Joy Williams, in her introduction to the just-released “There Is Happiness: New and Selected Stories,” writes that “the novels were more deeply lyrical than the stories, wide-focused on a lifetime in a single, long-past place. … But it was, I believe, the short story in which he delighted and at which he excelled, that American treasure that American readers are so wary of.”
Watson’s stories are nothing if not all-American. His good country people go hunting, drive trucks and instigate bar brawls; they know the best fishing holes, shoot guns where they shouldn’t and dream of escape from small towns that they will never leave; they love their dogs like children and treat their lovers like dogs. Many are drunks with hearts fit to burst, full of lust for experience and in flight from anything smacking of self-knowledge. If you’re listening for an implicit sigh here, don’t. The stories cover relatively narrow thematic terrain, but their emotional territory is expansive. Watson refreshes and destabilizes the Southern literary traditions and cultural tropes his work embraces. He does not pander and is never just playing the hits.
Watson is a sympathetic and persuasive portraitist of hard lives lived hard in hard places. He leavens his tragedy with comedy and his comedy with elegy. The work at its best is worthy of comparison with Denis Johnson, Padgett Powell and Joy Williams herself, who reminds us in the introduction that “the good short story tells us something very alarming about ourselves and our puzzling sojourn on this earth. … This glimpse is the short story’s gravest gift and Watson is a maven at slamming our souls with it.” She’s right. Occasionally, I will admit, Watson’s elegiac mode drifts — as the monologues of largehearted drunks will — into grating wistfulness or boggy sentimentality, but these lapses really are rare, and at any rate more common in the novels than the stories. I love “The Heaven of Mercury” but I could see it 40 pages shorter, and I know which ones I’d cut. Not so with the stories.
“Last Days of the Dog-Men,” at 144 pages, is a collection slender enough to attempt perfection. It’s easy to see how Watson spent 10 years on its eight stories. “Bill” is about an 87-year-old woman who decides to have her elderly dog put to sleep, but first cooks him all his favorite human foods and serves them on her finest china. “As the evening wore on, Bill’s old cataracted eyes gradually seemed to reflect something, it seemed, like quiet suffering — not his usual burden, but the luxurious suffering of the glutton.” In the title story, a wayward husband compares his woes to those of various dogs he’s known. “Humans are aware of very little, it seems to me, the artificial brainy side of life, the worries and bills and the mechanisms of jobs, the doltish psychologies we’ve placed over our lives like a stencil. A dog keeps his life simple and unadorned. He is who he is, and his only task is to assert this.”
The 12 stories in “Aliens in the Prime of Their Lives” tend to be longer, more textured, more willing than those in the first book to make allowance for and draw energy from the sheer weirdness of the world. The title story follows a pair of young lovers who, after an unexpected pregnancy, lie about their ages to get married, then move into a miserable apartment to try to start their life. In the middle of the night, they are visited by a pair of housebreakers who swear they are not escaped patients from the psychiatric hospital down the street, but rather aliens from a distant planet merely borrowing the bodies of the psych patients: an intergalactic version of dressing for the weather. The couple’s close encounter is brief and inconclusive, but its aftermath ramifies through the rest of their lives, separately and together, in ways I’d rather leave for you to discover. It’s like Tracy Chapman’s “Fast Car” beer-battered in Philip K. Dick, deep-fried in Tolstoy, and served in a red plastic basket with hush puppies and slaw. Which is to say, a masterpiece — not Watson’s only one, but the one arguably most unlike any of his others. I’d give a lot for a few more in its vein.
“There Is Happiness” collects four stories apiece from “Dog-Men” and “Aliens,” including those mentioned above, and 10 new stories, some previously published but uncollected and some heretofore unseen. Though it’s fair to say that the best of the first two collections are gathered here, I can’t help but feel that both “Aliens” and “Dog-Men” benefit from presentation in their original, complete forms, and that the new batch of 10 would have worked as a stand-alone third collection. Failing that, why not an unabridged “Collected Stories”? There are only 30, after all.
“There Is Happiness” is also saddled with four (four!) epigraphs from a sequence of poems called “The Watson Poems,” by Watson’s friend Michael Pettit, which Pettit began writing while living on Watson’s couch. He later developed the character into someone who both was and was not Brad Watson, the author. “Who would have figured, least of all him,/ he’d arrive into the sweet, forgiving/ light of this evening?” Pettit wrote, in “Hemicenturian Watson.” It’s not the verses themselves I’m objecting to — they are lovely and accomplished — but rather their overdetermining presence on the doorpost of this book. It’s another case where sentimentality, however well-intentioned, works against itself. Sweet tea shouldn’t be so sweet that it makes your teeth hurt.
All that notwithstanding, the new stories are excellent, and we should be grateful to have them. “Eykelboom,” “Apology” and “Crazy Horse” are some of Watson’s finest work. “Crazy Horse” carries a footnote explaining that it was still in progress at the time of his death, but I can’t imagine what else he might have meant to do to it, other than send it to his agent. “The Zookeeper and the Leopard” is adapted from an unfinished novel. The loose ends are more visible here than in “Crazy Horse,” but it’s still a gas, and tantalizingly suggestive of a return to the playful supernaturalism of “Aliens in the Prime of their Lives” and “The Heaven of Mercury.” The zookeeper, a drunk, releases a leopard as part of an ill-conceived plan to humiliate the local animal control officer, who has lately seduced his wife. The leopard immediately kills and eats his hated jailer. As the beast explores his newfound freedom, he defecates pieces of the zookeeper, whose vestigial consciousness registers the nature of the, um, change he has undergone. A note from Watson to himself, included in the text, reads: “Other parts of the zookeeper’s consciousness will be in other piles of excrement, fading from the larger ones and barely there in the smaller ones, until they’re all decomposed and he’s vanished.” I’m sorry we’ll never get to see where this one was headed. But Pettit has it right in one of his quoted poems: “Watson/ the perpetual work-in-progress and…”
Justin Taylor is a Book World contributing writer and the author, most recently, of the novel “Reboot.”
There Is Happiness
W.W. Norton. 288 pp. $29.99
