the man who has washed up on the beach to be discovered by a young girl in “The Odyssey.” Other times, the visits are just the wandering presences of neighbors, like a needy little boy that walks into middle of a couple’s reckoning with infidelity or a woman named Sylvia who desperately wants the narrator of “Ambrosia” to consider marrying her son. Similarly, Upton’s characters frequently contend with the presence of animals that seem to find their way into tangle of human dramas. In the collection’s opening story, “Visitation,” a woman agonizes over an upcoming supervised visit with her estranged daughter, leading her to fixate on a groundhog who’s eaten the flowers she intended to bring along. Whatever form these visitations take, Upton’s characters are afforded glancing encounters with something that seems just out of reach, including the immaterial but persistent possibility of grace in their lives. Visitations often revisits or retells well-known stories, including a reformulation of Robin Hood and Peter Pan, in which an arrowhead plucked from the carpet beside James Matthew Barrie’s deathbed calls forth a shadow who flits in and out of children’s dreams. Upton calls on Robert Frost’s “Mending Wall” for a fantastic story about a mountain troll and an old movie called The Vikings (1958) to shape the events of a men’s self-help retreat. These stories often dislocate the reader’s [End Page 24] sense of where stories begin and end, both for the characters within the stories and the stories themselves. The collection’s first half operates on a principled ambiguity that might over-delay gratification for some readers, as the “truth” is often obfuscated by a surreal presence, but Visitations offers an opportunity at immersion within well-told stories. In one story, the protagonist is present for the reading of the governess’s account occurring inside Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw (1989), and following the reading at Douglas’s house, Upton’s character has his own supernatural encounter leading back to a mysterious house. The collection’s next story, “Escape from the Dark Forest,” builds on this gothic preoccupation with the story of a woman whose car breaks down and lands her in an eerie kitchen with a boy who looks like her long-lost brother, an unsettling mother, and a bevy of stray cats. “The Tell-All Heart,” referential of Edgar Allan Poe’s classic, draws together many recurrent threads in Visitations. The story is narrated in alternating sections between a wife, Char, and her overworked husband, Kit, with each shift in point-of-view picking up on the sentence or phrase that ends the prior section. The result is that the couple, grappling with infidelity and the possibility of a squirrel infestation in their attic, voice a unified story of marital dissolution while also demonstrating their divergent psychologies. We learn that Char has already broken off an affair with a childhood friend, to whom she felt emotionally attached; “Things did go into...
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